For the last year I've been semi-daily posting "What I'm Listening To Today" links in this thread:
mastodon.social/@mcc/108199886…
The thread is now so long it is increasingly breaking Mastodon, so I am making a new thread, starting here.
To recap, here's the entirety of the year-one thread in the most impractical possible format: A YouTube playlist containing 246 songs and running for just over 47 hours:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLI…
"What I'm listening to today", Year 1
I make a daily(~) post on Mastodon chronicling cool music I find on YouTube. I did this for one year. Here is every song I linked (except a few that aren't o...YouTube
What I'm listening to today: "space jam"YouTube has this incredible wealth of people performing little improvised electronic sets pieces in bedrooms and on kitchen tables with whatever equipment they have and this has honestly been most of my music diet the last few years. A lot of these pieces have like 20 views yet are breathtaking. This is a 30-minute(!) ambient piece that starts as repetitive humming tones but finds a captivating hypnotic groove like… 12 minutes in
youtube.com/watch?v=-MUkdU67-G…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: Track 17, The Mathletes
I think I've mentioned Joe Mathlete who I went to high school with and made music on four-track tapes. Most of his music was earnest indie folk-pop but he had this one song I loved that was a deafening blast of exuberant, overdistorted emotional noise. This was given to me directly by Joe on an unlabeled CD-R, so I always thought of this song as "17". I think the actual name was something like "illegal ghost bikes".
data.runhello.com/The%20Mathle…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Untitled 7", Oval
Markus Popp did this thing in the 90s of scratching CDs by hand and sampling the glitches to make ambient music. Later he contracted someone to condense his artistic process into a computer program, so he could set it up in art galleries. Be Oval. He made an album ("ovalprocess") with this; it was the most alien music I'd ever heard. This is my fave track from it. It is harsh (no really, it's pretty shrill) and beautiful.
oval.bandcamp.com/track/untitl…
Untitled 07, by Oval
Ovalmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Remotely", Coil
My favoritest ambient album ever is a 1992 album of "remixes and re-recordings" of Coil's 1984 debut single "How to Destroy Angels" (subtitle: "Ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy"). "Remixes" seems to mean "we recorded some new music with the same instruments". This one's the standout (other than the title track), a growling noise symphony that gives me stark images of looming forms gyrating in darkness.
youtube.com/watch?v=Mdunqv-loy…
- YouTube
www.youtube.commcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I listened to today: "CT-0W0 Computer Cowbell", emma essex
This brave VST author made a whole synth based on a hyper-advanced version of the old (distinctive, but little-loved) Roland 808 "cowbell" drum voice, with dozens of controls and modular patchpoints, then recorded this fascinating EP-length demo video for it. It starts as recognizable techno, ranges into mysterious sounds and ends as terrifying, abstract dark ambient. My favorite part is "The World's Maw".
youtube.com/watch?v=N291i0UEB_…
"CT-0W0 Computer Cowbell" - a mutant 808-inspired synth
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "ecnalubma", awk
I made this song, in 2001, via about 5 lines of C and Perl mashed together on a Linux command line and piped directly into /dev/audio. I used slightly different code on the left and right channels. I wasn't trying to make "music", just a byte pattern so complex I no longer understood it, to see what it sounded like. The result was shockingly structured and undergoes multiple cryptic phase changes over 20 minutes.
It's loud.
data.runhello.com/abk/awk%20-%…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Die genaue Zeit", Einstürzende Neubauten
…German for "Collapsing New Buildings", were early industrial-music luminaries who used handmade instruments, concrete & metal reclaimed from demolition sites, and screaming to evoke landscapes of urban desolation. This song from 1983, translated, describes a sort of Muzak apocalypse, with all art replaced with elevator music and all speech replaced with a voice endlessly intoning the accurate time.
youtube.com/watch?v=dAc8UvpKc4…
Die genaue Zeit
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "No-input mixer minimal techno", closedcircuits
You think of mixers as passive, but feedback through a bandpass filter can make tones. This leads to the idea of the "no input mixing board", most famously explored in a series of excellent ambient albums by Toshimaru Nakamura. This artist takes the idea one step further by using the technique for *rhythm*, cross-wiring two mixers into a funky drum machine in this quiet but rocking dance track.
youtube.com/watch?v=WRueiWaQNK…
No-input mixer minimal techno
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Polyend Tracker Untitled Electronics Jam", Risa T
This is a short trip-hop jam on a portable hardware tracker. (Like, the kind of tracker one would normally associate with text-mode DOS or the Atari ST. There have been a couple attempts recently to put one in a standalone hardware device.) Skittering, glitchy beats and a kind of mysterious air.
youtube.com/watch?v=dFeyfladlE…
Polyend Tracker Untitled Electronics Jam by Risa T (Polyend Tracker Scene)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Battle Against Belch", Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka (Nintendo)
Earthbound is the game that famously managed to permanently change how every millennial video game hipster thinks about games, without being what Nintendo would consider a financial success. This dark jazz track from the equally influential soundtrack stitches a series of samples and ~leitmotifs~ which appear before and after it in the game, together with a grinding bass.
youtube.com/watch?v=OtCtagbcwU…
Battle Against Belch
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Magritte's Dream", Yusuke Shirakawa
Music concrète on a desktop, this piece is made with tape loops and scavenged-looking cassette equipment (including one literal loop of magnetic tape which appears to have no "cassette" attached). With one four-track tape and one mono, the artist has five faders that (in a performance with no instruments) they can play like an instrument to create peaceful and only slightly creeptastic ambiance.
youtube.com/watch?v=XUXKzopLSv…
Magritte's Dream
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Flowing Water"
This is a piece of classical Chinese music, whose score was first written down around 1350 CE, though according to various sources on Google it existed in some form as far back as 500 BCE (and according to the YouTube summary here the most recent "paragraph" was added around 1850 CE). Here it's performed on the guqin with a devastating gentleness, each of the five(?) sections keeping a distinct and sharp emotional tenor.
youtube.com/watch?v=BcElotwrZ8…
Chinese Guqin : Flowing water Guqin 流水 古琴曲
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Modular Notes 88 - ER301 Study I", mafmadmaf
This is a skewed-feeling but very carefully composed collection of beeps and tones over about six minutes. Not sure how to describe it. It speaks for itself.
One interesting thing about this composition is it's made on modular, but each of the four individual modules is digital and two are general-purpose computer modules. The modular rack here exists to be a tactile interface for software.
youtube.com/watch?v=ccuBRpixpm…
Modular Notes 88 模塊兒筆記 - ER301 Study I
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Time Eater", Gold Panda (Ssighborggg and Luna re-cover)
Gold Panda is an electronic musician I'm fond of, one of those sample-oriented hip-hop-sorta artists on the Bonobo/Blockhead model. This is one of Gold Panda's better songs being performed, with samples replaced by a live-instruments arrangement, by an American/Korean math-rock group and a traditional Korean gayageum player. I would describe the effect as "rocking".
youtube.com/watch?v=uKaRKKI5q7…
Time Eater (Ssighborggg Re-cover)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Puppygirl Forever", minasheep (Jami Lynne remix)
This is "breakcore" (is this breakcore? I think it is breakcore), cheerful happy hardcore pop, but in this remix it's going just a little too hard, the accelerator's pushed just a little too much, giddy until it gets a sort of a sinister edge, like a upbeat sugar high gone just a little too far, like… okay I guess like a puppy girl that's just a little too excited. I was trying not to say it
minasheep.bandcamp.com/track/p…
Puppygirl Forever (lynnedrum PUPPYDOG WITHOUT U mix), by lynnedrum
MinaSheepmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "System Jam #3", Edd Butterworth
A lot of the live synth performance videos on YouTube are either posted by, or made possible by gear donations by, the companies that make the synth equipment, as semi-covert ads. The good news is instead of buying the equipment you can just watch the videos. This video was posted by ALM/Busy Circuits to show off their eurorack line but by itself it's a funky weird-noises rave with captivatingly screwy beats.
youtube.com/watch?v=wZHuagvQ1X…
System Jam #3
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "∆°S-P-3-C-1-3-S_U-N-K-N-0-W-N°∆", Th3Pock3tOp3rat0r
One for the "doing the most with the least" category, this is Teenage Engineering's cheap toy sampler/drum machine run into Korg's cheap toy echo unit. The sound here is huge, the PO-33 is pushed to the limit of its sequencing abilities and the track is hard and driving, electro rock with a touch of 80s feel. Imagine a 00s metroidvania that the only reason you remember it is this one song.
youtube.com/watch?v=_XUHatuShu…
∆°S-P-3-C-1-3-S_U-N-K-N-0-W-N°∆
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Live Tribe Tekno 147bpm with Eowave Quadrantid Swarm and more Hardware!", dReadSolJah
This is a 70-minute live set of industrial-y rave techno, based on a mix of live synthesizers (with the Swarm at the center) and pre-recorded Ableton loops. A couple different days now I've listened to this while working and both times I could not tell you what happened during that hour, I just entered this totally hypnotized trance state.
youtube.com/watch?v=wbWAdMz8VY…
Live Tribe Tekno 147bpm with Eowave Quadrantid Swarm and more Hardware!
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Modular Synth Triggered by Drum", Djo HxC
This track pairs a sick modular-synthesizer Cool Noise with the trick (there were a couple of these in my last thread) where a drum is rigged to fire a trigger on the eurorack, playing a note keyed to the synth's current pattern. So the drummer is kind of playing drums and bass synth at once. And then: *drum solo*. This is kind of short and it doesn't really go anywhere, but it's fun while it lasts.
youtube.com/watch?v=EJIFgk7LQs…
Modular Synth Triggered by Drum
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Heavy Balloon", Fiona Apple
"Fetch the Boltcutters" was released 1 month into COVID. Ah!, we all went. How resonant! Everyone in lockdown can relate to this! Nobody noticed the fridge horror. She released it at the *start* of lockdown. So *before COVID started* Fiona had *already been holed up inside*, for however long, teaching herself the drums & stewing about ex-boyfriends.
Anyway here's a funk song about being depressed but also angry
youtube.com/watch?v=8whTAkkBv6…
Fiona Apple - Heavy Balloon (Official Audio)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Pop 6", Gas
This is some jangling, indistinct ambient. Sometimes it is good to listen to one meticulously-crafted sound for ten minutes. There's a bit of variation to keep things interesting but mostly this is just sort of like an atmospheric soundtrack to your life, assuming that the thing happening in your life right now is at least somewhat ominous.
kompakt-gas.bandcamp.com/track…
Pop 6, by GAS
GASmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "He Turns Down", Cat Power
Cat Power was the queen of the 90s/00s indie/lo-fi folk-rock set. This is the song that best embodies her off-kilter style; everything feels like Take One, feels a little unstable, like the song is about to topple over and take you with it. What sticks with me here is the flute accompaniment, doing something seemingly totally unrelated to the rest of the song. I don't know what that flute means. It seems important.
youtube.com/watch?v=DzXkea6gmP…
He Turns Down
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Abalone", PACKS
This is a fun, messy indie rock jam from 2022. I actually don't know much about this band! Wikipedia says they're from Toronto? The album cover has a feeling of old family vacation photos.
packstheband.bandcamp.com/trac…
Abalone, by PACKS
PACKSmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "verZion", Syphus
A mod tracker has a finite number of sample channels, and each is monophonic. So if you want sounds with long tails, like piano notes, you have to do tricks like alternating notes in different channels so each sound completes before the next one starts. Sometimes this gives tracker music, when viewed *in* the tracker, a fascinating two-dimensional ascii art structure, like the long diagonal chains in this banger of a song.
youtube.com/watch?v=qKhUB7baGo…
Syphus - verZion
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Distorted Ambience - Lyra-8 / Strega Into Modular FX", Brodie Peterson
Built from two synthesizers which can both be described as "a simple tone generator bolted to a powerful drone echo", this is a sublime symphony of metal sounds, clanking and banging and grinding howls, "Industrial" in a very literal sense. I like how the synthesized moans punctuating the backing sound eventually line up in surprising melody, like a slowed-down pop song.
youtube.com/watch?v=vWy3g9J6a7…
Distorted Ambience - Lyra-8 / Strega Into Modular FX
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Not Surprised", Boris and Uniform
Normally I'd say much of why I like Boris is they deliver metal without falling into a kind of squawky vocals I don't favor. Here tho they collaborate with an American group to make exactly that sort of metal, and it really works. Herein the genre of death metal is slowed down, disassembled and rebuilt wrong in a splayed-out open-skeleton structure. It reminds me of Pink Lemonade. This really did it for me!
boris.bandcamp.com/track/not-s…
Not Surprised, by Boris & Uniform
Borismcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "far up close (live improv ambient)",
TRDRT
9 minutes of calm background-music echo shimmers and synth sparks from a modular rack (with some good stickers). The note patterns were composed in realtime on a Synthstrom Deluge, by alternately adjusting patterns on the grid view and playing notes in the isometric keyboard mode. The title calls it ambient but this is a highly structured piece. If this was made in the 90s we'd call it "New Age".
youtube.com/watch?v=k7bc4CAW6F…
far up close (live improv ambient)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Rossum Panharmonium + Instruo Lubadh + Plaits + Rings", Sascha Neudeck
This is an intense, fascinating ambient journey through a series of sounds and textures, with sparky serrated-edge waves cycling in and out of your perception. Intermittent scrolling subtitles at the bottom of the video explain, in an entirely unhelpful level of detail, how the modular patch driving the track was created.
Stereo or headphones recommended.
youtube.com/watch?v=ej0NGboMlP…
Rossum Panharmonium + Instruo Lubadh + Plaits + Rings
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Jamuary 02 2022", Waveformer
A virtuoso synth performance, leading you through a series of sounds and moods. Recorded live on the standard low-end setup of a Microfreak and three separate echo pedals, it's dark and expressive. If this had been recorded in 1990 it would have been distributed accompanied by a video of a long CGI tunnel like at the end of "2001", or maybe a slowed-down VHS of a handcam walking unsteadily through some woods.
youtube.com/watch?v=yHmkErVcDd…
Jamuary 02 2022 - MicroFreak, NTS-1, EHX 720, MS-70CDR #jamuary2022
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "found a hatch", riueru
This one's simple but strange, a randomly lurching tourgroup of synth lines driven by a randomness source and an irrationally-phased LFO. It starts suddenly and cuts off suddenly and in between shows a thoughtful, incredibly human degree of subtlety and emotional variation. But there's no human in the loop. It's beautiful and a little unsettling.
youtube.com/watch?v=L3Dv--lI3z…
found a hatch | mewsic box + marbles, plaits, monsoon, ochd
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "live @ Red Ink, Providence 5/6/23", Cryptwarblr
If I told you to trust me— would you take my hand and take a step with me off the edge, into the abyss? This is what I now ask of you. This is a ten-minute performance on a card table at a leftist community bookstore. The noises here alternate quiet and violence— sharp, intense, unpredictable. There's a structure to it, I think. There's a meaning in here somewhere. I can't see it but I feel it
youtube.com/watch?v=Eyr363zg_7…
Cryptwarblr_ live @ Red Ink, Providence 5/6/23
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "MESS MOOG SYSTEM 55 WAVEFORM", Christian Hogue
Five minutes of sinewaves composed on the legendary and extremely rare Moog 1973 modular analog system, illustrated on an analog oscilloscope. Starts with a simple line of tones and evolves into menacing, increasingly overdriven multipart antiharmony. Makes a really intense mood. Warning, parts are a bit high pitched.
youtube.com/watch?v=dJLIXJu30G…
MESS MOOG SYSTEM 55 WAVEFORM
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Cruel like Flint", Amon Tobin
So after "Foley Room", drum&bass-adjacent jazz god Amon Tobin went in a *very* odd direction, focusing on complex live shows and ever-more-fine-tuned monophonic sounds. His newer stuff's pretty challenging even for me…!
But this one track from a sampler album of the label he founded really does it for me. Mind-expanding timbres and a quirky rhythm, a cool mix of his old and new sounds. Like feedback dubstep.
youtube.com/watch?v=IqNAxl1PiV…
Cruel Like Flint
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Quick Jam with the Moog Mavis", HeadyBeatShell
This is a fun dance techno duet between a simple analog synth and some complex digital synths. Good robot noises and some really effective production for a desktop jam. The Mavis doesn't have a sequencer hooked up so the musician has to play the little toy frontplate keyboard all the way through.
youtube.com/watch?v=8PNdt_zG6l…
Quick Jam with the Moog Mavis
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Luxe", Holy F*** + Alexis Taylor
This is one of my most-listened tracks on Tidal; I think of it as a pandemic classic. It's Rapture-y synthrock, one of those songs that lays out a series of elements then lets them all converge at once like a magic eye becoming an image.
There's a ("Mea Culpa" inspired?) music video that comes close to meeting the song's surging energy: youtube.com/watch?v=I6gP4IijTC… but warning, flashing. Or listen on Bandcamp:
holyfuck.bandcamp.com/track/lu…
Holy Fuck - Luxe (ft. Alexis Taylor)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Tangie 1hr+ improvised modular techno (live)", Tangie
An unseen person with a modular rack and an octotrack delivering a good 80 minutes of driving, industrial-flavored rave techno. The sound design is consistently full of pleasant surprises and I'm not sure how they keep the energy level up this long while improvising but they somehow do. I would describe this set as "hott" with two Ts. Hott like homotopy type theory
youtube.com/watch?v=LU8TKE1xk8…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "pikocore", infinitedigits
This is a very short drum & bass / breakcore freakout performed on the most minimal hardware available: a tiny shield/hat for the Raspberry Pi Pico with four buttons and four potentiometer knobs. (The device, an "open hardware" sample mangler apparently created and sold by the musician/YouTuber, is linked in the YouTube description.) Goes hard.
youtube.com/watch?v=cB3kc5KxCL…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Dirge", Tragic Laurel
tragiclaurel.bandcamp.com/trac…
I get a lot of these synth videos I post from Reddit /r/synthesizers, which went down last week for the Reddit protests. At the start of the strike the community (or part of it) started a treehouse Lemmy instance named waveform.social; this was the first piece of music posted there, last Monday. Nice little jam! Spooky drunk-feeling vaporwave with slow quirky beats. I didn't post it then but I'm posting it now.
Dirge, by Tragic Laurel
Tragic Laurelmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Black Crow", Namoli Brennet
Trans folksinger Namoli Brennet wrote this song as the title track on one of her albums, but this live version, recorded on an acoustic guitar in the back of a bookstore in New Haven with Brennet's voice ragged from cough medicine, is my favorite. This recording just absolutely wrecks me every time. The song gets to this one part and I just start like ugly crying
youtube.com/watch?v=Y2JXUuaYFG…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Vallentin Rd", kirkis
While trying to learn more about "Czochralski Cells" I found this artist's baffling YouTube page, which hosts:
- All the official videos for the "Destiny+" handmade synthesizer company
- Several breakcore albums
- A standalone video for this one terrifying moth song, with no information attached except a URL shortener link which currently appears to be redirecting to malware.
The song is a Tiger Electronics onslaught
kirkismoded.bandcamp.com/track…
Vallentin Rd, by kirkis
kirkismcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Stay Crunchy", Ronald Jenkees
In this video a man in a little hat yells "Hello YouTubes" and slams directly into performing an absolutely mindblowing four-minute solo, on a MIDI electric piano VST over FruityLoops beats. (FLStudio/FruityLoops, is IMO, underrated as a serious production music tool.) Ronald, the musician, was an early vlogger who had a whole thing going on and this was the track of his that went most widely viral. It slaps
youtube.com/watch?v=lg8LfoyDFU…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "The Mother of All Funk Chords", Kutiman
This was posted in 2009, at the peak of Internet Optimism, as track 1 of "Thru You", a project mixing unrelated YouTube videos of people playing music into complete songs.
This song summarizes YouTube in the image of every single person on earth simultaneously playing a giant chord on every single instrument. It remains the most powerful document I have ever encountered for the power of the Internet.
youtube.com/watch?v=tprMEs-zfQ…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: Improv, Tori Amos
Around 2001 I got an mp3 off Gnutella titled "Tori Amos - Improv.mp3", in which Tori launches into a bizarre rant on stage in response to a fan yelling "Take me home with you!". All the while she's doing an absolutely gorgeous improvised organ solo that haunted me for years.
Searching now, I find that this clip is more commonly titled "Foodgasm", and it's taken from a recording of a show from the Dew Drop Inn tour in 1996.
youtu.be/3eyGg7BzSss
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Modular synth, drone, 4MS Ensemble oscillator, Qubit prism", grumpfigrumpf
A series of ambient hums, hisses and coos, sounding alternately like an air conditioning unit heard from the other end of a parking garage or an alien spacecraft taking off. It's long (20 minutes) but continuously satisfying, changing enough it feels like there's a narrative to it. If you listen on good speakers you'll be rewarded.
If you like Coil, listen to this.
youtube.com/watch?v=-zRJtUHgHB…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Chill granular meditation music w/ Prismatic Spray, monome norns, Phantasmal Force, 1010 lemondrop"
This piece takes four separate cheap tabletop granular synthesis devices and cross-wires them to make a dreamy, melodious noise ocean. The patch is endlessly self-generating so apparently the musician (the developer of the Prismatic Spray) ran it for 40 entire hours one week and just dipped in at some point to clip this six-minute recording.
youtube.com/watch?v=OaL5EcVImc…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Somasynth Connection: ENNER + COSMOS + LYRA8", Giovanni B
This is like the fourth time I've posted a "Enner + Cosmos" video, and they all sound so different.
This is a 11-minute virtuoso noise performance beginning with raw clicking and slowly coalescing into organ sounds twisting like worms. The start sounds like someone rhythmically changing the station on a radio, later parts feel like distorted dub reggae.
Stereo speakers recommended.
youtube.com/watch?v=cz_FYMLhFA…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Uses of Zener Noise", Peter B
This unsettlingly quiet piece is a slightly-overlapping arrangement of two performances on unusual/handmade musical instruments, both based on the principle of "Zener Noise". Together it has the feeling of a guided meditation, like being lead blindfolded down a path of hissing noise and burbling whistles. I never know if anyone else will see the emotions I see in music but I find this one actually frightening.
youtube.com/watch?v=ZxYhwLglky…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Ceremonial Grade", Jon Gee
Again, the Cosmos.
Jon Gee shows again his skill at ambient soundscapes. This piece, based on layer and layer and layer of chaotically-phasing synth swells, has a good subtle structure to it, starting as chaotic waves of noise but at some point sort of clicking first into musical logic and then a long fadeout. I imagine a movie soundtrack, switching over at some critical moment from establishing shots to action.
youtube.com/watch?v=Fesalu9VkW…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Soft", Pulp
I'm breaking my format rules here: This song runs from 1:01:09 to 1:05:30 in the linked video (a cassette tape compilation from 1990). This seems to be the only copy of the song on the Internet. I find no other record of the band ("Pulp") existing.
The song is about four minutes of ambient rumbling. I've spent a lot of my life listening to ambient rumbling and this is some of the best rumbling I've ever heard. It's that good.
youtube.com/watch?v=Je4HTllH7b…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Elegy", Kai Saul
This piece gives the strong impression of being one single chord for six minutes. On a relisten today I find there are actual notes in there, but they're so drowned in echo you may or may not actually hear them. I recommend paying no attention whatsoever to this song as you listen to it. Just treat it like a pleasant feeling in a bottle. The feeling of a sudden blast from an air conditioner turning on. Ambient-ass ambient
youtube.com/watch?v=vRRwzERsn_…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "rpeg", Autechre
We used to split Æ into "early Autechre" and "late Autechre", like the Beatles, and this album (EP7) was the dividing line. It's "experimental", in the sense it's a series of experiments.
The way I think about this album is it's like a series of magic eye images with sounds— each track initially seems to be totally meaningless random noise and then there's always some point where it *shifts*, and suddenly you can See it
autechre.bandcamp.com/track/rp…
Rpeg, by Autechre
Autechremcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Clipper", Autechre
So this is "old Autechre" (1995). Back then their whole thing was composing evocative melodies then fussily giving them the most interesting timbres possible with mid-90s synths. They were kinda heavily dependent on Loops in this period but still delivered some absolute jams, like "Clipper". This track has an epic, almost operatic quality to me. But like, sci fi opera.
Warning: Drums are a bit ear-piercing on headphones.
autechre.bandcamp.com/track/cl…
Clipper, by Autechre
Autechremcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "recks on", Autechre
This "early autechre/late autechre" model I'm banging on stopped working pretty quickly, as Æ eventually went through a *bunch* of wholly distinct phases. Their most recent phase, starting with "Exai", is just *really long* albums, like, 2 hours, 8 hours, 28 hours(!). Things you aren't even *meant* to listen to in entirety but dip into and out of at random.
This song: Stalked by breakbeats through labyrinthine corridors
autechre.bandcamp.com/track/re…
recks on, by Autechre
Autechremcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Lentic Catachresis", Autechre
This is my favorite song from my favorite Autechre album, the long outro to Confield (the "fully armed and operational" point for what I call Late Autechre).
This whole album is like music from another universe and this song particularly, with its weird tempo shifts, is an amazing mix of the human-crafted and algorithmic, like Rob & Sean drew an outline and Max/MSP filled in all the fractal details. DISCOVERY!
autechre.bandcamp.com/track/le…
Lentic Catachresis, by Autechre
Autechremcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Draun Quarter", Autechre
This is the last track of "Envane", a 4-track EP that samples Kool Keith and might be the most accessible thing in Æ's discography. This song's just really nice feeling. I don't even know what to say, it's just really pleasant. It's got some very Æ timbres but the anchor is ultimately some extremely emotive synth playing. Like if you gave Debussy a DX7.
autechre.bandcamp.com/track/dr…
Draun Quarter, by Autechre
Autechremcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Coda Maestoso in F♭ Minor", Earth (Autechre Remix)
For a while Autechre did a series of absolutely brain-breaking, material-shredding remixes of indie rock bands (Lamb, Stereolab, Tortoise). And then when they decided to remix Earth, *already* bizarre and otherwordly, they… mastered it as pop. They made the song *less* weird. It sounds like Soundgarden now.
As if… whelp, gone as far as we can in that direction! Gotta stop and turn around??
youtube.com/watch?v=9NT3Kls8Je…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "notwotwo", Autechre
"Quaristice" is Autechre's most accessible post-EP7 album— probably a good First Autechre Album. Part of how they restrained themselves was releasing, like, *three* albums worth of limited-edition bonus material, mostly much longer versions of nearly every song. The standout is this extended "notwo", adding an entire gorgeous additional movement to what was already one of Autechre's best ambient tracks.
Close your eyes.
youtube.com/watch?v=fk4A2e9xqC…
Autechre - notwotwo
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Shock Therapy 23", Cromag
This is a cool DOS-tracker proto-trance sort of thing. Really satisfying synths and beats.
Trying to look up when this was made, I find it is named "Shock Therapy 23" because Cromag made 23 of these, between (apparently) 1994 and 1999. More than anything, this sounds like a song made on a computer in 1999 (by the last person still using DOS in 1999).
youtu.be/6hxdZ8pFQ0E
Chromag - Shock therapy 23
YouTubeDarius Kazemi
in reply to mcc • • •mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Dream Sequence", Stefan Torto
When Roland started making Volca-likes it seemed like they'd be watered-down versions of their super-expensive "boutique" virtual analog synths. But then the S-1 ($200) turned out to be *better* than the $600 SH-01A (unique features). Go figure.
Anyway this beatless but surprisingly intense track makes me think of: 80s production bumpers, sunrises with VHS tracking errors, a past when the future still existed.
youtube.com/watch?v=JO_3JtsDQ0…
Roland S-1 | Dream Sequence
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "It will never come back.", EAMFOS
A synth-solo-y 5-minute ambient track consisting of chime-y tones with deceptively complex timbres. Really emotionally evocative. Video shows fixed shots of empty fields and flowers.
youtube.com/watch?v=p_oENexUIE…
EAMFOS - It will never come back.
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "One Channel Music", Aleksi Eeben
This piece is a sort of parlor trick. The C64 has three sound channels, but each is reprogrammable— each can play any sound the SID is capable of. So composing for C64 it's good practice to learn to cram "two channels into one", rapidly switching timbres to alternate instruments. This track goes all the way to fitting *the whole song* in 1 channel. It's complex and interesting sounding, and shockingly funky.
youtube.com/watch?v=SsXCnND1Si…
Aleksi Eeben - "One Channel Music" (C64) [Oscilloscope View]
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mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Elektrical Activity", Mind over MIDI
When this track initially popped up for me in a playlist I initially assumed it was a new song, and was like, wow! What a nostalgiac 90s feel this has! Then I looked up Mind Over MIDI and discovered this song was actually released in 1995, and the feeling changed to, wow! What a futuristic post-90s feel this has! Anyway this is a driving techno track with a sick groove and some aphexy sounding synths.
mindovermidi.bandcamp.com/trac…
Elektrical Aktivity, by Mind over MIDI
Mind over MIDImcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Transforming", EAMFOS
This starts off as a nice hypnotic synth drone and electric-piano jam. Then at some point there's a sort of strange shift, like two bones settling against each other in a way it doesn't feel like they're supposed to, and suddenly it feels more like something adjacent to epic heavy metal, the kind made in Scandinavia circa 2001. I have absolutely no idea what is happening in the video.
youtube.com/watch?v=C86BWMMgtr…
EAMFOS - Transforming / live session.
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Modification (Acid Jam 6.0)", INKOЯREꓘT
This is some hardkore, four-on-the-floor 90s techno, interestingly made entirely of newer reproductions of classic 90s gear: A tracker to drive the thing, but a Polyend Tracker instead of an old Atari; a 303, but a modern Behringer analog remake; a 606, but a modern Roland digital desktop remake; and an Access Virus, just an Access Virus (though I think the build they introduced in 2008). It's fun.
youtube.com/watch?v=9rjMxZ5vG8…
TD3 MO - Polyend Tracker - TR6s - Access Virus // INKOЯREꓘT - Modification // Acid Jam 6.0
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "MELANCHOLIA", roxxx303
Made on Roland's new budget desktop remakes of the 303/808 and Jupiter-8, this is a slow, gradually-developing, low-bpm acid techno jam with a good chill vibe. There's something nicely unique about this one I can't quite describe.
youtube.com/watch?v=URgJ18mKE7…
ROLAND T-8 and J-6 - ACID JAM "MELANCHOLIA"
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "07", Scoth
Yamaha's QY line, first released in 1990 (three years before the Apple Newton!) and awkwardly branded as a "Walkstation", was an attempt to make something totally new— a fully portable, handheld MIDI music production station, run off AA batteries. This modern track was made entirely on a 1997 QY70 and it sounds great. Peppy fusion funk grooves and some gorgeous pad sounds.
youtube.com/watch?v=3_g3MFWFJZ…
Scoth - 07 ( Yamaha QY70 only )
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "SOMA Pulsar-23 + Piano // Dreamy Ambient Machine", Dexba
This is a gorgeous piano piece, played on an electric piano overlooking a window somewhere in Ho Chi Minh City (and accompanied by a few beastly glitch machines— but↓ reverb-squashed down until all you hear is the quiet rush of a river and the strange distant chirping of robot birds). Is the music I link sometimes… uh, a bit much for you? Well, here's something a bit gentler.
youtube.com/watch?v=SGUIIt_qD3…
SOMA Pulsar-23 + Piano // Dreamy Ambient Machine
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "You Didn't Break Me", Pedestrian Deposit
NOISE TIME. This is some kinda strange post-rock/metal… song? EP? I'm not sure. There's no separations, just one 20-minute track, but it has multiple distinct movements within it that feel like different songs but also like part of one whole. Big shifts, violins falling into harsh noise and such, like a harder Godspeed You Black Emperor. Definitely hits the feels hard.
youtube.com/watch?v=t0U7PA2teM…
You Didn't Break Me
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "War Photographer"
Jason Forrest. Sample artist. Originally used the recording alias "Donna Summer" just to see how long it would take him to get sued. Creator of songs such as "My 36 Favorite Punk Songs" (it samples them all). His one brush with popular appeal was this *absolutely incredible* music video, which presents some kind of baffling narrative about a Viking mecha powered by rock music. You want to watch the video while you listen.
youtube.com/watch?v=VtYEz4OKCn…
Jason Forrest - War Photographer
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Joyous", 12 Rounds
I was one of 12 Rounds [ft Atticus Ross]'s very few devoted fans in the 90s, but I didn't even know until recently about their first, pre-Nothing album, which apparently got so buried CDNow never listed it. "Jitter Juice" is 1/3 tripe, 1/3 tracks that later appeared on My Big Hero, and 1/3 solid gold, ending with this lovely little, fully-orchestrated, goth/trip-hop kiss-off. The lyrics have deep personal resonance to me.
youtube.com/watch?v=1uwaVP9BYQ…
12 Rounds - Joyous
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Testing stereo field", Fantastic Dan
I was watching through this musician's videos on YouTube and my favorite wound up being their very first. It's clearly a test video (it cuts off suddenly at the end), and it's got unusual binaural audio that pans as the cellphone moves. But I really just love the groove!
This video is 4 years old, and in all this time it's only got 18 views. The Internet is full of beautiful and secret things.
youtube.com/watch?v=2UhK33bjBO…
Testing stereo field
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Buchla 200 at the Evergreen State College.", Giselle Garcia
Some drums-not-needed analog synth music on a vintage unit at a college in Olympia, Washington. Chill but with a distinctly sharp energy. What I used to think of as "Space Mountain Music".
There's a gap of about two minutes halfway through this video as the musician configures the unit for her second song so you may want to stop the video at 2:40, but I do like the closeout track.
youtube.com/watch?v=Bgl-UuwMUK…
Buchla 200 at the Evergreen State College.
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Estuary", nk
This week I've been posting tracks in which a modular synthesizer makes many short, fast notes in a random-feeling way. This is… that again, to start, but it quickly changes, dropping in a skittering, jazzy-erratic beat and droning bassline. Once it gets going the mood of the piece is really interesting, very determined, like something large and heavy in dogged motion.
youtube.com/watch?v=NyCtqyyX5t…
Estuary - Atmospheric Eurorack | Choas, Twin Waves, Beads, MFX
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Cottonwool", Lamb
In the golden age of trip-hop, Lamb was known for two things: A really good Kruder & Dorfmeister remix; and an undignified incident where one of their albums got widely distributed on Napster/Gnutella after someone relabeled it as an "unreleased" Portishead album. Unfortunate: Lamb deserves to stand alone. I like this track for its layers of lounge jazz and breakbeats, satisfyingly distinct and unmixing like oil and water.
youtube.com/watch?v=wvHMHOGrG8…
Cottonwool
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Morning Practice", Todd Barton
Made on a modern reissue of one of Buchla's "Easel" style suitcase units, this is an improvised performance of strange, quietly unnerving alien sounds. You may not recognize this as "music". It's basically the noises you'd hear in the background in some sort of science lab or alien spacecraft in a 60s movie (probably because those sounds, in those movies, were in fact made on Buchlas). It's definitely intense.
youtube.com/watch?v=mrvpTaMl6n…
Morning Practice
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "AMBIVALENT", Human Motives
Humming buzzing noises and bright chords like sunlight glinting off metal, this is six minutes of ambient music made on a modular pipeline that features not one but two granular sound-stretchers chained end to end. Something relaxed.
youtube.com/watch?v=WLw59F34y_…
AMBIVALENT // Eurorack Ambient Jam w. Make Noise Morphagene
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Neutral Labs Elmyra DIY drone synthesizer & friends", nyppy
The Elmyra was a DIY/"Open Hardware" clone of the SOMA LYRA-8, with 3 operators instead of 8. A drone box, basically. In this video the box's designer demos the Elmyra with a variety of other equipment (including, in some clips, a LYRA-8). A buffet of atmospheric booming sounds.
I try to limit this thread to single tracks but frankly, all 22 of these pieces are really compelling.
youtube.com/watch?v=9I5FMplMQO…
Neutral Labs Elmyra DIY drone synthesizer & friends - a collection of short sound snippets
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "The Day Of Opening The Tomb", Aural Holograms
This is a 23-minute recording of atmospheric drone ambient, from 2008 and a genre somewhere adjacent to black metal. Metal sounds and distant clanking, sounds that could be wailing or maybe just wind. The YouTube thumbnail actually summarizes this track better than I could. As a connoisseur of structured humming noises, the 23 minutes I spent listening to this were very high-quality ones.
youtube.com/watch?v=1zkoprENdA…
Aural Holograms - The Day Of Opening The Tomb
YouTubeOwen Nelson
Unknown parent • • •mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "DarkMatter by Lefty’sSoundLab+Eventide BlackHole drone improvisation", Arkady Marto
This is a sorrowful audio inkblot made by a handmade drone synth covered in mysterious knobs. Hypnotic but constantly changing, saws like low horns over a foggy Thames at the start of a spy movie. About 12 minutes in I realized I was convinced I had been hearing a sequence of 3 bass notes for many minutes continuously, but when I concentrated they evaporated
youtube.com/watch?v=VQ51UBKksu…
DarkMatter by Lefty’sSoundLab+Eventide BlackHole drone improvisation
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Wail of a Decomposed Star", Hobboth Music
In this beautifully atmospheric piece the musician rigged up a modular system and then, they claim, "left this patch to record while taking [a] shower". This is surprising since the piece really does feel like it follows an arc to an energetic climax & decline over its 18 minutes, so either something acted as a very long LFO or we got lucky.
(The fittingly H.R. Geiger-y video is an autovisualizer.)
youtube.com/watch?v=xynNKdA8_Q…
Wail Of A Decomposed Star | Modular Dark Drone Ambient
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "'Convection' | Cassette Tape Generative Ambient", Not_A_Creative
The YouTube summary for this tells a story: The musician recorded a modular synthesizer piece, but they weren't really vibing with it. So they recorded it onto a cassette tape and played it back at half speed. Suddenly they loved it. This *is* good, actually. Peaceful with occasional passing tremors of creepy feeling, like glimpsing something you shouldn't through the fog.
youtube.com/watch?v=n3vbiemDvs…
"Convection" | Cassette Tape Generative Ambient
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "morning drone", SERi
Here is the secret to drone ambient: Get some sort of oscillator with either phase or FM effects that cause transient crackling/squeaky noises, then run it through a massive reverb until you can't hear any individual element. This *always works*.
This track means being repeatedly hit by uniform walls of sound, like vertical ocean waves. It's pretty good for total mind-emptying. No emotions. No consciousness. Just sound
youtube.com/watch?v=dXw3KeRRjy…
morning drone / droneking + avalancherun
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Empty" (YMF288 Cover), jaezu (original by 4-mat)
Yamaha FM was the sound of pop in the 80s, with the DX7 used in more hits than I can name, and then the sound of high-end computers in the 90s, with budget versions of the DX7's chip showing up in the Genesis, Neo Geo, Soundblaster etc.
This is a chiptune cover of another chiptune (originally a 512byte demo), remade on the Sharp PC-98 Yamaha chip as laid-back, vaporwavey electric-piano funk.
youtube.com/watch?v=glfHkltN4-…
4-Mat - "Empty" (YMF288 Cover)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "TD-3 // RD-6 + volca FM = f u n k", Ricardo Schnidrig
Here cheap Behringer reproductions of the Roland 303 and 606, both running at maybe half the tempo those machines are usually run at, combine with an entire garage workbench worth of guitar pedals to make some *unbelievably* laid back acid atop a foamy wall of phased FM. Cool and dreamy and a little bit hypnotic.
youtube.com/watch?v=LS9LvdcLhP…
TD-3 // RD-6 + volca FM = f u n k
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Scarlet Skies", CorvusScribe
This is a chiptune piece on the 4-channel POKEY chip that handled sound and random number generation on the Atari 400 and 800 computers, plus most of Atari's 80s arcade games (Missile Command, Centipede etc).
This one's all big crashing chords, epic and dramatic. Sometimes you just want to listen to some PWMed square waves. The visualization in the video looks pretty cool.
youtube.com/watch?v=GoQqZhPlcx…
Scarlet Skies
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Oh Sheila", Ready for the World
This is from that period in the 80s I've talked about before, when hip hop, new tech and Prince were causing pop music to change quicker than musicians could keep up with. It's a beautifully rocking R&B track, with borderline-experimental staccato everything. Morse code synths.
BTW—go find the music video for this, or GIS "Ready for the World band", if you want to see an *incredible* moment in men's fashion.
youtube.com/watch?v=excjFCPOS7…
Oh Sheila - Ready For The World - 1985
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Beyond your mind", Reinos
This is a eurodance DOS tracker tune from 2004, with sampled (?) acid synth noises and some fun stuttery violin sounds. Take this into a club in mid-1996 and it would have been the hypest thing.
This was posted on YouTube by the artist, and as the artist does not link the .xm file, and the website advertised in the .xm file on screen appears to be dead, this is probably the only copy of this track on the Internet.
youtube.com/watch?v=t6Ls25NaTU…
Reinos - Beyond your mind (2004)
YouTubehanna ✨
in reply to mcc • • •mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "zxy", Kiyomi Tadagumi
A 60-second chiptune onslaught made by virtually overclocking the NES's 2A03 sound chip to unlock new powers. Every six seconds appears to show off a different "impossible" synthesis technique. Super cool, but frustrating!— it's incredible as flexing, but since no musical phrase repeats it can do little as "music", even though the fragments show potential to be great. I wish for a longer version with a "song structure"
youtube.com/watch?v=0hgWYNP5Dm…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Performance 065", Stereo Pig
This is a short, focused bedroom modular jam with dirty, way-overdriven distorted industrial beats and a good buzzing groove. Made with a couple of my favorite noise machines (the SOMA Pulsar and Lyra) and a light show made of LEDs controlled directly by the modular equipment (so warning, the video does have flashing). A good piece to play in your warehouse hideout when the rival gang shows up on hoverbikes.
youtube.com/watch?v=7cufyyLHsr…
Performance 065 / Pulsar-23 / Lyra-8 / Illuminator / Acidbox
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Kachina 🦄", Dochness
This would be a "lo-fi beat to study to" except for the incredibly heavy dubstep-esque synthline bearing down on you, so I guess this is a lo-fi beat to be incredibly nervous to. I think the unicorn emoji is part of the song title.
Performed live on two cheapish desktop synths (Korg's sample-based drum machine, and Roland's SH-1 emulation). It's always nice to me to see enormous sounds coming from budget gear.
youtube.com/watch?v=WHBmPtFoTG…
Kachina 🦄
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Simple Stuff", Loraine James
So as far as I can tell the deal with Loraine James is that while I was in college listening to IDM music, she was a teen listening to the same music and thinking "there should be music that sounds like this, but it's laid back R&B". Then she grew up and made it.
This track… isn't IDM exactly, or R&B, it's a forest of dense, unpredictable, looming beats with Loraine cooing on top through increasing distortion.
lorainejames.bandcamp.com/trac…
Simple Stuff, by Loraine James
Loraine Jamesmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "I Cannot See Them", Hitchcock Guillotine
A mix of drums and feedbacky synths through an overdrive filter, one for anyone who believes there is a venn diagram intersection between "harsh noise" and "ambient". Quiet tribal-style drums and a big wet plodding heartbeat of a kick, like the song is keeping time for a march into a sinister Zdzisław Beksiński landscape. One of those loud things that sounds better if you turn it down slightly.
youtube.com/watch?v=w1CUc-yEeW…
I Cannot See Them
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Devil's Advocate", DJ Shadow
DJ Shadow's pre-Endtroducing period was covered very well in major-label rereleases, but this one 🔥 track (an alternate, massively superior version of "High Noon") is actually really hard to get get hold of, I assume because of clearance problems. Alongside ultradense beats, this track weaves a pair of dueling vocal samples designed to appear indistinguishable. Pure music must give birth to orgasm and revolution
soundcloud.com/kayschaefer/dj-…
Dj Shadow - Devil's Advocate (Heaven Vs. Hell)
SoundCloudmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "DUSG Harmonies", Bleep Bloop
A little abstract synth piece made of an ocean of detuned sawtooths. It's about two minutes long, beatless, and joyfully intense. One of those quiet things that sounds better if you turn it up very loud.
youtube.com/watch?v=G5U_l8-QMB…
DUSG Harmonies
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Tired of me", Loraine James
So I mentioned a few days ago I've been listening to Loraine James and her stuff is like IDM music as laid-back R&B? Right, so this was what I was thinking of. Dreamy swarm of distorted clicky stutter beats and echoey nonsense keys. I'm not even totally sure I understand what's happening here but I like it
lorainejames.bandcamp.com/trac…
Tired Of Me, by Loraine James
Loraine Jamesmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "ELOQUENCER // MEDITATIONAL APPROACH 2 // Cwejman QMMF-4 + 4 VCOs", LESINDES
This is a slow, wonderfully minimal aleatoric piece in which a sequencer controlling four synth voices starts off playing all four at once in a repeating chord then, on interference from the musician, starts allowing the four channels to desynchronize from each other, phasing the chord into lovely little chaotic arpeggio patterns. "Ambient" or maybe just Krautrock.
youtube.com/watch?v=eabjWronWG…
ELOQUENCER // MEDITATIONAL APPROACH 2 // Cwejman QMMF-4 + 4 VCOs
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Petrified Wood"
Eyvind Kang is a violist and composer who has recorded with artists as diverse as John Zorn, Animal Collective and Sunn O)). This is a minimalist piece from Kang's own compositions in which he lays violas and reverb atop themselves over and over until any ability to identify what "note" is being played is lost, nothing left but a nameless emotion constantly growing in intensity until you feel you will burst
airtexture.bandcamp.com/track/…
Petrified Wood, by Evynid Kang
Air Texturemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Dawless 025 - Stuck in a loop", Stöfbug
This is some SPACE MUSIC recorded live on a grid of entry-level Roland & Korg desktop synths. Synth musicians in the 70s-80s made almost this exact music but would have needed an incredibly highend studio to make it sound this clean. Beatless but not quite ambient, intent music for scoring a craft flying silently through space, a childrens' documentary about the water cycle, a sunrise over a racetrack
youtube.com/watch?v=pbpi4kNlzH…
Dawless 025 - Stuck in a loop (Roland S-1 + J-6, Korg Volca Bass + NTS-1)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Stereo Music for Yamaha Disklavier Prototype", Keith Fullerton Whitman
KFW is a composer and former drum&bass jockey with a lot of really amazing work. I've always been captivated by this piece for the Disklavier, which is Yamaha's trademark for a kind of player piano controlled via MIDI. Through some unclear computer-side technique (phasing?) a single chord is broken apart into noisy note clusters and reconstructed into heart-tugging music
keithfullertonwhitman.bandcamp…
Stereo Music for Yamaha Disklavier Prototype, Electric Guitar and Computer, by Keith Fullerton Whitman
Keith Fullerton Whitmanmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "White Window", Stefan Torto
I've featured Stefan in this thread a couple times already. The constant attributes of his videos are (1) making complex music on unusually simple hardware setups and (2) cat.
This one's gorgeous, lush semi-ambient electronica. It's got a bit of an epic feel, bestowing a cinematic tone on this video of a cat, bathing in muted morning light, completely convinced the human arm next to her is there for her benefit.
youtube.com/watch?v=6kRxnSjQ6H…
White Window | Ambient Session
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "VHIKK X sound demo 1", Forge TME
A medley of creepy howling drones as the creator of the VHIKK complex oscillator demonstrates playing it by hand. Most eurorack oscillators output one tone and then you run that through effects; this one has feedbacky delay and modulation built in so it outputs a finished sound. Ignore it's a product demo & you have 20 enjoyable minutes as various cool, menacing industrial noises play, shoggoths shambling by
youtube.com/watch?v=vsm5RVInFI…
VHIKK X sound demo 1
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "shape of raw to come", the hatch
I saw "the hatch" live at Toronto's "Next Music from Tokyo" event. NMFT is a really great event and the hatch is *incredible*; mostly they alternate (and blend) dark jazz and death metal, in a way that seems like it shouldn't work but really *really* works. This track is more typical post-rock but still has its surprises, an ominous wailing threat over chugging guitars.
jusangatsu.bandcamp.com/track/…
shape of raw to come, by the hatch
十三月 / 13th recorddsmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "萃点", GEZAN featuring Million Wish Collective
This is from an absolutely wonderful album Christine found. This weird, joyous mix of Taiko-style drumming, electric guitar, a room full of people yelling and chanting, oceans of echo and (not in this song) bagpipes? It makes me think of Polyphonic Spree, or J. A. Seazer's songs for Shūji Terayama and the Utena anime. The track name translates something like "point of origin" or "intersection".
jusangatsu.bandcamp.com/track/…
萃点, by GEZAN with Million Wish Collective
十三月 / 13th recorddsmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "生まれる前のセクシーキング", the hatch
I linked "the hatch" on Monday— this is from their previous album, and is a little closer to that "halfway between jazz and metal" thing I mentioned. Actually it kinda feels like if Last Days of Humanity tried to do a catchy ska kinda thing. All screaming and guitar-shredding noise. But it's catchy!
Google Translate claims this title means "The Sexy King Before Birth". Not sure how to interpret that.
jusangatsu.bandcamp.com/track/…
生まれる前のセクシーキング, by The hatch
十三月 / 13th recorddsdemize
in reply to mcc • • •the most interesting thing about the title is that it doesn't say "sexy king" in japanese, it says "sexy king" in english, transliterated into katakana
I don't think this clears anything up
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Melting through Midtown", The Physics House Band
The Physics House Band is a very noisy jazz ensemble. This track is not noisy at all. It is gentle and smooth and autumn-breeze cool. Saxophone and electric piano and drums. Very satisfying.
I previously posted this album in that Bandcamp recommendations thread I had on Another Site. I've been trying not to feature songs from that thread in this one, but maybe soon it won't matter anymore.
unearthly-vision.bandcamp.com/…
Melting Through Midtown, by The Physics House Band
Unearthly Visionmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Gateless", Darren Korb
It's been 9 years and I'm prepared to say that "Transistor", by Supergiant Games, has the best video game OST ever. Like, the best video game soundtrack to listen to as an album. I was in indie game circles in 2014 and just every time there was a party in that scene, this album played in full at some point.
My fav track on the OST by far is "Gateless", an intense, epic guitar jam with a slight return to "The Spine".
supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/t…
Gateless, by Darren Korb
Supergiant Gamesmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Ambient jam w/ Soma Cosmos, Take 5, Polymoon, Marantz cassette tape piano, and guitar", Jay Hosking
In this unimaginatively titled but gorgeous piece, Jay builds in a looper a bed of layers of keyboard sounds (from a 2021 descendent of the Sequential Prophet descendent, and one actual piano), then plays soulful guitar over it. Music for something cinematic to happen over, the protagonist confessing love or saying goodbye for the last time.
youtube.com/watch?v=QIGcUGKiGX…
Ambient jam w/ Soma Cosmos, Take 5, Polymoon, Marantz cassette tape piano, and guitar
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Analogue Fields", Stefan Torto
This is a stark, moody synthwave piece by Stefan Torto (no cat this time). All sounds are produced on just the budget Volca Keys (the big keyboard is a MIDI sequencer, and the little box on the right is adding the echo). Simple but powerful, music like cold, distant wind.
youtube.com/watch?v=wfDTwCR6_X…
Stefan Torto - Analogue Fields (Live with Korg NTS 1 & Volca Keys)
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Nerdseq & Assimil8or Live Mix 170823", 27 Arches
A 20-minute techno set performed on a modular rack. Acid basslines, industrial hardness and atmospherics. A really good emphasis on sound design. This is music with a viewpoint, the viewpoint is that more echo is ALWAYS better, and they do make a strong case.
The Nerdseq is in the bottom left—it's a tracker built into a eurorack module. You can see them composing the music on it as it plays.
youtube.com/watch?v=5S1BmsjlgH…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Live Techno mix set.", Th3Pock3tOp3rat0r
This is a shockingly sophisticated medley of dance pieces on the cheapest available hardware: two Pocket Operators and two toy Korg touch-strip synths, in a single chain of 1/8-inch cables.
The music itself is joyous & noisy distorted, 90s house with better production, or worse maybe, a single set of blown-out speakers set up at the other end of an echoey gym.
Makes me think of Axiom Verge.
youtube.com/watch?v=TqQQJ2pMNG…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Polyend Tracker // An undercover ambient machine", Dexba
This is a Selected Ambient Work made on the Polyend Tracker, but Dexba doesn't seem to be… using it correctly, or not in the normal way? This is a composition machine, but in the video he's somehow playing it live as an instrument, possibly with coordination/interference from a precomposed project.
Rain, echoing piano, skittering beats of the kind people in 2010 would call "glitchy".
youtube.com/watch?v=Su4Tdfs7de…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "GBA + Elektron jam", Bad Diode
Elektron is the MPC of this generation. They make a range of "grooveboxes" that are ready-made for producing genres like EDM or hip-hop.
This is a short, thumping rave electronica track by @bd in which an entire rack of Elektron devices serve as backup for… a Game Boy Advance, running a sequencer BD themself created (ROM available on Itch, see YouTube comments). The rhythm, it entrances me.
youtube.com/watch?v=UcOebKPQFn…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Everything is a synthesizer", Kurti
This musician rigs an electrical engineering learning tool (a "SystemTechnik Type 3910 Digi Board 2"— various standard chips + banana plugs) to make a repeating buzzing sound they control with switches, and combined with a Monotribe (first of the current era of desktop grooveboxes) builds a surprisingly catchy dance rhythm. They let this run for one minute, then burst out laughing and turn off the camera.
youtube.com/watch?v=wsAylogXQT…
Everything is a synthesizer
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Meditation In White Sound", Halim El-Dabh
youtube.com/watch?v=Vzyr2lleLO…
Halim El-Dabh (see article: cdm.link/2023/09/halim-el-dabh…) is a fascinating figure— an Egyptian composer with a career spanning 72 years and an undefeated claim to creating the first piece of electronic music ever ("The Expression of Zaar" aka "Wire Recorder Piece", 1944).
This 1959 piece, recorded at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, is an absolutely gorgeous minimalist ambient journey.
You die so many times: you need more of electronic pioneer Halim El-Dabh - CDM Create Digital Music
Peter Kirn (CDM Create Digital Music)mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Boundless pad", Mike Lewis
If you want to make the kind of ambient music that sounds like just one giant chord for three minutes, the Novation Peak is a good synthesizer to go with.
This track is three minutes of stately chord progression absolutely drenched in echo. Extremely satisfying. Imagine someone in a big comfy sweater with a big cup of coffee jumping up and down in front of a sunrise yelling "Yes!! Yes!!! This is so relaxing!!!"
youtube.com/watch?v=MTIV-jYYmX…
Novation Peak || Boundless Pad
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Soma Labs Lyra 8 + Hologram Microcosm Performance [No Talking]", A NEVER ENDING EXPLOSION
This video's thumbnail reads "Tuning the Lyra-8 to a Hungarian Minor Scale". The musician doesn't explain further, but the Lyra's 8 touchpad "keys" *can* be tuned to any arbitrary frequency, so it's good for tuning/scale experiments.
This piece is 16 minutes and makes every second count, a series of giant haunting tones with cryptic, intense emotions.
youtube.com/watch?v=8Je3FPMGom…
Soma Labs Lyra 8 + Hologram Microcosm Performance [No Talking] - Day 21 out of 30
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Covenant - Live", Abre Ojos
This is the kind of music that is used for dolly shots slowly gliding down spaceship hallways when it is going to turn out later that your spaceship is haunted. Creepy indescribable atmospheric noises and big thumping beats wet with distortion.
You should watch the video if you want some nice psychedelic visualizations (or avoid watching the video if you're unusually sensitive to flashing colors).
youtube.com/watch?v=aYoUOA5xCM…
Covenant - Live - Eurorack LXR02, VHIKK-X, Elektron Octatrack
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Satie?", Dud Faz
Satie? Is this Satie? I don't know? This is a peppy, pleasantly sloppy jam that plausibly sounds as if it is inspired by, or possibly directly incorporates motifs from, the work of Erik Satie (1866-1925). At one point the musician is performing drums by hitting keys on a piano keyboard. How to describe this? Imagine a dance number breaking out in a 19th-century French factory.
youtube.com/watch?v=d6pVeLDoNc…
Satie?
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Piece for tape recorder", Vladimir Ussachevsky
This piece was recorded in 1956 but sounds highly ahead of its time, like if the "drug freakout sequence" music from a 1970s film soundtrack were composed as intentional music, or like if the interstitial junk in a Kid A era Radiohead album were expanded to a full song. I really like this, it gets so much mileage out of tape-jank & exactly four oscillator circuits in a hand-wired configuration.
youtube.com/watch?v=E47Zk8riCO…
Vladimir Ussachevsky: Piece for tape recorder (1956)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "roland s-1 dnb drum play", alarky
It's been said the Drum & Bass genre couldn't have happened without Cubase, the software that originally let 90s artists artisanally place all those 1/16-note hi-hats on a grid. This artist on the other hand says who needs grids, and just sorta mashes the buttons on his drum machine front panel. It's messy, but sorta works! Combined with the weirdly overpowered synthesis of the S-1 it forms an intense mood.
youtube.com/watch?v=KxUD40TENv…
roland s-1 dnb drum play
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "I'm Afraid of Americans", David Bowie (Photek remix)
Heterodox drum & bass artist Photek leans heavily to a kind of minimalism that when it goes too far can feel sparse and strung out. Here the strung-out feel works strongly in the song's favor, as it gives us more time to luxuriate in the voice of David Bowie.
Incidentally I think this mix (from a 1997 remix EP organized by Trent Reznor) might secretly be an early draft of "Seven Samurai"
youtube.com/watch?v=JDeRFsHk7g…
I'm Afraid Of Americans V5 (2022 Remaster)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "YAMAHA SU10 DNB JAM", Electromachines
Armed with the terrible Yamaha portable sampler I was talking about last week, plus one of Korg's "Monotron" toys and a voice sample from a really old interview with Squarepusher, this musician goes hard on some budget-bin drum & bass. Got those kind of wobwob synths you normally associate with dubstep, but it isn't dubstep, it's drum & bass.
It really has that 1997 feel
youtube.com/watch?v=2xaLnnQPNN…
YAMAHA SU10 DNB JAM
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Mood // Lyra-8 // Drums - Ambient Creation", André Davies
This is a deliriously weird video that I don't think I'd find that weird if I only had the audio. With just audio you'd think "oh, horror movie soundtrack music". With the video, you've got a man seated at a drumkit proceeding to make what seems to be every possible sound other than the sound of a man playing the drums. A step up from metal plates and contact mics maybe? Is this jazz
youtube.com/watch?v=BKoJtowx6H…
Mood // Lyra-8 // Drums - Ambient Creation
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening today: "TANMO", BENDYmusic
Two minutes of mysterious noise, recorded with mysterious electronic boxes on what appears to be a table in a cafe. The feedback wobbles and distorted kicks interweave with passing snippets of conversation from the cafe and a radio which I think is actually patched into the recording device. If you love noise as much as I do you will dig this two minutes
youtube.com/watch?v=jlPpmFyAlC…
TANMO
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Level Incomplete", Bas Mondblau
Bas here has a YouTube account containing hundreds of decent drum & bass jams made with Elektron's desktop grooveboxes, most of them in the style I would describe as "Dreamcast menu music". This one's the most interesting one I've found so far, on a slightly different wavelength. Chill, jazzy and LTJ-Bukem-ish, this is an airy flight through fluffy synth-pad clouds and skeletal d&b beats.
youtube.com/watch?v=xDtSFiVakH…
Level Incomplete - Arcade inspired drum & bass - S016
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Torture by Tao"
youtube.com/watch?v=Y_TJVc5z_K…
Tao is an apparently legendary Atari ST chiptune/demoscene composer (rockabit.weebly.com/tao.html) who started in 1991 with the goal of recreating C64 SID sounds on the Atari, and wrote his own tracker synth to get more accurate sounds. This is a 1999 track made in someone else's SID-on-Atari simulator ("Sid Sound Designer"). The point of interest here though is this is just a really rocking track, with a great high-energy mood.
Torture by Tao (Atari ST Sid Sound Designer music)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Bangin' Nights", gwEm
This is some acid chiptune created in 2005 for the Atari ST with the "maxYMiser music" tracker (software written by gwEm himself). Rocks hard. Depending on how you feel about harsh sounds, you'll either be enraptured or annoyed by the production; these waveforms are positively serrated.
The YouTube uploader explains this is a Atari ST conversion of a C64 chiptune by Matt Gray (composer of 80s games like Last Ninja 2).
youtube.com/watch?v=LGirs-oEn5…
Bangin' Nights by gwEm (Atari ST maxYMiser music) 1080p50
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Atari", HyphenPixel
Several things define "chiptune"; an underrated one is the channel restriction. Which this track bypasses by being made on… 2 Atari POKEY chips, a configuration easy to set up in modern trackers but historically meaningless. The only way to play this song on period hardware would be to MIDI-sync two Atari 800s and have them play a duet.
A neat, melancholy glimpse at an underexplored part of musical configuration space:
youtube.com/watch?v=x3jJtVTueY…
HyphenPixel - Atari (Furnace | 2xPOKEY)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening today: "Z-ZONE", BeaT
This is a tracker .mod file based around some Neo Geo-feeling FM bass samples. I don't know for a fact when this was recorded but it was uploaded to themodarchive in 2007. The kind of music you'd hear early in a video game where you are rescuing your girlfriend, presumably from some sort of crime lord. Low-key but has a good feeling to it, I like the early-hip-hop drums. Allow yourself to be filled with the spirit of the 1980s
youtube.com/watch?v=EB8wf_yAD8…
BeaT - Z-ZONE
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Unreal SuperHero 3", Kenet and Rez (Game Boy conversion by Kabcorp)
Unreal Superhero 3 was a classic tracker tune from 2001 that, I'm told, gained infamy after being used in some mid-00s keygen cracktros. The original Windows version was trying to simulate a chiptune feel, so it only makes sense that recreating it for the actual Game Boy sound chip, as this YouTuber did in 2018, improves the sound considerably. A nice little bop here.
youtube.com/watch?v=o6cMPBfqM6…
Unreal SuperHero 3 on GameBoy by Kabcorp
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Havoc" title screen theme
"Havoc" was a 3D "tank game" (anyone whose parents wouldn't let them play FPSes will recognize this phrase) from the 90s that history has entirely forgotten. There were two things of note about it: One, it was one of *very* few games to ever support Apple's "QuickDraw 3D" hardware acceleration API; two, its title screen theme was a techno banger entirely beyond all reason. This song is a secret treasure, to me.
youtube.com/watch?v=e1MmyEZ8if…
HAVOC (Menus) - Reality Bytes 1995 (PC/MAC)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Sommarhack 2024 Invitro", 505 & mOdmate
"Sommarhack" is an Atari demoscene party happening next year in Sweden. The event announcement came itself in the form of a short Atari ST demo, which you can find on YouTube under the name "300 Days to Go". The demo incorporated this original track, made in maxYMiser music (that's the tracker made by gwEm). It's effortlessly funky, and has absolutely the filthiest chiptune bassline I have ever heard.
youtube.com/watch?v=2WKg-wMTW8…
Sommarhack 2024 Invitro by 505 & mOdmate (Atari ST maxYMiser music)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "ZIQAL DIMENSION + bionic lestar + Zadar", Plugman
"Plugman" is an active performing musician, but his YouTube account is used exclusively for short sound tests and module demonstrations; I've been watching the account for months waiting for him to post an actual *song*. Here he finally has, sort of, a short but extremely sick 2-minute jam with cool swoothy synths. This makes me think of whatever "dub" meant in the early 00s techno scene.
youtube.com/watch?v=ihQ3TrZHAN…
ZIQAL DIMENSION + bionic lestar + Zadar
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Taxi", Pole
In 1996, a DJ named Stefan Betke dropped his Waldorf "4-Pole" filter and broke it. The "broken" filter turned out to make strange, unique crackly noises that Betke loved so much he recorded 3 entire albums of minimalist, borderline-ambient "dub" techno based around the filter's new sounds. This is my favorite track from the set, a tense, hypnotic descent into a single hissing loop disrupted by sketchy reggae instrumentation.
pole-stefanbetke.bandcamp.com/…
Taxi, by pole
pole (stefan betke)mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "10 minutes of DUB TECHNO on the korg VOLCA bass/FM/Sample"
"Dub" emerged in the early 70s as a minimal, bass-focused, echo-drenched variant of reggae.
Then "Dub" emerged in the late 90s as a techno genre aping dub reggae style, generally with no lyrics and often with minimal/microhouse beats.
This YouTube dub techno set was made on Korg's quartet of cheap desktop synths, and it's good. Actually, it's *very* good. Cocooned in floaty vibes
youtube.com/watch?v=3qsuYcEYLv…
10 minutes of DUB TECHNO on the korg VOLCA bass/FM/Sample
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Wallfacer"
Vladislav Delay has been making distinctive, often cryptic glitch-adjacent electronic music since the late 90s, and is considered one of the foundational artists of dub techno. He's now releasing lots of rapid-fire EPs on a Bandcamp subscription plan. This is from this year and feels dub-like in spirit (if not in stereotypical elements), beats and isolated abstract noises floating in dark space. A zen rock garden made of sounds.
vladislavdelay.bandcamp.com/tr…
Wallfacer, by Vladislav Delay
Vladislav Delaymcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Starlight", Model 500 (Moritz remix)
My posts this week in this thread wound up with a dub techno theme, so I thought for Friday I should listen to some dub techno classics and pick a really epic track to post on Friday. What I then realized is that dub techno doesn't really do "epic". "Satisfying" or "chill" is more its speed. So here's a seminal dub track from 1995 that is just really intensely satisfying. A tiny understated funk groove.
youtube.com/watch?v=k1TwVLmOhi…
Model 500 - Starlight (Moritz Mix aka Maurizio remix 1995)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Illusory Walls", Cobra Truth
This YouTuber makes some traditional-standards dub techno with some interesting modern equipment: The Make Noise trio of noisy synths, a 303 clone, and the Digitakt drum machine (probably driving the Make Noise). Okay, so 2/3 modern. This takes a minute to get going but then it jams pretty hard, really nice bright and clean production. PS: No, the MS-20 visible in the background isn't actually used in the track.
youtube.com/watch?v=VsxENHzuYE…
Cobra Truth - Illusory Walls
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Killed By A Feedback", Dynamo
This is another track from the (Fact Magazine) "25 best dub techno tracks of all time" list I found. It's from 1996, and it's weird: The parts of a techno song as if heard from deep underwater, gradually building steam. There's a point where it flips over from confusing and abstract to extremely danceable and both sides of that flip are fun, in their way.
youtube.com/watch?v=3TLn4VWlbE…
Dynamo - Killed By A Feedback
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "11/7/23 'Blueberry 5200'? 'Smurf'? (2x Behringer ARP 2600 clones) + Mackie Mix12FX (02: Small Room)", Cfpp0
The ARP 2600 mega-synth is most famous not for music at all, but for *sound effects*; it's the machine that provides the voice of R2D2.
This track, made on *two* unauthorized 2600 clones, is itself practically more sound effects than music; it's a meditative, hypnotic sequence of sweeps, like AC waves breaking on an electronic shore.
youtube.com/watch?v=z5kE9-5iq_…
11/7/23 “Blueberry 5200”? “Smurf”? (2x Behringer ARP 2600 clones) + Mackie Mix12FX (02: Small Room)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Comfortably Heavy", Travis Benjamin Simpson
I've featured the Lyra-8 in this thread repeatedly, but usually in aleatoric ("noise") compositions where they're just generating general drones. This musician meanwhile uses two Lyra-8s, whom he calls "The Girls", in this slow but meticulously composed piece where he plays the Lyras like strange, slow-motion pianos. It's intense and moody, ponderous, tones and pendulums and long decaying release
youtube.com/watch?v=L5-Uf4ftTY…
Comfortably Heavy - Soma Lyras x Cosmos x Bastl Bestie Live Jam 5.23.23
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Grone - 2nd Exploration", Somnambule
One day in high school, my friend Joe AIMed my friend JZ: "Say the first thing that comes into your mind. No thinking."
"Grone is coming now", JZ replied, then recoiled in horror. JZ feared he'd freed Grone from the collective subconscious with his careless words.
Then in 2020 Maneco Labs released "Grone", a synth module from which an ominous face stares. Is that Grone? Is he here? How long do we have?
youtube.com/watch?v=Qcn8GkQCBu…
Grone - 2nd Exploration
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Drone Music With DIY Analog Synthesizer (Hana Synth)", Jeanie
Jeanie is really unique among synth YouTubers, using her collection of (actually pretty weird) modular equipment to make polished, Kraftwerky pop music incorporating her own vocals. Here she demos an ambient noise box she designed & sells herself, singing her own backup for a short atmosphere piece I'd describe as "Yoga class music but more epic". I kinda wish it were 4x as long.
youtube.com/watch?v=nKqk5ASc1p…
Drone Music With DIY Analog Synthesizer (Hana Synth)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Blizno / Cinematic video nature / Elektron Analog Four MK II / Ambient Drone", Mutant Manfred
Anybody like Boards of Canada? This is a piece on one of Elektron's more advanced devices, with indistinct, wavering synths and an absolutely killer vibe. It starts off in the standard drone "one loud, very sculpted note" mode but then melody gradually takes shape from the noise, like the sun consuming a horizon. This sounds the way VHS looks.
youtube.com/watch?v=wzgzvs9jJ9…
Blizno / Cinematic video nature / Elektron Analog Four MK II / Ambient Drone
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Extent", Abre Ojos
From a live set performed somewhere in New South Wales. Crashing waves of static over a lovely burbling ocean of indistinct echoes, and a creepy pounding heartbeat of a beat. Made on a packed table of modular gear connected by an absolute spaghetti mess of wires (I guess there's a VHIKK in there somewhere?), all obscured by the video's (pretty good) psychedelic visuals. The artist describes this as "drone doom ambient".
youtube.com/watch?v=n13jvdWkUM…
Extent - Live @ SeeSpace Lismore - Eurorack, Octatrack, LXR, VHIKK-X, Kickain, drone doom ambient
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "manecolabs eurorack system experimental", Maneco Labs
Chill lo-fi noise to relax/astral project to, this is somebody from the company that made the "Grone" synth module making a track that's about halfway between trip-hop and an FM radio wedged in the static between two stations. It's got a really good vibe to it as long as (as previously mentioned) you are indifferent as to whether or not your soul remains tethered to your body.
youtube.com/watch?v=wD1XhvBbs8…
manecolabs eurorack system experimental
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Machines talk about swimming - Lifeforms Sv-1 + Digitakt + Analog Four + TB03 electro rhythms", Bad_Mix
I could spend 400 chars abstractly describing the timbres of this track or I could just say "Do you like Aphex Twin? This sounds like Aphex Twin". No, that's not really fair. This is a really creative piece that feels like it starts with the vibe of very early Warp Records and flies off on some other elevated trajectory. Wonderful flavors
youtube.com/watch?v=bsOwp8RB_X…
Machines talk about swimming - Lifeforms Sv-1 + Digitakt + Analog Four + TB03 electro rhythms
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to: "Bipp", SOPHIE
SOPHIE was a beloved, influential hyperpop artist known for her delirious production and her obsession with creating entire tracks on the Elektron monomachine (which, as the name suggests, can only make one sound at a time). I'm kind of basic for "Bipp" being my favorite SOPHIE track but it just feels so wonderful. Loving 80s pop with too much candy and an entirely alien backing track that sounds normal until you concentrate on it.
nmbrs.bandcamp.com/track/bipp-…
BIPP, by SOPHIE
Numbersmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Purchaser", Fat Warrior
A really fun vintage ProTracker .mod file from 1993. Dancey with some really great sounds and focused on rapidly switching between different timbres (The Mod Archive documents some text from inside the .mod file and the author implies it was made out of leftover samples from other projects). I think this might be "Complextro". I'm not sure. I've spent the last decade+ trying to avoid finding out what "Complextro" is.
youtube.com/watch?v=Y9v5ndxIqs…
Fat Warrior - "Purchaser" (MOD) [Oscilloscope View]
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "WARP CORE", Infrasonic Audio
This person designed a eurorack module based on the "phase distortion" technique used by the Casio CZ, and then made this video to demonstrate it. And the demo track is really good! Classic acid-tinged techno with some hype 808y drums. All the synth sounds are coming from the Warp Core; if you pay close attention the melody is syncopated slightly so it doesn't ever have to play at the same time as the bass.
youtube.com/watch?v=aak8dWPZlH…
WARP CORE Complex Phase Distortion Oscillator Prototype Jam
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Detroit Techno 100% Vinyl Mix", Gregor Soundhome
This is that vintage mm tss mm tss old-style techno, mixed on a vinyl deck in 2014 and containing a lot of music from the 2010s but with that kind of amorphous, timeless quality that could've been recorded anytime in the last 40 years. This mix is two hours long (!), and the account has dozens of multi-hour mixes like this. "Detroit" is an ocean. Leave this on the background, and swim a while
youtube.com/watch?v=GQWeF8nD6C…
°Detroit Techno° 100% Vinyl Mix
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in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Machinedrum Analog Heat +FX Session | No Talking", Shiro Fujioka
A medley of fun IDM beats on the machinedrum (precursor to SOPHIE's beloved monomachine). I think this is supposed to be a series of first drafts for the artist's hip-hop production work, and it's easy to imagine the songs these seeds would grow into. But also laid out like this the beats seem mostly to flow together, like one long track with dramatic pauses between verses.
youtube.com/watch?v=Y8EGMxPewc…
Machinedrum Analog Heat +FX Session | No Talking
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in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "I Don't Give A Fuck", DJ Rashad
DJ Rashad was a wildly inventive instrumental hip-hop producer working in a Chicago-local microgenre ("Footwork") he himself co-created; his stuff sounds kind of like trap music from another universe (the universe is Chicago). This song, from an album released one year before Rashad died, is an unpredictable, unsettling, avant-garde descent into darkness. It goes real hard.
This recording contains Cuss Words
youtube.com/watch?v=7NsrnIp73q…
DJ Rashad - I Don't Give A Fuck (Official Audio)
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in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Whisper and Mantra" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
I've mentioned before the SNES sound chip was a beast. Secret of Mana uses that chip to the fullest, leveraging its strengths *and* weaknesses. Consider this song that plays in mana temples, how the vocal sample starts & stops so abruptly. Technically that's a limitation of sample synthesizers but it feels right— "diegetic", like inhuman, supernatural voices are leaking from another world.
youtube.com/watch?v=aaxeJXjrdm…
祈りと囁き
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in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Mystic Invasion" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
So in the first mana temple the peaceful-if-spooky "Whisper and Mantra" plays. Then you reach the second mana temple, which has been overrun by surreal monsters, and this dark, fusion-jazz variation on the temple theme plays instead.
Secret of Mana has kind of a nothing plot but it's really emotionally memorable!— In part because the soundtrack does so much of the heavy narrative lifting.
youtube.com/watch?v=ONRN1vOT1I…
聖なる侵入
YouTubePhoebe Zeitler
in reply to mcc • • •It's really a shame that we only got about half of what was planned for the full game; way too much was cut due to the switch from a CD to a cartridge. The story could probably have made so much more sense if we'd gotten it all.
Related, though: I'm so glad it WASN'T on CD and couldn't rely on Redbook audio for the score. It just wouldn't sound right on anything but the original chip.
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Lofi tech beats PCBcore", Arman Bohn
This is a Selected Ambient Work with bitcrushed beats by the Picocore and semi-random tones by the Nunomo Qun (so with the Teenage Instruments TX-6 on mixing duty, that's two cheap idiosyncratic miniature synths and one very expensive idiosyncratic miniature synth). Slippery and indistinct in a way I find abstrusely compelling, this leads you down a twisty techno labyrinth then strands you at a dead end.
youtube.com/watch?v=JZddX1tpOR…
Lofi tech beats PCBcore w/ NUNOMO QUN MKII, TX-6 and pikocore
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "CB03.wav" (27Mhz series mix), Magic Window
This is some acidic, futuristic-sounding drum & bass I found on YouTube (the link goes to the full 3-track "Zerotime" EP, which you can also find on Bandcamp). I don't know anything about this group but they seem to really like Windows 95 and are very good at constructing fussed-over vaporwave timbres. Jamming rhythm on CB03 and lots of enormous sounds with wonderful tastes. I think this is "IDM".
youtube.com/watch?v=UtYiEtMoyY…
Magic Window - Zerotime (EP)
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Concept 1 96:01 01:00", Richie Hawtin
Under the name "Plastikman", Hawtin achieved fame as a "minimalist composer" who repurposed dance-techno techniques to sculpt stark sound landscapes. This bumping downtempo is from a previously *very* rare, self-published one-track-a-month limited-vinyl series he did while developing the sound of the Plastikman "trilogy"; now it's on Bandcamp.
Hawtin says he recorded this track on January 1, 1996.
richiehawtin.bandcamp.com/trac…
Richie Hawtin "Concept 1 96:01 01:00", by Richie Hawtin
Richie Hawtinmcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Mixtur Trautonium (exercise #6)", LudoWic
One last Trautonium piece, this one run through two (!) Space Echos and demonstrating one of the most interesting things to me about the device, that it's capable of Theremin-like trembles and slides but unlike Theremins can do hard edges and discrete jumps. Again, like an electronic violin.
Short and low and has a captivating, melancholy emotion, this just really grabs your heartstrings and yanks.
youtube.com/watch?v=MY5Qt7xd5r…
LudoWic - Mixtur Trautonium (exercise #6)
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Unknown parent • • •What I listened to today: "The industries of the unused mind.", Soaring Tortoise Orchestra
In this video a man in a basement appears to be mastering an ambient track on tape, tweaking the mixing board. But if you watch carefully he's actually just picking up various objects on his desk and staring at them as if he does not recognize them. What is happening here? The music is cryptic, striding a line between epic and creepy, like a guitar solo is being haunted by ghosts.
youtube.com/watch?v=cP2VnclaE5…
SoaringTortoise Orchestra: The industries of the unused mind.
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Mixtur Trautonium (exercise #11)", LudoWic
I linked one of LudoWic's Trautonium pieces on Wednesday; here's a more complex one, probably the most complex of these "exercises" he's uploaded, with a soothing, rhythmic clicking (which I can't even figure out where it's coming from) providing percussion. Watch during the little violin-like pitch vibratos throughout; that's not an instrument "effect", he's wiggling his finger on the touch plate.
youtube.com/watch?v=ZT4KBYPBPD…
LudoWic - Mixtur Trautonium (exercise #11)
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Distances", Fontaine Burnett
Mr. Burnett is a session musician; he's performed with Chaka Khan, the Temptations, the Weather Girls and a dozen other artists, meaning millions have heard him play without ever learning his name. During early COVID he started uploading home performances to YouTube, among them this absolutely lovely jazz piano solo on Roger Linn's "isomorphic" MIDI controller (a piano splattered onto a grid). Watch the fingers.
youtube.com/watch?v=5V2Yro3QLL…
Distances (LinnStrument)
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Mixtur Trautonium (exercise #4)" LudoWic
The Trautonium is an early electronic instrument from the 1930s. Instead of a "keyboard" like a post-1965 synthesizer would use players make contact between a resistive wire and a metal plate, allowing fine control more akin to a violin than a piano. In this piece, the musician works the plate (and the pedals?) for a complex and stunning tremolo effect, like a guitar pedal under direct human control.
youtube.com/watch?v=q4U7Uue5Qd…
LudoWic - Mixtur Trautonium (excercise #4)
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Minimoog and Rhodes Chillout Track", Kurti
In this charmingly guileless video a dude smiles at the camera and then proceeds to perform a song which is pure distilled 1985. Simultaneous solos on a minimoog and a gorgeous-sounding Rhodes electric piano (not a synth), with rhythm provided by an actual one-piece Macintosh Plus DAW hooked up to some MIDI modules. It's at times like this I understand why people liked "smooth jazz".
youtube.com/watch?v=6F5SnobjLb…
Minimoog and Rhodes Chillout Track
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Ventlaris", Ceephax Acid Crew
Ceephax is (in real life) Squarepusher's little brother. Last night he posted on YouTube this 26-minute live techno performance that apparently shows up in edited form on one of his albums. The jam is accompanied by a lovely video that appears to have been created on an Amiga Video Toaster. He's making basically the same music he's been making since the 90s, but now it's retro which means it sounds futuristic.
youtube.com/watch?v=iKDVXlCFwx…
Ceephax Acid Crew - Ventlaris - Live Jam Roland TB-303 SH-101 TR-808 TR-909 Juno-6 Jupiter 8 Pro One
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Anemone", The Brian Jonestown Massacre
This is a slow jam from the BJM's second album in 1996 and probably the closest thing the band has to a breakout hit. Lovely chill feelings, tambourines and bongos and one single held sustained organ note.
Anthony Bourdain once said in an interview that this was his favorite song; there's an episode of "Parts Unknown" that is just Anton Newcombe, BJM's front guy, doing home cooking for Bourdain.
youtube.com/watch?v=StV9lElcvA…
Anemone - Brian Jonestown Massacre
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Gumball Machine Weekend", Yppah
This is another Yppah song, this one from 2009, with sugary tv-commercial xylophones and grooving rock guitars. I really "dig" the bassline here (I would describe it as "hip").
I cannot actually identify what element of the presentation here causes me to mentally classify this as "electronica" or "hip-hop" instead of just being an instrumental rock song, but it's there somehow.
yppahmusic.bandcamp.com/track/…
Gumball Machine Weekend, by Yppah
Yppahmcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Aluminum or Glass (The Memo)", Negativland
Negativland is most known for discursive sample collages with "Adbusters"-flavor politics. But in 1997 for once they just sat down and recorded a rock song (intercut with a dramatic reading, by the Weatherman, of what appears to be an internal memo from Pepsi's advertising department) and it is transcendent, it is everything. Video treatment by Tim Maloney as part of the "Our Favorite Things" DVD.
youtube.com/watch?v=XY0ASHW360…
Negativland - "Aluminum or Glass"
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)", Jimi Hendrix
Hendrix's 1968 masterpiece Electric Ladyland has two meandering 14-minute epics on it; "1983", which I love, and "Voodoo Chile", which I'm not so sure about. But I *love* the album's closer, the "Slight Return", which reworks Voodoo Chile as a six-minute rock onslaught that showcases both Hendrix and the Experience's rhythm section (amazing musicians in their own right) all at their absolute best.
youtube.com/watch?v=IZBlqcbpmx…
Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Pish", The Brian Jonestown Massacre
The Brian Jonestown Massacre can probably be described as the less commercial Dandy Warhols, and are one of a few modern-ish bands, along with the Warhols and I guess the Beta Band, who decided there was something worth resurrecting in that pre-prog rock era I'd call "psychadelic" for lack of a better word. They released this dreamy, echo-drenched song in 2015 and I think it just feels great to swim in.
youtube.com/watch?v=-ZE6Gbr4b7…
Pish - The Brian Jonestown Massacre [Best Quality On YouTube]
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "The Porpoise Song", The Monkees
It's 1968. The actors who play the Monkees are tired of being actors. They want to record their own music, be taken seriously. So they make "Head", a surreal movie with songs by Carole King (!) a script by Jack Nicholson (‽) and a plot about the fictional Monkees struggling to become real. The movie doesn't… seem very good, but the songs are lush and gorgeous. An overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice
youtube.com/watch?v=GKmPmZoKeP…
The Porpoise Song - The Monkees - Head
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Bushmills", Yppah
From 2015, this is a banging, echoey jam by psychedelic electronica musician Yppah, mixing drums from the DJ Shadow school of hip hop with rock guitars. It's got a really good clean feeling to it and a flowing structure that slips away from you when your mind tries to get a grip on it. The feeling is not so much nostalgic as just remembering what it was to live in a time when it still seemed like there was a future
yppah.bandcamp.com/track/bushm…
Bushmills, by Yppah
Yppahmcc
Unknown parent • • •Note: Because nobody can really stop me, for the next week in place of my usual "listening to" thread I am going to be one-song-per-day posting a YouTube mixtape I made in 2020, titled "In The Future It Is The 1960s". ( youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLI… )
The concept of this playlist is a mix of songs from the 1960s that sound like they are from many decades later, and songs from the present that sound like they could have been recorded in the 1960s.
In The Future It Is The 1960s
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Prophecy", Julien Jacquart (orig. Hiroki Kikuta)
Ahh, *there's* the Flammie intro.
This is an arrangement of "Prophecy" (from Secret of Mana) by a French gamedev and progressive-metal guitarist, performed on guitar and piano. It's charmingly homemade in places but does a great job of capturing the enormous, epic feel that the original, for all of its mastery of the SNES S-SMP chip, strained to capture in its 64 KB of sample memory.
youtube.com/watch?v=sTWMY5OhZH…
Secret Of Mana - Prophecy - Arranged Version
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "A Bell is Tolling", Christopher Hernacki (orig Hiroki Kikuta)
In this video, a guy* multitracks himself a whole bunch of times to perform the "Ice Palace" music from Secret of Mana on trombones and tubas. While closely following the original score he slowly veers from soft melancholy to 70s movie-theme funk and just basically all the feelings in this arrangement are real good.
youtube.com/watch?v=AzNg16we74…
* Okay, a professional concert trombonist and college professor
Ice Palace - Secret of Mana - Bonified Music
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Secret of Mana +"
In 1993 Hiroki Kikuta, composer of Secret of Mana and its Japan-only sequel Seiken Densetsu 3 released a single-track CD containing a fluid, album-length rearrangement of music selections from those two games, featuring stadium rock, acoustic versions transposed into classical Japanese tunings, and ambient sounds seemingly recorded around Kikuta's home. If you like these game scores, this is *definitely* worth a listen.
youtube.com/watch?v=0FNBH9P3Ae…
Secret of Mana +
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Prophecy" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
SoM has multiple "airship" themes and this is the final one, when you enter the endgame, the sky is darkened and the Earth itself has changed. It is *super* dramatic. Again amazing use of the sample synth, in its context it really doesn't sound like something a Super Nintendo should be capable of.
(Missing from this recording: The crackles of thunder indicating the movements of the Mana Fortress.)
youtube.com/watch?v=Hl2wCPMYbL…
予感
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in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Ceremony" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
One of the places Kikuta brings traditional Asian music forms into his game work and one of my favorite pieces of video game music ever, this chaotic gamelan fugue plays as our heroes descend into the nightmarish inner sanctum of a sinister cult. The low-res samples really sell the feeling here; it makes me imagine music playing from an old, crackly loudspeaker bolted to the side of a public shrine.
youtube.com/watch?v=3G7H_MxXo-…
[SFC] 聖剣伝説2 - 儀式 (パンドーラ古代遺跡など BGM)
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Funky Stars", Quazar
This is a poppy eurodance DOS tracker tune from 1997. Feels good, slick production, moody 80s/early 90s feel.
After 2000 the artist behind this .xm went on to have a conventional career as a producer, making club techno remixes for a bunch of hip hop artists plus Madonna under the name "Axwell", then cofounding Swedish House Mafia ("Don't You Worry Child").
This track is listed on some mod archives as "Hybrid Song".
youtube.com/watch?v=_C95D6imxG…
Quazar - Funky stars / Hybrid song
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "20231231 145", sv1
Max/MSP is a open-ended music tool, a commercial fork of PureData. It lets you fine-control every element of making a song, from sound design to mixing, using a visual programming language or by building your own UIs.
For this artist's last album, he YouTubed himself making the tracks in Max, so you can see the bespoke-UI instrument he built for himself. Skittery beats & seductive alien echo sounds. Kinda Ryoji Ikeda ish
youtube.com/watch?v=ydtAzMbydg…
₂₀₂₃₁₂₃₁ ₁₄₅
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Destiny+ Entanglement Space 4xDSP with Czochralski Cells and Prism Circuits panels", James Plotkin
An exercise in bizarre sound design on two of Destiny+'s strange, extremely large (Plotkin can't fit them both in frame) synth units, this is made of big swoopy kick drum sounds that fall so slowly they cross the border and become bass notes. I'm… not sure if you're going to love how this sounds or it will just really annoy you. One of the two
youtube.com/watch?v=ONrcHkRVGX…
Destiny+ Entanglement Space 4xDSP with Czochralski Cells and Prism Circuits panels
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "I LEARNED THIS BEAT IN CUBA.... THEN ADDED SOME DISTORTION 😊", Max Sansalone
Waveforms do weird things when you clip or distort them. Harmonics burst into being, pitches mysteriously double.
In this track, a drummer performing alone alternates rhythmic sections with sections where he hits the stompbox and suddenly his drumkit bursts into melody as every sound transforms. Cool demonstration, nice drumline, stands well on its own as a song.
youtube.com/watch?v=2gde0UMa33…
I LEARNED THIS BEAT IN CUBA.... THEN ADDED SOME DISTORTION 😊
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Odd Numbers", Shiro Fujioka
This one's something really special. This is an extended, mercurial electronic composition in the alien time signature of 7/8, made of haunting glass-harp feedback hums and IDM breakbeats. Nothing going on here is anything you could remotely predict, but in retrospect it feels like the only way it could have gone. Made/performed on Elektron gear.
Warning: The first ten seconds contain a sharp clicking noise.
youtube.com/watch?v=6M6u4dapZ5…
Odd Numbers | Digitone | Syntakt | Deconstructed
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Do You Miss Boards of Canada Too? I Made This In 15 Minutes.", Dan Chippendale
A peppy mix of analog synth and clicky woodblock beats. Grows into a really nice energy. I do see the comparison to Boards of Canada but it's kinda doing its own thing.
Made on Elektron's digital synth box; Teenage Engineering's new super-Pocket-Operator; and the blur in the background is a Prophet.
youtube.com/watch?v=Z9hGfOmffm…
Do You Miss Boards of Canada Too? I Made This In 15 Minutes. It's One Of My Best Yet. #jamuary2024
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Edelleen ja edelleen", Sleepers Tomb
Quiet, insistent drone ambient track. You're asleep, your phone's alarm keeps pushing at the barrier from some other world trying to break through and drag you out, but it's not working. A piece built up slowly on a modular suitcase that splays the track's internal process open to view like something on a dissection table. Good mood. I think the name is Finnish for "On and On"
youtube.com/watch?v=XhSssL8JxW…
Edelleen ja edelleen
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Scratch and Frazzle", Ivar Tryti
I've featured Ivar the Elektron virtuoso in this thread before. Here he deploys an FM-synth groovebox to make a song with two rules:
1. It should evoke the soundtrack of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal
2. It should be in 5/8 time.
(Watch the sequencer lights; you'll see his measures have 20 steps.)
Result: an industrial banger with beats that hit like bombs and a rhythm that keeps you constantly off balance.
youtube.com/watch?v=qJa4RobxwU…
Digitone Sketch #16 Scratch and Frazzle
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Soviet RITM-2 Synth and Loop Pedal", Slightly Nasty
This is a dark, engrossing soundscape made entirely on the РИТМ-2, a synthesizer produced in 1984 in the Soviet Union and often described as Moog-like. This specific unit has been modified for additional sound body, but the musician insists it was done with vintage germanium transistors— in other words, it's a modification that could have plausibly been done by a user in Russia in the 80s.
youtube.com/watch?v=Gs88-Qz84V…
Soviet RITM-2 Synth and Loop Pedal
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Chino", Madlib
This track, also from 2021, is two minutes long and like some sort of platonic form of effortless cool; there's something primal in its funky simplicity. Other than the professional snap on the EQ it feels like literally anytime in the last 80 years you could imagine there's a room in the world you could walk into and there'd be a piano, and people clapping, and you'd hear exactly this sound. There is rhythm, and also blues
madlib.bandcamp.com/track/chin…
Chino, by Madlib
Madlibmcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Dirtknock", Madlib
Madlib is the hip-hop instrumentalist who provides the voice of Lord Quasimodo and the beats on MF Doom's MADVILLAIN. His deal is pretty much "he samples jazz, but like, in a different way than other people do it". Here's a lovely snack of a track from 2021, with various lounge vibes jostling against each other, starting and stopping like thoughts in a distracted mind. I think this is what "Jigsaw Jazz" was supposed to be
madlib.bandcamp.com/track/dirt…
Dirtknock, by Madlib
Madlibmcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Get Your Snack On", Amon Tobin
Consider pre-"ISAM" Amon Tobin, who was on something incredibly unique. No one else has ever thought about drums the way Tobin did during those years. Back then we lumped him in with "drum & bass", but he didn't follow any of D&B's rules. He built something new from sampling the already frenetic energy of jazz drumming and somehow doubling it.
Here's my favorite track from that era. It plays like a manifesto.
youtube.com/watch?v=Lw8s7nYSyl…
Get Your Snack On
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Cosmos", John Coltrane with Pharoah Sanders
So. John Coltrane. Husband of Alice Coltrane, teacher to Miles Davis. This track is Coltrane at his Most, with him and Sanders simultaneously playing in what doesn't really feel like a "duet" because the two saxophone lines seem to be ignoring each other totally. Maybe "duel". Note Coltrane's use of "overblowing", which basically means he played the sax wrong on purpose cuz he liked how it sounded
youtube.com/watch?v=RJwzAcu7ly…
Cosmos (Live In Seattle / 1965)
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Pharaoh's Dance", Miles Davis
I don't really know that much about jazz. What I know is the standard sequence: Charlie Parker begat John Coltrane who begat Miles Davis.
"Bitches Brew" is probably Davis' most infamous album, as he was settling into his "weird stuff" period. My favorite part is the opening track, this experimental but approachable 20-minute journey with a nervous, constantly escalating wild energy. Chick Corea on keyboard BTW
youtube.com/watch?v=WtORTuLJw7…
Pharaoh's Dance
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Jung-Ak", Soojin Suh Quartet
This is a Korean jazz trio (?) I randomly saw live following a flier, and they were super good. If you listen to exactly one song by them I recommend the version of "Stream of Consciousness" they played in Toronto on Nov. 19, 2023. But I assume you do not have a time machine, so instead try this mysterious, meticulously-sculpted piece from the same album. Cold waters lap gently above a deep, unexplained sadness
soojinsuh.bandcamp.com/track/j…
Jung - Ak, by Soojin Suh
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Universal Consciousness", Alice Coltrane
Last week I saw a bumper sticker saying: "Keep Honking! I'm Listening to Alice Coltranes 1971 Meteoric Sensation 'Universal Consciousness'". So I went to look that up—
When you listen to this, one of two things will happen: Either you'll go "uh…okay?", or your consciousness will physically leave your body. When I first listened, for six minutes I was unable to move or think. Free jazz psychic attack
youtube.com/watch?v=KqPZzSufPo…
Universal Consciousness
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Zularic Repetitor's best friend Befaco Percall Modular Techno Jam featuring Kickall & Noise Plethora", tiimoik
This is a 20 minute industrial techno performance with a really good chilled (distinct from chill) feeling to it. The rhythm is alive and constantly evolving throughout— the "repetitor" applies an algorithmic form of African music theory.
(The video confuses me—it appears to be a 4-second loop of just one part of the performance.)
youtube.com/watch?v=UJD-sXpMJx…
Zularic Repetitor's best friend Befaco Percall Modular Techno Jam featuring Kickall & Noise Plethora
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Iceplanet", Funkstörung
The visionary Skam Records was the original home of some of the 90s' most influential electronic artists, like a feeder team for Warp. They did a hyper-limited series named "MASK" where well-known artists anonymously dumped tracks that were out-of-character, "going too far" or literally illegal, and some of the 90s' best tracks accumulated there. From MASK 200 (200 copies printed), here's a chill space journey I love
youtube.com/watch?v=Lw8pymQhVG…
Funkstörung - Iceplanet [MASK 200] (1997)
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in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Movement (Hurdslenk remix)", TWR72
This song was released last month, but is that kind of timeless techno that sounds like it could have been recorded anytime since 1985. What genre is this? Berlin? "Schranz"? Is Shranz a real techno genre? That sounds fake. Anyway this an absorbing, driving drum torrent anchored by a hectic bongo rhythm. There is nothing wrong with making the entire song out of drums. This track is good proof of that.
floatrecords.bandcamp.com/trac…
Movement (Hurdslenk Remix), by Various Artists
Float RecordsDrooling Banjo
Unknown parent • • •Max is 👌 but wait until you find out about JoJo Mayer
youtu.be/7Agh591ykng?si=mLuMgu…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "BEATS OF THE JUNGLE THAT ARE ANTIFUNGAL!!", Max Sansalone
So like, "Drum & Bass", or "Breakcore", or "Jungle". (I'd be lying if I said I truly understood the difference.) By stereotype this is computer music, ie Cubase or trackers. There's drum samples but mostly only like, the one drum sample, the Amen. Maybe Think. No *new* breaks, canonically.
Max here just decided to sit down and drum some drum and bass. On some drums. It sounds *good*
youtube.com/watch?v=TLqymERI2S…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Compliant Confuse" (Tetrisphere), Neil Voss
One time I made a serious go at playing "Tetrisphere" for the Nintendo 64. What I found was:
1. Although I was legitimately having fun and seemed to be getting better over time, I never really understood what I was doing.
2. The soundtrack was *incredibly* hype. Oh my god. Why is this soundtrack so hype
This is some hardcore 1997 tracker jungle, with a nice crispy taste from the N64 sound chip.
youtube.com/watch?v=K3HzZglyqX…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Abraxas", Purity Filter ft. Catastrophi
Consider the Zoomer breakcore artists, who spill out in JVNE's wake like dismembered cartoon body parts. All incredibly hardcore, extremely traumatized and probably trans, hiding behind indistinguishable names that look like net handles and baffling joke song titles like "assadist pussy got me actin strange" (?). Here's a noise wall archetypical of the genre. It needs to go so hard you cannot think
dismissyourself.bandcamp.com/t…
Abraxas (feat. Catastrophi), by Purity Filter
Dismiss Yourselfmcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Cyberia Lyr1", sewerslvt
Enigmatic, prolific, JVNE blessed us with an incredible amount of amazing music and an internet mythology casting them as the DJ at Club Cyberia from "Serial Experiments Lain", then disappeared in a puff of internet harassment. (The new artist "AgonyOST" might be them, no one's sure.) This track gives us some retro and (if you're listening to it right) very loud chaotic drum & bass. Music for a Dreamcast time attack
sewerslvt.bandcamp.com/track/c…
Cyberia lyr1, by Sewerslvt
Sewerslvtmcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "beg4life", Dr. Mario
What if I told you possibly the greatest Drum & Bass song ever, and possibly the origin of modern breakcore, was recorded by a guy named "Dr. Mario" and uploaded on "mp3.com", then MySpace? What if I told you you've already heard this song, in the Gnutella era, but it was mislabeled as being by Amon Tobin, possibly named "Kill You Now" and misattributed to a Splinter Cell soundtrack? What if I asked you to listen to it?
youtube.com/watch?v=jLuKOI0WJV…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Herr Mannelig (with personal variations)", Ebanisteria C.M. Ferrari
This is the goth "musical cabinetmaking" lady from Wednesday, doing a complete multiinstrumental performance on handmade folk instruments in which she performs (and possibly built?) each part. Really compelling stuff, makes me think of Dead Can Dance or Loreena McKennitt, a folksong with the energy of rock.
Wikipedia says the song is about a troll queen proposing marriage.
youtube.com/watch?v=E0yoH1LnQF…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "LYRA8+T Resonator improvisation", Arkady Marto
Some things this song makes me think of: Street construction; industrial dishwashers; inscrutable machines at unidentified factories filmed by David Lynch in the 1970s; a sump pulling sewage out of a hole in the street; distant alarms going off. If it is not clear, these are all things I love. Created on SOMA's drone synth and Jomox's desktop filter box. Note, contains some high-pitched sounds.
youtube.com/watch?v=6lnCuK0dvX…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "06-29-2020-Grone", H.R. Terror
Created on the Grone, the previously-mentioned creepy synth module that my friend JZ may have accidentally summoned into being from the Noosphere, this is 35 minutes of hiss and distant barely-heard echoey sounds blending together into a terrifying/soothing ambiance. Good focus music for tasks such as exploring an aeons-abandoned alien spaceship never certain if a fell shadow stalks you through the corridors.
youtube.com/watch?v=aGlLYkWkLZ…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Drone Commander", Eric Archer
E.A. is a synth designer now selling modules under the name "Rare Waves"; in this 2009 video he shows off his first creation, a knobs-only chaotic drone unit built into an ammunition cannister. Here he's running four in parallel, each moaning its own strange song with its own structure; each oscillator interrupts itself with wobbles and clicks, which in the broader choir form complex, cross-interacting rhythms.
youtube.com/watch?v=4Jti2zky5M…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I listened to today: "If I Had a Heart", Fever Ray (cover by Ebanisteria C.M. Ferrari)
Are you, or have you ever been, goth? *How* goth? Because unless your answer is "I handbuilt a 14th-century string instrument that looks like a guillotine, then covered Fever Ray on it while dressed in black sitting on a couch decorated in dying leaves" you are/were not as goth as this lady. The dread-soaked original is dragged out even slower and lower, a sleep paralysis dream.
youtube.com/watch?v=LUth0YplJR…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •The Mod Archive v4.0b - A distinctive collection of modules
modarchive.orgmcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "11 notes on sand", Heartbeat
This is a really fun .mod tracker jam that was uploaded to themodarchive in 2006 (I don't know if it's actually older than that; the only metadata in the file is the address of a P.O. Box in Finland).
Straight up funk music, this is a mix of live-sounding keyboard solos and some silly, strange sample torturing, organ sounds bent so they sound like a computer from an old sci-fi movie is singing you a lullaby.
youtube.com/watch?v=QyzBVfV_SD…
Heatbeat - 11 notes on sand
YouTubeClive Thompson
in reply to mcc • • •Wow all the stuff in that trackertunez youtube is amazing
What, and who, am I listening to?
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Theme of Broadway", Einosuke Nagao (?)
"Compile" is/was a scrappy Japanese game company that accidentally hit it huge with "Puyo Puyo". For years they ran a "magazine" called "Disc Station", a monthly-published floppy full of demos and small prototype games. This song is from a PC-98 Disc Station cut: "Broadway Legend Ellena", a "PaRappa"-like very early rhythm game about the legend that a girl who wanna get a chance with her DANCE be cool.
youtube.com/watch?v=uWCDcNr-E8…
Broadway Legend Ellena (NEC PC-98) Music - BGM 00
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Thursday", Morphine
There's this genre that only existed for a moment in the 90s, I can point out dozens of examples but I cannot give it a name. It borders on lounge, jazz, blues, rock, swing, hip-hop and trip-hop but isn't any of these. Somehow Morphine is at the center of it. Nothing has ever sounded like Morphine, they do something totally unique like it were simple and obvious. Also they seem to have somehow detuned their saxophones.
youtube.com/watch?v=_Ek6jL4zF4…
Morphine - Thursday
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Placelessness" (excerpt), Chris Abrahams with Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim
A beautiful single stretched-out abstract jazz moment, like time itself is made of honey and will not let you go. I remember Spin once described a Boredoms song as "like the opening to an epic rock song that never starts". This is more like a single five seconds between bridge and verse stretched out forever, growing and deepening without progressing. Anti-music.
youtube.com/watch?v=d-74ihziRV…
Placelessness (Side B excerpt)
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Sleepless", Soul Coughing
Gosh, I love Soul Coughing. Nobody before or since has ever quite nailed their particular bizarre formula.
Here's my favorite S.C., from "Irresistible Bliss", the album where they couldn't get their regular producer and M.Doughty talked everyone into a stripped-down sound. It's a quiet lounge song that hits like a truck; if you listen to it on a setup with a real subwoofer it will literally make your walls rattle.
youtube.com/watch?v=wLDRgFDcsD…
Sleepless
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Soul Suckin' Jerk" (reject version), Beck
Beck's formula is so well-defined it's easy to forget he stumbled into making commercial pop music sort of by accident. So I really love his very early label work, before that formula solidified and the folk and rap components got separated. Like, the "Loser" EP's got some deliriously weird stuff, like this track where he apocalyptically fantasizes about quitting his job at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
youtube.com/watch?v=HuHBhk1qkR…
Soul Suckin' Jerk (Reject)
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Red Bats with Teeth", Angelo Badalamenti
Angelo here, as you probably know, is a frequent collaborator of David Lynch, transmuting Lynch's abstract emotions into music, usually dark jazz. In this track from the Lost Highway soundtrack, which I think has Badalamenti's best work (or at least the most accessible to non-jazz heads), he attempts to portray a saxophone player who is channeling a personal psychosexual breakdown into a sax solo.
youtube.com/watch?v=k-e08eBbNv…
Red Bats With Teeth
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Torture", The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
For an extended period in the 90s some record company exec was *convinced* Jon Spencer was going to be the next Beck. This misconception blessed us with the gloriously over-budget "Acme", which nobody wanted to listen to in 1998 but today (especially if you can find the 43-track deluxe version, on Apple and Tidal but not Bandcamp) is a sprawling laid-back masterpiece, the stuff lo-fi hip hop samples
shoverecords.bandcamp.com/trac…
Torture, by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Shove Recordsmcc reshared this.
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Dried Up Roots", Rachel Eckroth
This is some dark lounge music. *Really* dark, grabbing your heartstrings and not letting go, haunting and dread-soaked. Trip-hop being performed by a regular jazz band.
Eckroth tends to alternate solo work with serving as backing pianist for artists like KT Tunstall and Rufus Wainwright. This is from a 2021 solo album, which I've just learned actually got a grammy nomination? Even the normies love Morphine
rainydaysrecords.bandcamp.com/…
Dried Up Roots, by Rachel Eckroth
Rainy Daysmcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "dawless jam at balcony. BalcoWave.", epow6oow
In this video this person makes a fun, confident vaporwave jam on their back porch surrounded by laundry paraphernalia. An unusual collection of equipment; the Pocket Operator they're using for the drums is, if you look carefully, "Street Fighter" branded, and the innocuous pocket calculator looking thing (the RK-008— it's a full MIDI workstation) is, I think, actually driving the entire thing.
youtube.com/watch?v=gVul3k6cyS…
dawless jam at balcony. BalcoWave.
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "1976", Nicholas Lem
Some dark, murky IDM funk. Gummy organ and bass noises, makes me think of pre-Warp Autechre (like, Lego Feet/Incunabula era). Lots of sounds you are like "ah yes, I know what instrument this is" and then you listen a little more carefully and realize you have no idea. I don't know if you could dance to this but I think you *could* film yourself dancing and then slow down the tape, and it would match.
youtube.com/watch?v=JhFVv5xjPu…
Nicholas Lem -1976 (Monomachine mk2)
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Elektron Octatrack + Make Noise 0-Coast Electro / IDM Jam", cnstruct
A quirky, funky techno jam with a really distinctive fresh feeling. (Lovely sampled 808 drums.) Has really strange sound design that it kind of slips past you, it took until my second listen to notice how weird the drum patterns and 0-coast sounds are. Second half kicks up the energy level in a nice way. The soundtrack to a space program based entirely on astral projection
youtube.com/watch?v=hCMZjMNqS2…
Elektron Octatrack + Make Noise 0-Coast Electro / IDM Jam
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Yuki Satellites", Radix
This is a classic tracker tune made in (apparently— the YouTube poster is the original composer) FastTracker II for DOS. One of my favorite pieces of tracker music— lots of vocal samples and cool-sounding crunchy beats, just really fun.
Made in 1999 (post-BBS era) this track was actually originally distributed as mp3, *not* as tracker files— the .XM only got released when tracker tech got a revival in the late 00s.
youtube.com/watch?v=PXTZA5bqIJ…
Rymdlego - Yuki Satellites
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Sequencing with Pamela's New Workout and a Precision Adder", Electrum Modular
What's coolest to me about modular synths is when you use waveform generators not just as sounds but also to generate pitch control voltages. This peppy techno track does that by "adding" voltages of two slow waves, one for root note and the other for variation. The video shows an explosion of wires then walks you (in text captions) through each step in the chain.
youtube.com/watch?v=IXcYI1Qwqi…
Sequencing with Pamela's New Workout and a Precision Adder
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Lithium Drift", Eric Archer
This is synth designer Eric Archer, doing a product demonstration of his new (as of 2019 when the piece was recorded) modular unit the Rare Waves Hydronium. He uses four of these configured for different musical roles plus one distortion pedal and some minimal drums to make a downtempo acid journey that's a really compelling piece of music entirely apart from whether you're buying the synth. Feels crisp and clear
youtube.com/watch?v=paj5dVT7iK…
Rare Waves Hydronium - Lithium Drift (synth demo)
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "ambient house / YAMAHA QY70", hi-channel!
Man, the QY70 is a *beast*! This is the 1997 music workstation/PDA/ur-groovebox I've linked works on before, used to make polished downtempo house music (bordering on hip hop beats to study to). The groove is super compelling and suggests a whole studio of gear.
This piece has kind of three movements, and I really like the first & third but find the second a bit cheesy. Maybe that's your thing tho.
youtube.com/watch?v=bylFWthgSO…
ambient house / YAMAHA QY70
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Riverrun Humbling Allegory", Lauren Bousfield
I posted that other song so now I have to post this one. Bousfield was part of the original Soundcloud flowering in 2009 as "Nero's Day at Disneyland" and in my head sorta bridges vaporwave and net breakcore, while having this wild, unique style apart from any genre. I want to play you entire albums of hers but if I have space for one song here's a manic wound of d&b breaks and distorted synths:
laurenbousfieldanyev3r.bandcam…
Riverrun Humbling Allegory, by Lauren Bousfield
Lauren Bousfieldmcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Crysalis", Purity Filter
This was the song that introduced me to Purity Filter and probs my favorite track by them still. How do I describe this when it's more defined by an emotion than a genre? This is rave music for the people at the back not dancing (maybe a little sleepy because it's 3 AM), the warehouse ceiling echo already built into the song. There is light and sound and joy but they are somewhere else and happening to someone else
purityfilter.bandcamp.com/trac…
Chrysalis, by purity://filter
purity://filtermcc
Unknown parent • • •Ghost in the Shell (Production I.G / Exact - PS1 - 1997)
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •Jumping Flash! (PS1)
YouTubeblumby
Unknown parent • • •mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: Stage 1 (Geograph Seal), Hiroyuki Saegusa
In the USA, FM is the sound of early-90s PC gaming, showing up in those fancy SoundBlaster and AdLib cards. In Japan PCs however the Yamaha chip family that powered those sound cards showed up earlier and in lower-end hardware, and endured later, making it just the sound of PC gaming from the 80s on.
Here's a hard-driving FM track from a "Star Fox"-like 3D mecha game from 1994, for the Sharp X68000:
youtube.com/watch?v=ofPlNYUA5d…
Geograph Seal, 1994 (Sharp X68000) Stage 1 Theme (Extended Mix)
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "I have found my peace.", One Shot
Think about MODs (or XMs, or ITs). I think we think of these as Old Tech. But they're like, samples, right? And you can do *wild* sound design with just samples; samples can be anything.
Here's a 2023 tracker piece which mangles some violin-synth samples to make ghostly, alien space music. Like you're in space and suddenly you realize space is made entirely of ghosts. YouTube summary: "3 am vibez 😀"
youtube.com/watch?v=oPzD_gKVVj…
I have found my peace.
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Chaos Funk", Lizardking
Some extremely earnest chiptune-y (not chiptune, it's a .xm/mod) electro funk music, with an incredibly fun organ solo on the chorus.
This is from the year 2004 and is by Lizardking, an excellent tracker artist. It is hard to decide, listening to this, if you want to be dancing or racing a car through a Playstation 1 cityscape. Please select your vehicle. No stop dancing on the car roof you have to select a vehicle
youtube.com/watch?v=YgPE1YV9L1…
Lizardking - Chaos Funk
YouTubeTom Forsyth
in reply to mcc • • •mcc
in reply to Tom Forsyth • • •@TomF Although manufactured by Yamaha, I believe the YM2149 was a non-FM chip and contained square wave generators. polynominal.com/atari-st/atari…
Some sources claim that this chip is in fact not an internal Yamaha design but rather a clone of the General Instrument AY-3-8910.
This said, the FM in the Sharp X68000 is especially good. The quality of an FM synth is determined by the number of "operators". The X68000 had a LOT, plus a separate chip with sample channels for drums.
Atari ST YM2149F chip
www.polynominal.commcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Whorl", Ezra Fike
A chill, slightly forlorn ambient/dance piece made entirely of tape manipulation. Ezra combines three devices: One of those nice four-track Tascams, a mysterious chunky tape player that looks like school equipment, & Bastl's digital granular tape-loop emulator. Everything is tape, kicks are produced by scrunchy tape catches, a bassline is performed by changing a tape speed.
A hype (if quiet) beat slowly devoured by noise
youtube.com/watch?v=ttkTSZG6HZ…
David Erik Nelson🪬
in reply to mcc • • •mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Syntakt and Analog Heat + FX Jam", Risa T
Using Elektron's Syntakt and also their digital effects+analog distortion box, London-based DJ Risa T here creates a fun, boppy, unpredictable techno piece with some really unique far-future-reggae sound design. Lots of strange, slippery sounds to groove to.
In the performance she's wearing a T--shirt that says "Love who you are". I just thought that was nice.
youtube.com/watch?v=QKC6CVk86c…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Reset", Robbie Traughber
So chill I'd use words like "cold", this is a quiet, spooky electro jam with several lines of complex arpeggiating beeps colliding against each other chaotically like ocean waves.
Notably in addition to Elektron's FM box this is using the Bastl/Casper SoftPop 2, a VERY chaotic noise synth that in this case has had the chaos dialed down to where it can plausibly coexist in a boppy little pop techno song like this.
youtube.com/watch?v=UleJ-cHClE…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Explorations 007", Stöfbug
This starts off as a minute or so of ambient synth whooshes before settling into a determined, dubby techno drive. (The artist describes it as "minimal techno".) Brings a series of recurring elements in and out over nine minutes but refuses to ever get predictable.
Made on the Syntakt, synthesis-wise the most software-like / least "opinionated" of the modern Elektron devices; Syntakt tracks vary more by musician.
youtube.com/watch?v=Ajmc4lfaJL…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "The Roland TR-8 Drone Machine", Kablehead
Pitch is rhythm on a different timescale. Play a PCM impulse twice a second, and you'll perceive a 120 BPM beat. Play it 256 times a second and you'll perceive a middle C tone.
This musician exploits this by turning up a TR-8 drum machine to 300 BPM and filling all 16 steps, so each drum smears out into a rattling chug. Then for ten minutes they explore the sonic configuration space. Good stuff:
youtube.com/watch?v=FVLYY47I5m…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Coconut Mall but its EXPONENTIALLY getting faster", Ryu Nagamatsu / Asuka Ohta / "Quality Content"
Someone at Nintendo really likes jazz. The Wii especially taught Zoomers to love what Boomers call "elevator music".
This is a very simple edit of the "Coconut Mall" level of Mario Kart Wii, by which a soothing easy-listening track is transformed into at least three different kinds of terror, as ambient thuds give way to out-of-control panic.
youtube.com/watch?v=_-OKSRYlD3…
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Beyond the gates", KB
I have a confession. This week's music posts were specifically from a list of songs I wanted to post but felt like were too cheesy. But then I decided, no! No! "Cheesy", "cringe", these just mean sincerity. "Cringe' is us punishing an artist for making us feel, blaming them for our inability to see them being sincere, naked before us. Kill that impulse! Embrace cringe!
Here's some tracker techno from 1996. It's great:
youtube.com/watch?v=ELBkV2MhiP…
mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Air Plant", Yoko Kanno
"TURN A GUNDAM" is one of the least popular, slowest-paced, and (seriously) best shows in the Gundam corpus, nailing home Tomino's "no, really, war is bad!" message by setting the entire show during a set of peace talks. Legend Yoko Kanno flexes her musical polyglot muscles, scoring simmering, low-key spy intrigue with the imagined music of the 1910s-Southern-US aesthetic of far-future post-post-apocalypse "Inglessa".
youtube.com/watch?v=EMy_Lz45cY…
Air Plant
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "primordial satellite", Luna SC
In this video, a cool futch person commands a wall of modular synths to make a stream-of-consciousness series of captivating sounds; IDM-y metallic beats like robots drumming on sheet metal, air conditioner organs, drifting notes singing out from twinkling chimes. A bit of an order-out-of-chaos thing, each individual component is very noisy but the impression of the overall groove is musical, fluid, flowing.
youtube.com/watch?v=IVU5BL5tAb…
tmod 4 (primordial satellite)
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "BADLANDS ► Lofi Tape Ambient (Tascam Portastudio 424 & Strymon El Capistan)", Remood
Here is a recipe for ambient music. People have been using it since the 1980s.
1. Get a 4-track Tascam tape machine.
2. Record a different, unrelated thing onto each track. (Anything works as long as there's no pronounced beat.)
3. Play back the tape while slowly moving the four faders up and down as whim takes you.
This always works. It always works!!!
youtube.com/watch?v=yfsMOlGwUN…
BADLANDS ► Lofi Tape Ambient (Tascam Portastudio 424 & Strymon El Capistan)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Chase Bliss Mood MKII & Meris Mercury X vs Fender Rhodes", Duke Jamal
…in this laid-back, improvised-sounding piece, plays the classic Rhodes electric piano— beloved of Hancock, Ray Charles and the Doors— plus a couple guitar pedals. And he actually does play the pedals, as an instrument, one hand on the keys the other on the delay knobs, making the pedal a second instrument producing ethereal crosstalk that gradually dominates the piece.
youtube.com/watch?v=B-KYKRN1vw…
Chase Bliss Mood MKII & Meris Mercury X vs Fender Rhodes
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "EASTERN BLOC OF THE MIND", Chelidon Frame
Drone piece made on two synths playing constant notes and a guitar with an ebow resting on it. The three sounds blend together into one great sonorous blare, like an airplane taking off inside an ancient temple. The musician reaches in and alternates fiddling with the three devices as if they're taking turns with "solos"— you can only perceive the individual components when they change.
It's cool.
youtube.com/watch?v=NhgalRGpSo…
EASTERN BLOC OF THE MIND || chelidon frame
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "1553470665499594756", frxgxd
This is a simple but effective track in which a pleasant acoustic guitar loop that sounds like West Virginia (I cannot think of another way to describe it) gets sandbagged by an avalanche of dense, chaotic breakcore beats. Gets some freshness points for not sounding like it's using the Amen break (although I think it actually is using the Amen break, just EQed).
I can't decipher the name. It isn't UTC or ASCII.
youtube.com/watch?v=HJjgijHLCS…
frxgxd - 1553470665499594756
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Shadow of Doubt", Yoko Kanno
Yoko Kanno is a prolific composer with breathtakingly broad stylistic range; if you like anime there is probably at least one anime you love that Yoko Kanno scored. This is from the 1996 proto-Isekai anime "Vision of Escaflowne", and consists of layer after layer of Steve-Reich-reminiscent violins laid down in loops until it's just a wall of sound, a violin mosh pit. Just one of my favorite, like… songs, period.
youtube.com/watch?v=pb4SYzkY8K…
Shadow of Doubt
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Oceans and Moons", Lanthan O'Ide
This is a lovely, peaceful improvised piano performance on Yamaha's electric piano emulator (in Rhodes mk II mode… I think). Kinda has a 1980s pop ballad feeling to me, I kinda lack the genre language to describe it. It just feels nice.
If you've been skipping these posts because they're so frequently harsh experimental techno, hey, this one's safe! (And if you like the experimental techno: Look, a Reface.)
youtube.com/watch?v=XmquuTUbU2…
Ambient Improv // "Oceans and Moons"
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •What I listened to today: 2022-12-10 Mastodon post, Autechre
Turns out Sean Booth of Autechre has a Mastodon account? He just like, posts. And in 2022 (this YouTuber claims) he posted, then deleted, some rare tracks here.
This is a behind-the-scenes video of Autechre's bespoke Max/MSP software; Booth's alt-text described the clip as an attempt to emulate Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks with "a model made of water and spider silk (?!)". Question marks in original
youtube.com/watch?v=3poN6FDyB2…
Autechre - Unreleased Untitled Demo 12/10/22
YouTubeJP
Unknown parent • • •JP
Unknown parent • • •mcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Run", Michiel van den Bos
This is from Unreal Tournament (1999), a game I don't think I've played.
One nice thing about sample trackers is the files are small and playing them back has low CPU impact, which makes them ideal for embedding in video games. Apparently UT1999's tracker files can just be extracted and played in Impulse Tracker. Some of the tracks hold up well; this one's D&B-inflected and has classic, emotionally dead-on Vibes.
youtube.com/watch?v=oRTMBOm8nI…
Unreal Tournament 1999 - Run (Impulse Tracker)
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "FastTracker 2 Jungle Style", Dee-Shaya
Jungle made in 2022 by 1996 methods (if you look at the top you'll see "FastTracker II by Triton Prod 1996" and then next to it a track label saying "2022 Jungle Style"). Short, unpretentious, immaculate, satisfies some primal need (to listen to Jungle). This YouTuber's channel mostly consists of C64 retrocomputing stuff, but here she has chosen to indulge us with some DOS.
youtube.com/watch?v=gxitINSqz0…
FastTracker 2 Jungle Style
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Precision", Spinscott
I've heard it said that Drum & Bass, as a genre, couldn't have happened without Cubase. That's not strictly accurate, but… you get the sense of D&B/Jungle as something made "offline". A person at a computer pondering a grid.
But then this dude just loads an Amen break into an MPC 1000 and fingerdrums some jungle. Triggers each sample live by hand. It's like watching someone fly without an airplane.
youtube.com/watch?v=DG5_gQZJPR…
Spinscott - "Precision" (Live Jungle!)
YouTubemcc
Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Matter of Fact", Roni Size Reprazent
To those of us who couldn't experience UK dance culture firsthand in the 90s, "New Forms" is indelibly associated with drum & bass— it practically defines it. But Reprazent was also doing something bigger than d&b, weirder. Listen to this track, the album's biggest jaunt into outright jungle and a demo of its tendency to atmospherics that suggest *spaces* so well it's practically a video game soundtrack.
youtu.be/0L3lBvOlR8g?si=Z8T8sY…
Matter Of Fact
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Thunderclap 1995", Remarc
At some point I was trying to figure out exactly when "breakcore" broke off from Jungle and D&B. At least two sources I found (OK, Reddit posters) clamed this to be the first breakcore track. Is that true? What differentiates this from "Drum & Bass"? I've decided I don't care, and all I care about is that this track is *sick*. Sparse, spine-grabbing, this is a complex machinery made entirely of liquid. "Recommend".
youtube.com/watch?v=28NxKiuHe2…
Remarc - Thunderclap 1995
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "maphis", epow6oow
This person has a series of live-performance electronic music recorded on their back porch among the drying laundry. Here's the "focus" form of their idiom, by which I mean they moved the camera so the laundry isn't visible. It's beatless and consists of wave after wave of retro synth lines washing over you, layered on top of each other until the whole feels enormous and fractaline. What I think of as "space music".
youtube.com/watch?v=-_QFmge97Z…
dawless jam at balcony. maphis
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Kaleidoscope", Nicholas Lem
This is a single-device track made on Elektron's old-but-versatile MonoMachine. It's thumping dub techno that constantly feels like it's trying to escape across the border from dub into actual reggae, and has some mind-expanding MonoMachine-powered sound design; each individual sound is finely sculpted to be just a *little* weird. Then there's the visuals. the visuals in this video are doing something really fun.
youtube.com/watch?v=54hy8UdUeT…
Nicholas Lem - Kaleidoscope (Elektron Monomachine)
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Ghost Obelisks", Space Town
This musician uses two Dirtywave M8 handheld trackers laid out like DJ turntables, and controls the mixing on the tracks from a 16-knob MIDI controller in the center. There is a picture of a Chihuahua. This setup guides us through ambient shining sounds into effective 90s dark electronica with thumping beats and acid groans and yelps.
A 40-minute, continuously-changing live set with good "production values".
youtube.com/watch?v=S2LzUNaYzW…
Ghost Obelisks (Liveset Album recorded 1/17/22)
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "untitled", The Bleeple Syndicate
Far as I can tell from their YouTube, the "Syndicate" are 2 or 3 dudes who periodically meet in a basement and film themselves noodling with musical instruments. They don't seem to care who's listening.
Here, a big messy pile of electronics bumps out a chill vibey pattern while the Dudes play electric guitar and flute (regular flute) into echo pedals. This video has 42 views on YouTube and I really like it.
youtube.com/watch?v=70MxAb0NBj…
untitled
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "I'd Chill For Your Sins", WINFIELD
The Yamaha PSR-11 is a largely-forgotten budget Yamaha keyboard from 1986, based on Yamaha's famed FM synthesis tech— but in a primitive form (only 2 operators) and with a fixed instrument set.
This musician uses this primitive, "demake of the 1980s" feel to amazing effect, making every sound in this song on a PSR-11 (even the drums) as you watch. Result: The most evocative song that 1986 forgot to record
youtube.com/watch?v=3HbSXDnXhh…
I'd Chill For Your Sins - WINFIELD
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Soyut", DJ Strawberry
Very good, driving electronic music with chaotic, skittering beats (is this "Footwork"?), moving so fast by the time you understand what they're doing they're already past you. Has this emotionally ambiguous mood I can't quite describe except it's really intense.
The title appears to be Turkish for "Abstract"; the musician recorded this album while processing his experiences of the February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey.
outlineslabel.bandcamp.com/tra…
Soyut, by DJ Strawberry
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in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "CHOMPI Ambient #1", Syncopator One
The CHOMPI is a digital sampler inspired by tape-music workflows and basically custom designed for Kickstarter, with buttons made of keyboard keycaps, a toylike/"play"-oriented UX and a pink variant (yesss…). This track shows it off making infinite-reverb ambient.
I've never thought "Music for Airports" felt like an airport but this feels like an airport. Like early in the morning when it's mostly empty.
youtube.com/watch?v=6MwI06fyS1…
CHOMPI Ambient #1
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Unknown parent • • •mcc
Unknown parent • • •The Mathletes - Stable Ghost Article on Vimeo
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today (???)
The first song in this thread is a song by my friend Joe from high school. I wanted to add it to a YouTube playlist, but the song was never uploaded to YouTube, so this weekend I made a generative music video for it. Some flashing.
youtube.com/watch?v=KixKxQuRLG…
The YouTube compression murdered this pretty bad but I don't know a better place to upload it. The title of the song turns out to be "Stable Ghost Article". Rust generator code linked in YouTube comments.
The Mathletes - Stable Ghost Article
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Black Mesa", Biosphere
"Turned to stone"! That's the name of the Biosphere song I was trying to remember. Wound up posting Eyvind Kang instead. What? Sorry, ignore me.
Here's some strange downtempo 808 funk. Gripping electronic production and a good floaty-tense mood. The YouTube video sets the song to clips from The Petrified Forest (1936), the movie the song samples. The video title claims the voice is Joan Lorring, but it's Bette Davis.
youtube.com/watch?v=O6ehKBczNA…
Biosphere - Black Mesa [feat. Joan Lorring]
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "RAUSCHEN", Remood
I mentioned before a method for no-effort ambient music: Random sounds on a 4-track loop tape, fiddle with levels, run through echo. This track shows what that technique is like when you do it with intent— carefully chosen loops, planned level changes. This is no longer ambient. This is… music!!
The music wavers hesitantly, damaged magnetic tape as the medium for an incomplete transmission, half-heard, clouds on a horizon
youtube.com/watch?v=RDdBlBlI0t…
RAUSCHEN ► 4-Track Tapeloop Ambient Session (Tascam Portastudio 424)
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Rocco (Dave Clarke mix)", Death in Vegas
Way back at the start of these threads I linked "Rocco", a song (by the perpetually underrated Death in Vegas) made of psychedelic guitar solos and a backwards sample of old jazz standard "Moanin' Low". This remix de-reverses the sample and piles a forest of jostling techno beats on top of it. I love this mix, I had it on vinyl in high school and kept listening to it backward (so, re-de-reversing).
youtube.com/watch?v=W0wdzLW2ns…
Rocco (Dave Clark Remix)
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "BREAKWATERS", asymptotes
Last year I meant to include @apaleslimghost's song "THREAT ACTORS" in this thread, but I got confused and posted an unrelated song of the same name. Belatedly here's an asymptotes song from her (quite good!) new album. Giant atmospheric hums, and beats that dance like they're dodging blows. If you want me to like a song, put a slow-attack sidechain on a loud pad so it ducks whenever a kick plays. Gets me every time
asmpts.bandcamp.com/track/brea…
BREAKWATERS, by asymptotes
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Jan 7", Jon Coe
In January, as part of the "Jamuary" challenge, this musician made one song every day on their Yamaha AW16G desktop workstation. I linked the Jan. 14 track before, this is… Jan. 7. The vibe on this track is compelling and *super* weird. Dark, progressive composition but it's being played on the AW16G's General MIDI instruments, giving the entire thing a surreal tone. A corporate training video from 1995 is here to kill you.
youtube.com/watch?v=R6uNsJX76S…
jan 7
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "12", Scoth
This musician has a series of tracks made entirely on Yamaha's 1997 portable/handheld music workstation, the QY70. (I featured "07" in this thread before.)
This one is a really fun, bouncy MIDI dance track. Lots of sounds that whatever synth designer put them in the QY70 probably thought "kind of Caribbean?". Shows the versatility of the device well, it sounds a bit retro today but in 1997 could have felt glossy and futuristic.
youtube.com/watch?v=PjuiG0dimM…
Mr. Scoth - 12 ( Yamaha QY70 only )
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "Pink Lemonade", Kittie
Have I mentioned Pink Lemonade? Aside from being by Kittie (a rare all-female metal band), this is an interestingly high-concept track. It's a metal song slowed down— literally, I've tried listening to it in time compression and regular heavy metal simply falls out. But just by lowering the tempo they produce something unique, doom-flavored and terrifying. You should listen to this if you either love or hate metal.
youtube.com/watch?v=Q6VLkh0KhH…
Pink Lemonade
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Unknown parent • • •What I'm listening to today: "takemeawaypls.wav", Purity Filter
The version of this on Tidal is subtitled "(into the nightcore)" (and might be mastered a little better, idk). Purity Filter has several tracks that suggest being at a rave but far away from the speakers or action, loneliness pulled around you like a warm blanket. This drives that concept to an extreme, with filmic sound design that swings from distant to oversaturated and muffled, music heard in a dream.
haibane777.bandcamp.com/track/…
takemeawaypls, by purity://filter
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in reply to mcc • • •What I'm listening to today: "Dismiss", Kalla
Dunno if you've noticed but whenever I introduce a 90s techno song I have this long backstory situating it in time and when I post Zoomer breakcore I'm like "I found this on YouTube! It's real good!"
Anyway, here's some Zoomer breakcore. It's real good! Fun beats and pads. The artist self-published this song, seemingly exclusively via uploads on YouTube and SoundCloud; I like how they felt compelled to censor their dragons.
youtube.com/watch?v=PMu1oiLRBN…
kalla - dismiss
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