What I'm listening to today: "Unstability", Hidenobu Ito
One of the best ever songs from the early 00s "Glitch" genre was this track by this mostly-forgotten artist from the soundtrack of Boogiepop Phantom, a mostly-forgotten anime. Several cut-up synth lines (or maybe just a Reaktor script?) collide together and spill ruptured tonal organs all over the floor.
The bass in this YouTube rip is unfortunately a little de-emphasized, so subwoofer or headphones recommended.
What I'm listening to today: "Mutable Marbles experiment., eastern drone swedgling.", Jonny Riddles
"Marbles" is a randomness generator for modular racks, but for structured randomness, it's designed to make values cluster. Here it's being used to pilot timbres of hypnotic clanging noises—like gongs swinging in the wind somewhere distant at the edge of your hearing, but made of metal not of this world, gritty and distorted.
Warning, the mix is biased a bit to left ear.
What I'm listening to today: "Tribute", Guano Apes
The Guano Apes were a nu-metal one-hit-wonder on German radio in the late 90s. This isn't their hit; it's their album's final track, where they cut loose and made something really *weird*, starting with funky metal then… devolving? I can't describe it. There's a sense of dread, the vocalist is trying to communicate something she seems to think is very important but doesn't quite have the English skills to get across.
What I'm listening to today: "Ondes Sonores", Jean François Lavielle
Some good focused modular ambient. Chaotic windchime sounds, skittering against a quiet but driving beat that gives the piece a good backbone.
What I'm listening to today: "Shell Fish", Cool Breeze Rack
This is a low-tempo, slightly unsettling VCV rack patch with some interesting dynamics shifts, but what's interesting about it is all of the multiple melody lines appear to be sequenced by random generators. Despite this the brain does a startlingly convincing job of seeing patterns in the chaos even if it knows there is no pattern. This is the true power of randomly selected notes.
Video image is a still.
What I'm listening to today: "Soma DVINA / Make Noise Strega / 0-CTRL", Jon Gee
Chill, dreamy and atmospheric. Here Jon combines my favorite echo/feedback/hiss device (the Strega) with a new device from SOMA which is actually not a synthesizer but is sort of a two-stringed duxianqin [Vietnamese monochord]. (SOMA say they were inspired by Persian and Hindustani instruments.) Jon uses all this to create bowed-string and synth-tone sounds drifting in and out of aural fog.
What I'm listening to today: "Guess The Picture", DSP Kills
A fun, peppy jam that seems to be trying to hit as many different electronic music genres within three minutes as possible, but especially seems to love timbres from IDM and jungle. Created on an absolute nuclear control panel of a modular setup, but it's orchestrated from a PC running some sort of tracker so it's structured more like a complex mixed/prerecorded piece than typical live modular. I like the bass.
What I'm listening to today: "3x NYMPHES and 1 spare hour to shoot a video", Dimitra Manthou
As the title says, a synth designer/cofounder at Dreadbox had a slow afternoon one day, so she grabbed a Nymphes and over an hour dubbed it on itself 3 times to make this strange little song. It's short but it turned out really compelling, there's a fascinating mood to it. It tastes to me like aluminum.
What I'm listening to today: "SynthCone VISMUTH with Universe Zen Audio VOSKHOD-2 -=|=- DRONE DARK AMBIENT", GIPNOZER
If you've been following this thread you'll notice I keep returning to tracks that consist entirely of ominous howling, and this is for a simple reason, which is that I *really like* ominous howling. This is a great 10-minute track depicting the constant approach of an enormous swarm of invisible insects, punctuated by periodic electric squealing.
What I'm listening to today: "Finding Beauty in Distortion", Raucous Studio
Six minutes of meditative "weird noises" based around using an analog implementation of an OR gate as a distortion filter. Mostly very quiet actually, but full of lovely subtle moments. A good demonstration of how one can perceive rhythm in otherwise ambient works through simple things like a repeating click or a phaser pedal.
Headphones recommended.
What I'm listening to today: "L.E.S. Artistes", Santigold
The late 00s had a wealth of excellent female producer/songwriter/singers (Janelle Monae, Robyn etc) and among that group Santigold never quite got the attention she deserved, I thought. She's still releasing albums but her first album still stands out to me for its unusual synth accents and the first track, "L.E.S. Artistes", a basically perfect pop song that delivers unforgettably catchy funk from moment one.
What I'm listening to today: "Les Artisans", Theoreme
This album's from 2021 but what it makes me think of more than anything else is like old Einstürzende Neubauten or Swans songs with industrial-sounding (in the sense of "like a factory") bass sounds and clanging beats and prose being intoned in a low voice, except that in this one woman intoning the prose is speaking French instead of German. Anyway, I liked it. The first track on here is the best:
What I'm listening to today: "Les Artistes", Rachid Taha
So if you have Spotify or Tidal or one of those other big unethical streaming sites, a weird thing you can do is search for a song by name, click "play" from the search page and it will *play all the search results alphabetically*, which sounds like it should not work but is sometimes startlingly effective.
Anyway here's some jamming French rockabilly by an Algerian singer / social activist. Guess how I found it
What I'm listening to today: "THE LIZ", Armani Caesar
Armani Caesar is a new rapper from Buffalo NY with a distinct and really satisfying musical aesthetic. Her rap style evokes 90s rappers like Lil Kim and Foxy Brown, her production evokes Dan the Automator and Kool Keith. I'm making comparisons to old stuff but this isn't retro, it feels like she picked up where those artists left off. She has two good albums in the last two years, both of them named "THE LIZ".
What I'm listening to today: "Communiqué: Approach Spiral", Michael Shrieve
Awhile back I posted a music link here and someone said it gave them "Approach Spiral vibes". I didn't know what that was but it turns out in 1984 the drummer for Santana released an album of chill electronic music. This track features what I guess 80s Americans would have called a "world music" beat, 12 minutes long with a slow but increasingly intense build, and the vibes are excellent.
What I'm listening to today: "Celestial Soda Pop", Ray Lynch
This album, "Deep Breakfast" was self-produced/self-released by Ray Lynch in 1984, before "techno" was a word; back then it would have been sold as "New Age". Things were fuzzier then.
I heard this song in the 7th grade. I hadn't awakened into musical consciousness yet, so the only way I knew then to explain the extremely deep impression it left on me was "this is the best Final Fantasy overworld music ever".
What I'm listening to today: "Korg Wavestate relax", Ondřej Štěpánek
This is someone's synth jam with Korg's Minilogue-ized Wavestation equivalent; it's recorded last year, but has a deliciously early-90s vibe to it. The piece feels like it's building toward something, but stays quiet and slow right to the end; I get the sense of a song from a movie soundtrack, an early establishing scene, laying down leitmotifs that will pay off in tense and action-packed scenes later.
What I'm listening to today: "Children", Robert Miles
It wasn't easy to be a techno fan in Texas in 1995. The Chemical Brothers and "electronica" were still a couple years off so the rock station gave me nothing to work with. My only sources were college radio and, occasionally, 104.1, the soft rock station, which targeted moms but because it played pop *occasionally* would allow dance tracks into its lineup. Occasionally this meant true synth bangers, like "Children".
What I'm listening to today: "Full Performance (Live on KEXP)", Hania Rani
About a month ago this lady and her synthesizers did a live set on a Seattle radio station. The first six or so minutes are some basic chill 90s style ambient synths, but then she starts layering in piano and singing and from that point to the end it feels like she's banging on your heart with a hammer.
The final minutes are an interview, so you'll probably want to stop the video around 26:00.
What I'm listening to today: "Triple Kastle", alloutofsync
The Bastl Kastle is a lovely toy-like palmtop instrument that mocks the entire expensive idiom of modular synths by costing like $60, running off 3 AA batteries and yet sounding like it contains an entire universe of glitchy noise.
This piece combines three Kastles crosswired to make otherworldly noises unlike anything you've ever heard, although oddly it does remind me a bit of the Earthbound cave music.
What I'm listening to today: "Strega processing LF radio signals", Tom Zicarelli
"Software Defined Radio" is a technique where an untuned radio receiver shovels the bottom 48 kilohertz of the spectrum into a computer's audio-in "raw", at which point bandpass/demodulation are performed in software. In this video an iPad runs SDR with intentionally incorrect demodulation/frequency settings, so the only output is chaotic squealing that a Strega smears into audio ambience.
What I'm listening to today: "Every song on Björk's album 'Vespertine' at the same time"
This experiment starts off feeling kind of pointless; all the first 30 seconds do for me is reveal 606 drums and the harpsicord from "Pagan Poetry" stand out well amidst noise.
But then there's a shift, like the floor dropping out under you. Once the song intros are past everything blends, and coalesces into a slowly-mutating, gloriously creepy, shockingly emotional uniform howl.
What I'm listening to today: "Saigon Window // Crunchy Ambient [Live Performance]", Dexba
A flowing 20-minute live set featuring a slightly unusual setup (multiple Meng Qi synths) and, as advertised, a window on a Vietnamese street. Starts with some basically okay distorted chimes and echoing howls but around the seven to ten minute mark it finds an atmospheric groove and from there to the end is a transcendent cosmic journey.
What I'm listening to today: "Twelfth", Daniel M. Karlsson
Karlsson (@t36s) is a composer I've been following for years who constantly produces lovely and intense noise/ambient. This was his Nov 12 entry for the "#Noisevember" event (he's now moved on to Dronecember).
Karlsson explains this track is based on a string physical model (https://mastodon.social/@t36s@social.ordinal.garden/109333185610168206); the model seems to be pushed to (past?) its limit, producing unearthly, sorrowful noise.
Source code included:
What I'm listening to today: "POCKET OPERATOR ACID RAVE", L҉̵͘P̴̶͘
I've mentioned the Pocket Operator in this thread before, but I don't think I've mentioned how much I love it. It's designed with the aesthetics and sense of play of a toy but you can do serious music production with it. This is demonstrated here via, as the title promises, some absolutely MASSIVE acid rave techno performed live from a PO-33 sampler unit on a tiny calculator-like PCB in the musician's hands.
What I'm listening to today: "Discovering Ambient with the Verbos Multi-Delay", Raucous Studio
This piece is based on a very simple feedback patch; a signal is amplified into itself, piped first through a delay echo and a bandpass with oscillating boundaries to sculpt the frequencies. It's extremely sparse and mostly quiet and almost nothing in it is intentional— just a man turning knobs to see what happens— but the echoing, moaning chirps are very evocative to me.
What I'm listening to today: "Soma RoAT Exploration N°2", HELL F.O
This is based on the Soma "Rumble of Ancient Times", an opinionated/toy synth. The normal problem of noise synths is they sound cool but wind up just making one undifferentiated drone; the ROAT solves this by making *four* drones (pad-triggered).
Here the ROAT's combined with Korg's desktop drum-modeling synth to make a cool and nicely structured glitch hop jam. "It's just like listening to real music!"
What I'm listening to today: "Soma ROAT Jam - Mélodie d'automne", Sidney Cote Nadon
This one uses *two* Rumble of Ancient Times units plus an Akai sampler to make dance techno with the ROATs' various noise generators providing the sirens, swells and background beepy noises you expect to be drifting in and out in the background of such music. It jams. If you liked whatever "Electro" was in 2008 ("Electroclash"? Was that the same thing?) you'll probably like this.
What I'm listening to today: "random noise 079", glenn clyatt
A bizarre journey back and forth across the border between music and noise, this uses a Bastl Kastle and a chiptune synth to pile together bizarre noises until suddenly the noise coalesces into some pretty cool sounding dance techno!… before just as suddenly slowing down 800% and becoming one of, depending on your mindset,
1. A blissful, psychadelic trip
2. The sound of something crying out in pain
What I'm listening to today: "Koma Krell | 0-Coast | Field Kit | Part Two | Extended Cut", Bottle Makes Music
The "Krell Patch" is a setup various synthesizers make possible to construct, where the closing envelope at the end of one note triggers the start of the next note. The name is a reference to the movie "Forbidden Planet". This Krell is augmented with a synth-controlled radio and a church fellowship hall used for natural echo.
TLDR: This is 12 minutes of beeps.
What I'm listening to today: "live stream #1 … subroom signals", substan
substan posts a lot of chill electronic music on YouTube; I've linked him in this thread before. This is an absolutely lovely two-hour (!) flowing set of chill-beats ambient songs, alternating "music they'd play in a yoga class" and "music to program to" with flavors of acid and dubby clicks-and-cuts floating in and out. Every song in this set individually is a song I'd recommend by itself. Massive
What I'm listening to today: "Messed up", KUČKA
KUČKA is a singer-songwriter who produces her own tracks and makes lush, grimy* hyperpop. This track is a single off what I think is an upcoming album and it's super intense, it's got a good driving beat and works as both pop and avant-garde sound design.
* in the sense of "reminiscent of Grimes"
What I'm listening to today: "Limited Access", GOLDEN BOY
At some point last week this tab got opened on my browser and I d… I honestly don't remember where it came from. The song in the tab is from an album named "I NEVER MEANT FOR THIS TO HAPPEN" and is frankly pretty hype. As is the wont of Bandcamp electronic musicians, GOLDEN BOY (she/her) seems to be trying to fit as many different club genres into one song as possible. Kinda reminds me of early Prodigy.
What I'm listening to today: "◯" (Vision Creation Newsun part 1), The Boredoms
The Boredoms started off making entire EPs of just screaming, but evolved into a mindblowing mix of psychadelia, surf rock, and Taiko drumming. And screaming. This is their masterpiece, a joyous explosion like the sound of a world being created, cf "Victory over the Sun".
I couldn't find a good single-track rip on YouTube, so this is the whole album. "Oops." Press stop whereever feels right.
What I'm listening to today: "Asozan", OOIOO
OOIOO is the side band organized by Yoshimi P-We, the drummer from the Boredoms. (If you are a millennial hipster: Yes, this is the Yoshimi who allegedly battled the pink robots.) OOIOO usually offer a slightly more structured take on the Boredoms formula, mixing P-We's drumming with funk stylings. This particular track is a longtime frequent re-listen to me; it has a feeling like a dream, something drifting close and away.
What I'm listening to today: "Super Are", The Boredoms
This is from an album on which every song name begins with "Super".
If I were going to give someone exactly one Boredoms track to listen to it would probably be this one. I mentioned before the Boredoms combine a few different musical styles; this one basically splits them apart and showcases each of them one by one, taking time to savor each flavor, starting with Eno-ish 60s organs and ending with Taiko surf rock.
What I'm listening to today: July 22, 2009 total solar eclipse, BOADRUM
In the 00s the Boredoms spent a while organizing increasingly complex performance art pieces involving very many drum kits, with the largest being 88 drummers in a giant spiral in a Brooklyn park. In my favorite, they took a boat into the pacific ocean to perform this ecstatic noise music ritual in the umbra of a solar eclipse. The dude next to Yoshimi P-We is Zach Hill of Hella and the Death Grips.
What I'm listening to today: "kawasemi Ah", OOIOO
OOIOO released a new album in 2020 that was mostly alternate-version rerecordings of older songs, but one of the new tracks is this song called "kawasemi Ah" with a really good groove. My summary of this song is: kawasemi Ah
What I'm listening to today: "Mixed Emotions", Bebe Barron
In 1956, experimental electronic musicians (and married couple) Bebe and Louis Barron composed the score for Forbidden Planet, inspiring a generation.
In 2000, Bebe visited the music lab at UCSB and recorded a new piece. It is *sick*. It seems to be inventing entirely new emotions. It sounds exactly like the music 60s electronic artists would have made if not held back by the friction of contemporary recording.
What I'm listening to today: "La Jetée", Sines of Exquisite Pleasure
I somehow, happily, managed to wedge YouTube in a state this weekend where it recommended me nothing but albums from the early 80s artists self-published on cassette tape. S.O.E.P. was a particularly exciting find from this; their 1981 album "Modular Systems" is *amazing*, but this one serene track from their 1984 tape stands out to me for its retro-invocations of Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Air.
What I'm listening to today: "pulsar 23 volca fm jam", clyv
This jam gets some *wonderfully* bizarre noises out of Volca's cheap modern DX-7 clone box, combined with some wonderful grungy noises from using the Pulsar-23 (a drum machine) as a synth voice. Once the (chugging, dirty) beat comes in the overall feeling is pleasantly disorienting, like listening from afar to a rock concert, or perhaps an alien invasion, happening on the far other side of an echoey valley.
What I'm listening to today: "Spirals & Orbits", Benge
This was recorded this year but is going *hard* in both audio and visuals for the aesthetics of a 60s-70s educational filmreel, all baffling diagrams and radiophonic-workshop abstract noises, video feedback, quiet glimmering echoes on slow oscillator sweeps. As a piece of ambient music it's entrancing.
What I'm listening to today: "Elysium State", Stardust
The "demoscene" if you're not familiar makes tiny audiovisual programs that push the limits of computer hardware. The community started on 80s hardware, and since wowing on modern GPUs is less challenging they to a large extent stayed on 80s hardware, making them a good chiptune source. Here's a new 2022 demo by Stardust (not to be confused with the 1998 Thomas Bangalter side project).
TLDR Dubstep on a ZX Spectrum
What I'm listening to today: "I Am A Recording", m 10538
The poster of this song claims it's a cassette tape they recorded in 1981, when they were a child, on a toy organ in their parents basement. It definitely sounds like a child hitting random notes, but after a bit something clicks and they hit this powerful, spooky groove. Daniel-Johnston-esque in more ways than the conceptual.
The YouTube summary ends with a strange rant about digital preservation, worth reading.
What I'm listening to today: "Almost in tune live play pulsar 23 buchla easel", Amon Tobin
I spend a lot of time listening to bedroom synth jams by YouTube randos and I've gotten *very* used to incredibly hype stuff posted by accounts with 23 subscribers, so when I got to the end of this driving, buzzing techno jam I was shocked to realize THIS rando was Amon Tobin, a Ninja Tune-signed musician I've seen live three times. Apparently he also has synths in his bedroom.
What I'm listening to today: "Bedroom electro test demo (live electro track feat Elektron Octatrack // Analog Rytm // Slav Squat)", Matt Leagre
Now *this* is a true bedroom synth jam, as in, you can literally see the bed and the dude visibly doesn't have enough space for all the synths he has jammed in the corner there (the unplugged Arp Odyssey reissue! D:). Eight minutes of shifting groove with 90s dance and vaporwave flavors. Really good stuff actually.
What I'm listening to today: "Volca Keys + Beats ambient jam - Volca Dreams", Fortress of Sound
A lovely, gentle electronic groove made on the two most basic Korg Volca units and one guitar pedal. Feels like water level music from a lost Donkey Kong Country game. The basics, they work. This is 13 minutes long and realistically probably could/should have been like seven but you just kind of zone out and you don't notice how long it's been.
What I'm listening to today: "True Love Will Find You In The End (Daniel Johnston cover)", The Mathletes
I went to high school with Joe Mathlete, the lead / occasional only member of this band, so I guess I'm one of their oldest fans. As a home-recording indie musician from Texas Joe's got a deep love for Daniel Johnston and played a version of Johnston in Speeding Motorcycle, a stage musical in Houston and Austin. This cover is super intense to me; best listened loud.
What I'm listening to today: "400 piece 1", Alessandro Cortini
Cortini is a colossally talented synth musician famed for doing all Nine Inch Nails' synths for many years. He also has a YouTube channel where along with his music videos he posts jams, and videos of his cat sitting on rare synthesizers. This video, from 2017, is a spooky, swaying ambient piece; he claims it was the first thing recorded on a "newly restored" Buchla 400. Check out the ancient CRT interface.
What I'm listening to today: "Make Noise | Strega with Pocket Operator PO-33 Session 221119", ナカヤマコウジ
This is a short and simple, kind of ambient / abstract trip-hop piece made with a handheld sampler and the Strega, a synthesizer/effects unit (co-designed by… Alessandro Cortini, again). Not super attention-grabbing or anything and it's over near as soon as it starts, but it sounds really cool and it creates some nice distinct moods before it goes.
What I'm listening to today: "Pulsar 23, THYME, and Generation Loss MKII - Destruction Jam", nealwho
This one uses a Pulsar playing a gritty industrial drum loop, but the centerpiece is a guitar pedal that simulates the sound of degraded magnetic tape on a poorly maintained player. This, and an unusual (sequenceable) bitcrushing delay-echo by Bastl, place the loop on a rack and stretch it into 10 minutes of muffled, unsettling error noises. William Basinski in real time
What I'm listening to today: "Stations of the Tide (annotated)", Dave Seidel
An extremely quiet piece consisting entirely of Schoenberg-y tonal hums rising and falling in possibly-patternless waves. In places it just falls into complete silence. There's a feeling of intense isolation here, maybe something like dread.
The piece is mechanically generated in VCV Rack; the video shows the machine that generated it, and overlay text explains what each functional block does.
What I'm listening to today: "Sixtyniner", Boards of Canada
All those "chill synth jam" videos I link here? You can blame basically all of them on BoC, who perfected a blend of educational-film-score analog synths + hip-hop beats that in 1998 was a revelation.
BoC had tons of early stuff recorded when they signed, so they have multiple rerelease albums. My favorite BoC track ever is still "Sixtyniner" from their 1995 self-published cassette. The mood remains unmatched.
What I'm listening to today: "shortbus take1", SunFallsMusic
The "Shortbus" is a literally-named Eurorack module that doesn't connect to the power ribbon; the switches just determine which plugs are electrically "shorted" to the others. This guy rigged up a pleasantly strange repeating beat with a wavetable synth and a shortbus at the center. The same guy has a "take2" video which shows the performance possibilities of the switches better, but I like this strange loop.
What I'm listening to today: "The Ark Of Redemption/Full Circle (Pulsar-23, Strega, 0-CTRL, DBA Rooms)"
This is a half-hour long (improvised?) performance of somewhere between one and three songs. So it's kind of a lot, and some of the sounds are harsh, but I really like the progression on this, going from a constant buzzing drone into epic warehouse ambiance and sinister clicking and, eventually, music. If you can let yourself be hypnotized by sound, this will do it.
What I'm listening to today: "Push for Woogies", tvvt
This is an acid techno jam posted on the synthesizer subreddit this morning based around what I think is a Moog Sub37 and a bunch of Electron boxes. It's messy but very fun; I like how the first 20 seconds or so sound like just random noises until the bass drum drops and suddenly everything snaps into place.
https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/10csghi/push_for_woogies/
What I'm listening to today: "Techno jam / polyend tracker,tr-6s,j-6"
This is a desk jam using some boxes from Roland's recent attempt to approximate the Volca line, specifically the "It's like a TR-606 with sliders? Sort of?" box and the "It's like a Jupiter-08 with a chord sequencer? Sort of?" box.
The opening just-drums part goes on maybe a little longer than I would have let it, but once the j-6 comes in it gets "hype". Overall some enjoyably dirty techno.
What I'm listening to today: "Laidback Dub session # DubTechno studio Jam (Tempest SpaceEcho Prophet6 Perfourmer Strymon..)", VØSNE
VØSNE has a bunch of good videos of live sets doing laid-back dub. (In this context, "Dub" means "instrumental reggae for nerds".) This is… a live set of laid-back dub. This one's forty minutes long and starts as a few minutes of just ambient echoes, but the drive keeps building the entire time and once it's built it's got a great goove.
What I'm listening to today: "Soma Pulsar 23 - Dark Minimal performance", Deaftone Audio
A small, hissy percussion piece ("microhouse"? Is this what "microhouse" is? Maybe nanohouse?) with some really good sounds, including an acid bassline rigged out of a Pulsar drum channel. In my opinion a good way to spend four minutes.
What I'm listening to today: "Particle Hands", HELL F.O
HELL F.O has a bunch of fun stuff posted— they've appeared in this thread before— and it's practically all abstract, ambient noise music. So this track is an interesting surprise just by being a completely listenable, borderline-pop dance techno piece. Still some interesting sound design, mind you! But drop this into a club set with some bass EQ and I think the crowd would eat it up.
What I'm listening to today: "digitakt + modular live improv set", ANVBS
This is a live set basically comprising a concert's worth of different songs, all that kind of dirty industrial techno I like so much. The flow's good and it works well as focus music. The set isn't of completely consistent quality— if this were say, a Bandcamp album I probably would have picked a favorite track and linked only that— but the songs in here that are good are real good & hard-driving.
What I'm listening to today: "GRP A4 sequence 3:1", Klang Zaun
The A4, it turns out?, is a $5000 synthesizer the size of a desk, designed to be a "more affordable" version of the A8 (a $10,000 synthesizer the size of a wall).
No drums in this, just synth tones that don't feel so much retro as prehistoric, like that proto-electronic stuff from the 70s before Giorgio Moroder realized synths were for dance music. It's hypnotic and ends with you kind of wanting more.
What I'm listening to today: "Steal My Soul", Rahzel
Rahzel is a legendary beatboxer, known for his work in the Roots and various collaborations (Björk's Medulla). He released 1 solo album, "Make The Music 2000" (it's a Biz Markie reference), an odd album with less beatboxing than you'd expect. It does have an infamous live Missy Elliot cover, and this absolutely lovely, spooky, nearly-all-voice jazz track. You won't realize how much of it is voice until the 2nd listen.
What I'm listening to today: "Mea Culpa", David Bryne and Brian Eno
In 1981, between "Once in a Lifetime" and "Burning Down the House", Talking Heads frontman Bryne made an instrumental album with ambient music creator-deity Eno, built around samples from AM radio & West African music. "Mea Culpa" is a dreamy wash that feels decades ahead of its time.
The proto-music-video "short film" below is by Bruce Conner, and IMO is inseparable from the song. * Warning, flashing.
What I'm listening to today: "2 Miles", 12 Rounds
You know that Atticus Ross guy co-credited on all Trent Reznor's film scores? In the 90s he and his wife were a band called "12 Rounds" I'd describe as Portishead crossed with Vampire: The Masquerade. Almost nobody liked this album except me and Trent Reznor (who liked it enough to hire the guy to produce, like, all his albums). Every song on it has something special happening, but this understated track is my favorite.
What I'm listening to today: "Phantom Limb", Hovercraft
Hovercraft was an experimental noise-rock band from the 90s with an almost total disinterest in "notes". This album's release was dogged by confusing, inaccurate rumors Eddie Vedder secretly performed on it (he was married to the bassist at the time and may or may not have played drums in some of their live shows).
This song has a lovely dark mood; the bassline has been my go-to synthesizer test melody for years.
What I'm listening to today: "Mr. Mistake (Boards of Canada remix)", Nevermen
Okay so try to follow, this is:
- Tunde Adebimpe (previously vocalist of TV on the Radio)
- Mike Patton (aka Mr. Bungle, previously vocalist of Faith No More)
- Adam Drucker (previously vocalist in cLOUDDEAD)
- Boards of Canada (production)
…all together on one single track. And it's *incredible*. BoC at their best dispensing Feelings and the words have been circling in my head for years.
What I'm listening to today: "Divine and Bright", Earth ft. Kelly Canary and Kurt Cobain
Earth is a "doom metal"/drone band I am much enamored with, consisting of Dylan Carlson and whoever else is in the room at the moment. They have almost no songs with vocals, but one exception is this 1990 collaboration with a screaming woman and also Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who was close friends with Carlson. This might just confuse you, or maybe you'll find the mood delightful.
What I'm listening to today: "Orange Twin Field Works (Vol.I)", Jeff Mangum
Neutral Milk Hotel (Jeff) in 1998 became the biggest name in indie rock, then just… stopped. Before he went he released this one strange and amazing thirty-minute recording (there is no Vol. 2) of field recordings of Bulgarian folk music from the Koprivshtitsa festival, mixed together in a way that perfectly captures the larger-than-life feeling of live music on foot. This is game design, to me.
What I'm listening to today: "Cinematic Music | Moog Grandmother + MiniKORG700FS | A Love Letter To Synths from A Student for Life", HEYMUN
This is a dreamy piece where the musician sets a few synthesizers running on patterns and plays piano along with it. It's highly structured, but sneakily so. On surface it just feels chaotic; it feels as if two unrelated pieces of music happen to be playing at once but somehow keep converging in interesting ways.
Just float in it.
What I'm listening to today: "Perkons HD-01 Bassline and OXI ONE sequencer Jam", Mark Cee
This guy spent a couple months posting jams with this large, unusual blue drum machine and I kept watching his videos like a hawk thinking… eventually he's gonna make something awesome. Eventually he did, with this complex, clicky 6-minute dance techno bop for an entire crowd of people enjoying standing at the back of a room holding drinks and bobbing their heads but not dancing.
What I'm listening to today: "Choralberg", Alex Siebenhaar
In this video, a man wearing a bluescreen for a hat sits on a carpet and steers some racks of synths (and one analog drum machine) through a cryptic, funky melody. Just as you think you understand where it's going, it ends; you find yourself wanting more.
What I'm listening to today: "crisping.1 #lofi #ambient #chaseblissgenerationlossmk2 #glitch", [moos]
It's not very hard to reproduce Boards of Canada's style, especially not since cassette equipment became a common modular synth add-on. But this piece, based around that guitar pedal that fakes tape degradation, is special, mixing tattered synth pads with a death-march beat that refuses to find a rhythm. It's scary actually, like something's gone horribly wrong.
What I'm listening to today: "Pulsar 23 - Sounds you don't usually hear coming from it"
Occasionally in this thread I've praised songs for adapting Pulsar-23 drum channels for non-percussive purposes. This track is *only that*, the dude does not turn on the drum sequencer, clips on a device designed to turn circuit EMF leakage into sound?, and makes something approximating a jazz piano solo alternated with gunky glitch dub sounds. Very weird noises even by my standards.
What I'm listening to today: "Filthy Miksher - Demo Jam", Deaftone Audio
This pairs a Pulsar and an acid bass groovebox with some kind of noisemaker box based on a spring attached to a contact microphone. It starts as ambient noise and then grows into a bumping rhythm without ever containing… anything except noise, actually, so you've just got this gradually escalating percussive techno piece made up of different noise textures. I like it
What I'm listening to today: "pulsar 23 rhythmic explorations", clyv
This is 14 minutes of a musician fiddling with a Pulsar-23 drum machine. There are periodic cuts, so I assume this is edited down from a longer recording, leaving only the moments they found a good Beat. Not quite a song, this is like the skeletons of 20 different songs, awaiting someone to loop them and add something more than drums. Good beats tho, and good background if you let your focus wander.
What I'm listening to today: "LENTIL2C33MOD 400Hz 23", Rzeczy
This song was produced from an NES sound chip, but doesn't sound anything like an NES because:
- It's got the wavetable channel from the Famicom Disk System;
- The sound chip has been overclocked to make possible synthesis techniques (like audio-rate PWM) a normal NES could have never done
The musician uses these powers to make some sick industrial-feeling… "electro breakcore"? EDM genre names are gibberish
What I'm listening to today: "Zone J" (Rescue Rangers), Harumi Fujita (Capcom)
Do you ever think about how there's a basically finite number of possible "songs", but our attribution/copyright systems assume each piece of music is written only once? So like what if the most beautiful piano song ever got stuck in a toothpaste commercial. Or if one of the greatest electro-pop hooks ever wound up in the final level of an NES game and is now just "retro game music" forever
What I'm listening to today: "Ultraviolet", gasman
Since discovering Stardust I've been watching a lot of ZX Spectrum demos; it's a neat demo platform because it CAN do near anything, but nothing's easy. This 2017 demo is a charming mix of bracingly earnest and legitimately hype, both in the visuals (which YouTube HATES) and the chiptune.
Incidentally, if you know how the ZX works, the still images at the end of the demo are the most technically impressive thing here.
What I'm listening to today: "Ufouria" title theme (iNES 0.9 glitched version), Naoki Kodaka (Sunsoft)
iNES 0.9 for Mac OS 9 had an audio bug affecting only a few games (including "Hebereke", aka "Ufouria") causing the noise and PCM channels to be very loud and distorted. In my opinion, this improves the music *tremendously*, giving it a wild industrial/IDM flavor.
The first time I played Ufouria it sounded like this, and I didn't know it was a bug. So this is the canonical soundtrack to me.
What I'm listening to today: "Parallax" loader music, Martin Galway (Sensible Software)
This is My Other Favorite C64 Song, besides Sanxion. This track contains no percussion whatsoever and just takes you on an epic 12-minute journey of every sound possible from grinding detuned saw waveforms, ending with a single 2-minute sound I cannot describe and which sounds different in every recording, I think because it actually sounds different on different SID chip revisions.
What I'm listening to today: "真実を信頼する", Oblique Occasions
This is a track from a deeply confusing album from some sixth-generation "Vaporwave" group on Bandcamp. Like 80% of this is Signifiers and they are not Legible to me. (Sorry, I went to an academic unconference today and am still Talking Like That.)
Anyway! This one track is a really lovely fusion-jazz(?)/hip-hop/trip-hop groove of the kind I spent most of the 00s listening to. Beats and electric pianos.
What I'm listening to today: "海に憎しみを叫ぶ", Oblique Occasions
This is another track from the same album I posted yesterday, but it's what I'm posting anyway, because who's going to stop me? This is one of a few tracks from this album that sound like lost music from a PS1 JRPG— and might actually be, since one of the other tracks is literally a Castlevania cover.
I like how this mimics that sound from tracker music where each violin sample starts as if in isolation.
What I'm listening to today: "Hoss featuring the PERKONS HD-01", Generative Jane
This one is a wild ride, starting with a blast of strange FM noises and then immediately dropping hard into a gradually-mutating industrial dance beat. This is the kind of music you'd show opening credits to, probably over establishing shots of a futuristic city, or possibly people riding futuristic motorcycles at great speed to no particular obvious destination.
What I'm listening to today: "Puppet Master", ZyeKali
This rocking chaos-&-strings jam was made with the Pocket Operator handheld sampler and a hand-modded "Chaos NAND" (seems to be an Atari Punk Console variant). Instead of using the Pocket Operator's sequencer, the musician plays the PO and Chaos NAND by hand, then samples the sampler, layering eight performances on top of each other. I *think* the colored Launchpad grid is starting and stopping the other video clips.
What I'm listening to today: "Hardware Jam 0006 // Shared System and Friends // 162bpm atmospheric drum n' bass", kaleidasonic
This is a neat mix of a classical 90s Drum & Bass beat with modern modular-synthesizer sound design; it starts with 2 minutes of random-notes ambient, then drops an Amen and a lovely chonky bass and keeps evolving in interesting new directions for the entire 15 minute runtime. (Those without long attention spans may wanna quit around minute 7.)
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient improvisation 4 (Soma Enner + Cosmos)", Più
Cosmos is an "asymmetric looper"—a loop pedal whose loops are of varying lengths and so can drift in phase against each other. Here it's fed with tiny sound fragments (with such sources as small plastic frog, whose shape is sonified by rubbing it against the Enner's case and spring reverb) to build up an all-enveloping ambient soundscape partway between a rainpipe and a horror movie score.
What I'm listening to today: "Lysergenesis", Lauri Paisley
Paisley in the early 80s was VP of the "International Electronic Music Association", which I've never heard of; this was the final song on a cassette album, "Real-to-Reel", she released in 1983. Not so much a soundscape as an ambient ocean you plunge into and possibly drown, this is probably the most progressive electronic music you're going to find in 1983; 15 minutes of synths following a weird internal logic.
What I'm listening to today: "SOMA PULSAR 23: Live Jam with Microcosm", Among the Trees
This track is incredibly mysterious; there *is* a Pulsar drum machine in here, but it seems to only exist to agitate a chain of reverb filters rigged to produce an enormous, shimmering rushing noise with seemingly little to do with the input.
I would describe this as the music from a movie from the 60s-70s that plays while the protagonists wordlessly explore an alien spaceship.
What I'm listening to today: "lofi ambient with lubadh rings morphagene beads shallowwater and nightsky",
[moos]
A chill ambient piece where several large slabs of modular synthesizer, with help from a hand reaching in to tweak something once a minute or so, produces ten minutes of generated-melody tones and plucks and simulated tape wobble. Really good feeling to it, the kind of music you'd hear it distantly, follow it into the woods and never be seen again.
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient Improvisation Elektron digitone and Moog Mother 32", Surgeons Girl
This track gets a lot of mileage out of fairly minimal elements, synth stabs fighting to rise above the water of a ocean of sorrowful foghorn hums. Sometimes I feel like attempting to describe these pieces makes them lesser and that's definitely something I'd worry about here, this is something meant just to be felt rather than intellectualized.
What I'm listening to today: "Verbos + Mimeophon Jam", Deaftone Audio
This video is essentially a single held note and some rhythmic clicking for eight minutes, but the musician, hand-driving a complicated modular feedback machine, thoroughly explores every point in the configuration space of that constrained premise, taking you on a journey through a small universe of minimal ambient destinations. It's all very hypnotic and maybe a little sinister.
What I'm listening to today: "Drift", Lähtö
Here's what I eventually figured out: Back in 2006-2007, Lähtö made music and posted it on a Google Site alongside little blog posts. The only distribution method was mediafire links, all dead now. None of these albums are preserved anywhere on the internet. Mysteriously, this month, someone uploaded this one to YouTube.
This first track (ends at 11:00) is a feast of luscious ambient pads, like a bed made entirely of pillows.
What I'm listening to today: "Track 1", rien
Sometimes I just want to listen to a quiet crackling static noise for twenty minutes. So here's just that. This is an untitled song on an untitled album consisting of two seemingly identical tracks.
Try focusing on this sound. Really pick it apart. Try to perceive each individual microsound. You might be inclined to think of it as literally nothing, but there's gobs of complex texture in how the pops & bass rumbles cluster.
What I'm listening to today: "Track 2", Impermanence
An untitled song from an album named "Even if we talk about love in our fantasy, this iron and concrete won't convey its warmth." It's 15 minutes of a loud, distorted, mostly unchanging static noise, like standing close to heavy machinery. This is the sound of being very stressed and sometimes when I'm very stressed I like to listen to this sort of sound because it externalizes the stress into something apart from me.
What I'm listening to today: "Chaos Of The Galaxy / Happy Man", Sparklehorse
Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) was a beloved one-man indie rock band and multi-instrumentalist in the 00s. This version of "Happy Man" presents the song as if you're hearing it coming in and out of tune on a radio station just slightly too far away to pick up and fighting interference from some rival station. It makes the whole thing really spooky and gives the legible parts an incredible punch.
What I'm listening to today: "Moth", Burial and Four Tet
Burial and Four Tet are two of the most original electronic musicians of this century, and when they were at the height of their powers around 2010 they recorded three songs for singles together ("Moth", "Nova" and "Wolf Cub", and then some other stuff with Thom Yorke). Moth is my favorite of the three, bouncy, a killer Four Tet pop hook but muffled and blurry in Burial's style. Just some incredible sounds here.
What I'm listening to today: "Deep progressive house jam with hardware synths - M:S, Model D, Skulpt, Microfreak, NTS-1, Volca FM.", Work4synths
This YouTuber posts a lot of decent improvised trance techno sets, but for this one they seem to have decided to make a Song and they absolutely killed it. This is a catchy, well-produced electronica bop with a lovely clean-feeling emotion to it, performed by a table of mid-range synths driven from a composition in Ableton DAW.
What I'm listening to today: "Down With Silent Night", Irena and Vojtech Havlovi
From 1992, a married couple playing a duet on piano and cello. Feels like a movie score both in the 10,000-foot atmospheric vibes and the weird echoey way the cello is recorded. It's gorgeous, "evocative" and *slow* in a beautifully deliberate way, with chord changes minutes apart. It's also half an hour long so sincere suggestion: Hit stop at 19:39 exactly. That's where I would have cut.
https://havlovi.bandcamp.com/track/down-with-silent-night-a-tichou-noc-snesl-sv
What I'm listening to today: Butt music from hell, Hieronymus Bosch
Around 1500 CE Bosch painted "The Garden of Earthly Delights", an epic triptych of surreal scenes concluding in Hell. In the hell scene, a naked man has a fragment of musical notation painted on his ass. In 2014 a blogger named Amelia Hamrick transcribed it and a YouTuber named James Spalink recorded this ghostly version on period instruments. What Hell left unfinished the Internet has completed
What I'm listening to today: "Brother", Beck
Beck's early albums cleanly alternate hip-hop/pop & folk, but the B-sides from then tend to find a lovely unique otherworld between the two. Like "Brother": Obscure, ballad-like, & my favorite Beck song.
This song staggers like it's drunk. It always gives me a mental image of hanging from a ceiling from ropes, or maybe clutching a loop handle on a moving subway, putting all your weight on it and closing your eyes, swinging.
What I'm listening to today: "Dissolution III (Oversaturated Intervallic Collisions)", Earth
This 15-minute piece, performed live on NYU's college radio station in 2002, is my favorite Earth recording, and one of their most difficult to find a legit copy of.
It's a series of pendulous guitar distortions layering deeper and deeper on themselves. It's impossible to rationally comprehend as music, and best experienced as ritual. Listen to it as loudly as you can stand.
What I'm listening to today: "Super Fxx", Tera Melos
Tera Melos is a band from the Sacramento post-rock clique who started off making what I'd describe as metal played by free-jazz rules, and gradually transitioned to very loud surf rock with unusual chord progressions. Their last album ended with a weird, memorable blast of a song named "Super Fx", and then a single had a b-side named "Super Fxx" which I'd describe as the same song but with different words and chords:
What I'm listening to today: "Hello Great Architect", Hella
Hella is another Norcal post-rock band, the drummer from the Advantage playing guitar and the drummer from the Death Grips (the legendary Zach Hill) playing drums, specializing in the loudest, densest, most chaotic, most rancid riffs possible. Their live stuff's incredible, so I'm linking a song from the middle of a live set ("Concentration Face" DVD). Song ends at 1:52:27, turn up loud for intended effect.
What I'm listening to today: "My Neighbor Satan", Boris
Boris is a Japanese rock band with an epic and wildly genre-spanning discography spanning metal, pop-rock, and straight-up noise. This is a really fun track where they take what could have been a simple metal song, compress the metal bits until they're flat and turn the volume way down, and layer strange currents of pop and funk on top. Like peacefully floating on the bubble-bath surface atop a dark noise ocean.
What I'm listening to today: "Idols and Anchors", Parkway Drive
I don't have an interesting story about this one. It isn't a rarity or anything. It's just a song I heard on the radio once and liked, from the genre I can never remember if it's called "black metal" or "death metal". The utter sincerity with which this band with a goofy name singing goofy cookie monster vocals goes about its very serious business has always been really charming to me. Good blastbeats.
What I'm listening to today: "Annihilvore", Behold The Arctopus
My favorite track on my favorite metal album. BTA makes instrumental metal with the kind of post-rock musical rule-breaking I don't have the vocabulary to describe so I always fall back on "it's like jazz, I guess?" (or for the stuff after this album, "it's like twelve-tone?"). This one epic track is a rocking mix of the mind-expanding, the accessible, and the "damn, that's just a really good single sound".
What I'm listening to today: "My Empire's Doom", Emperor
At my college, consensus was Emperor was The Greatest Metal Band In The World. I'm so-so on them, but! What I do *really* like is Emperor's original demo tape, recorded on a 4-track and self-distributed. The low recording quality causes every instrument to blend together into an indistinguishable soup and the resulting aesthetic is *perfect*. Also this was before the knife murderer joined the band, so that's nice.
What I'm listening to today: "Modular jam with Volca Modular, Korg NTS-1 and Playtronica Touch Me", ITSME
This is a short, peaceful synth piece performed on a tree. Like, uh. This person got hold of a device that converts current (capacitance?) changes from human touch into MIDI, and then they wired it to a small tree. So the harder they squeeze the tree the higher the note on the Volca Modular goes. Anyway, it's a real nice song.
What I'm listening to today: "Roland MKS-80 REV5 & MPG-80 (1983)", Werkstatt Matlak
This unusual YouTube account belongs to a synth repair shop in Bavaria. Each video features exactly one vintage or rare synthesizer and a summary like "Final test after service". Apparently when they finish repairing a customer device they make a song with it.
This video features the Super Jupiter (a rackmount MIDI Jupiter-8) and its programmer. They use it to make sick retro hip-hop.
What I'm listening to today: "A8 KM34", Funkstörung
"Appetite for Disctruction" was released in the brief initial golden era of IDM and I think got kinda quickly forgotten?, but almost every track on it would have been the best track on some other album. All bizarre dirty bitcrushed beats and catchy clean synthtone melodies, all really satisfying.
This isn't my *favorite* track on there, but it's the one I'm thinking about today. Sometimes you just have an A8 KM34 day.
What I'm listening to today: "最強ACIDマシーン。The strongest ACID machine.", TUNASAN
The "T-8 Aria Compact" is a neat device from Roland that tries to get some of that Volca money Korg's been scooping up by putting in a single tiny box [digital emulations of] an 808 and 303, Roland's early-80s drum/synth boxes that failed, flooded the used market and accidentally invented ACID.
In this video, a dog wearing a tiny hat makes some ACID. A T-8 review is hidden in the captions.
What I'm listening to today: "Devolver", Stardust
This is a 2021 demo for the Spectrum ZX by demoscene group Stardust. I linked a Stardust demo in this thread before (again: not Thomas Bangalter related) and the other one was more visually impressive, but the music in this one is *incredibly* hype and stands on its own as a piece of relentless, borderline-gabber hardcore dance music. There are acid sounds in here I am sincerely baffled how they tricked a ZX into making.
What I'm listening to today: "Teisco Synthesizer 110F (1980)", Werkstatt Matlak
This is the synth shop I linked earlier this week, posting the "Final test after repair & service" for a fascinating synth by Teisco, a company I've never heard of (in part because they were folded into Kawai shortly after this synth was made). The test track showcases some lovely timbres Boards of Canada would be proud of, in an alternate universe where BoC were interested in drum & bass.
What I'm listening to today: "Eurorack idm", Sinking Feeling
Sinking Feeling appeared way up earlier in this thread with one of my favorite electronica tracks on YouTube, and lately has been streaming a lot. This is a 20-minute stream that seamlessly transitions between 3 or 4 notional songs all using the same sonic palette. It's sparse & minimal in a way that feels like crisp morning air, all skittering taps and distant curious warbles. Really unique in its simplicity.
What I'm listening to today: "Law – Unreleased Jungle Selection"
Jungle is the older, rawer, more chaotic older brother of "Drum & Bass". This YouTube video is mysterious, a CD-R-length mix of 17 songs by 10 artists. Searching I find the tracks all recorded ~1993-1995 and variously unreleased until the 2010s, released in the 90s (but not as the same mix?), or seemingly found nowhere else on the Internet. Who is "Law"? Unclear. It's a *very* good mix tho, dark & driving.
What I'm listening to today: "Digital", Roni Size Reprazent
New Forms was the album that introduced "Drum & Bass" to a lot of people internationally— as a teen in Texas it massively changed how I thought about music. But besides being a D&B position paper it's got an amazingly unique, self-confident tone of its own. "Digital" isn't the most avant-garde track on it but it's maybe the stickiest, building an incredible groove out of soul-flavored vocals and a D&B skeleton:
What I'm listening to today: "Threat Actor", Jamie Myerson
I have this Cohost post of recommendations for Bandcamp Friday, and so I have a Simplenote file where I stash a reminder list of bands to add to it next time Bandcamp Friday rolls around. When I came back to look at it this month, I found the last line was
"threat actors?"
What… was this? I have no idea. Searching Bandcamp finds only this one song, which I don't think I'd ever heard. Actually it heckin rules
What I'm listening today: "7:10", Plug
Luke Vibert is a man of many names and many styles. This is the first track on Plug EP 1, which was released as "Visible Crater Funk" in Europe or mashed into CD 2 of "Drum & Bass for Papa" in the US.
This is D&B (Jungle?) by the basics but the basics are pushed to a point of total chaos. Amen break in a blender to create a maelstrom of drums, and discomfiting, minimal synth tones. It grabs you really well.
What I'm listening to today: "Brown Paper Bag (Nobukazu Takemura remix)", Roni Size Reprazent
"Brown Paper Bag" was the album-seller track on New Forms, mostly due to the *incredibly sick* timewarping music video which had a different, punchier, vocal mix not on the album. But my favorite version remains this rare remix by Nobukazu Takemura, a Japanese glitch musician I once saw live by accident.
(You might find the first two minutes here offputting. Give it a chance.)
What I'm listening to today: "Point of View", LTJ Bukem
LTJ Bukem ruined drum & bass for me. This is not his fault. "Journey Inwards" is stripped-down, minimalist D&B that exposes its inner workings, and once Bukem showed me the Pattern I heard it everywhere. D&B's seemingly infinite fractal complexity was revealed to mostly be K–S––KS– over and over.
I have to forgive Bukem. He also gave me this pair of tracks, this Yoko Kanno-esque sea of violin samples—
[CONTINUES]
What I'm listening to today: "Viewpoint", LTJ Bukem
[CONTINUING]
—and then this lovely track, which blows past D&B's occasional aspirations to being an intellectual descendent of jazz by just, like… making some jazz.
"Viewpoint" is a refreshing, bouncy showcase of jazz bass, electric piano riffs and, at one point, threaded in sneakily, the violin sample that "Point of View" (the previous track on the album) deconstructs. Just such a good feeling to it.
What I'm listening to today: "Lessness", Tom Djll
A mesmerizing abstract journey. If you're used to "music" this track might be a good intro to ambient sound collages. Let it guide you from point to point, a soundtrack for images in your mind maybe.
The parts this is made from are kind of interesting: An honest to goodness VCS-3— the closest thing 1971 had to desktop eurorack, famously used by Pink Floyd— mixed in with a modern desktop eurorack, mixed with a trumpet.
What I'm listening to today: "LOST SOULS - MODBAP", leonardoworx
This is a fun, single-minute hip hop jam with an MPC drum machine, Make Noise's desktop modular synths and some Nas samples.
90s west coast hip hop always had a thing for 70s east coast synthesizers, so there's something that feels like a natural extension to try to do that style of hip hop* with the west-coast synth methods used here**.
* Except Nas is east coast.
** And Make Noise is in North Carolina.
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient then heavy", Jay Hosking
Jay runs a Patreon; the deal seems to be people crowdfund him to buy the most expensive synthesizers in existence, in exchange he makes music with them & posts it.
The in-video captions explain this as "I wanted to create something that starts dreamy and goes heavy", and he does this by using a pair of Moog keyboards for huge padscapes then dropping in dense IDM beats from a purpose-built modular skiff box.
What I'm listening to today: "Live Techno Jam #6 - Roland TR6S - Quadrantid Swarm - Minitaur - BlueBox - Blofeld - NTS1", Spadehead
Have I like… boxed myself in to needing something interesting to say about each of these tracks? Because this is just a good, thoughtfully-composed basic four-on-the-floor techno track with a table of 2010s-2020s desktop synths and a really nice 90s feeling. Good background/focus music. I like the obviously-synthesized-strings voice.
What I'm listening to today: "Heavy Medicine", Jon Gee
Jon, like Jay Hosking, is constantly pushing highly-developed synth music to his YouTube, but rather than the community focus it all seems very personal. A lot of his video titles use words like "meditation".
Last April Jon posted a *bunch* of absolute bangers all in quick succession, and this was my favorite from that block, a futuristic synth-rock track based around the two synth "trios" from Make Noise and Moog.
What I'm listening to today: "Serge Modular Live Patching Improv - Modular Notes Vol.2 10 - Pure Serge Eurorack"
This box is a rebuild, in modern form factor, of Serge Tcherepnin's 1970s "west coast" modular synth.
The video builds a patch gradually, one wire at a time, which means just listening to it you get a very slowly evolving drone that grows from a buzz to a weird melodic moan. It's some nice, meditative rhythmic ambiance, and it's cool to watch it being built.
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient patching with Prism Circuits Canvas and Quasar systems, BPoOT (20220825 191252)"
Prism makes modern re-imaginings of Serge/Buchla style modular systems. These systems excel at patches where control is driven by feedback loops and voltage logic rather than programmed sequences.
This strange, spacey patch creates an ocean of strange cross-interacting sounds loosely driven by a 16-step sequence the circuit moves through as it chooses.
What I'm listening to today: "Cartesian Somersaults", FΛDE
Okay, do you remember the "PC speaker"? The piezoelectric beeper thing inside old tower PCs, could only play one note at a time? Well this is a full, catchy, multi-instrumental song created entirely for one of those monophonic beepers (apparently the one in the 1980 Commodore PET). It even fakes drums with short chirps. It hurts to listen to and the waveform in the video hurts to look at, and I kind of love it.
What I'm listening to today: "Call Me Up Again", FΛDE
The PC speaker musician again, making something even weirder: have you heard of the "Fairchild Channel F"? The very first "video game console", 1976. It had a beeper inside the case, but it could only play 3 different notes. This song, recorded on actual Channel F hardware, uses some bizarre modern algorithmic magic (manual FM synthesis!?) to squeeze out "impossible" sounds like arbitrary chords & white noise snares.
@mcc This immediately unlocked a memory in my mind of the Xenon 2 Megablast soundtrack for the PC Speaker, and indeed there it is, glorious handmade multivoice music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izadA3nSPbk
(I remember playing MOD trackers on the PC speaker, but those used a conversion algorithm to play sample-based music resulting in that typical "dithering noise" sound)
What I'm listening to today: "Chi-Fou-Mi", FΛDE
Okay this is my third song in a row from the same musician but like, how many songs do you know running on Channel F hardware? Because I only know these two (or I did until I got this reply yesterday: https://mastodon.social/@Korcenton@mas.to/110142793919008016). This is less catchy than the other track but more technically impressive (and more enjoyably technically disastrous). The video has the cryptic caption "HOW IN THE F*CK DID THE TRIGGERING GET BETTER"
🐙
@hisham_hm @mcc oh wow! this also unlocked a memory of another game that had PC speaker music apparently also programmed by David Whittaker, the PC version of Quadralien. He was pretty good at it, I suppose. 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q7fivIqNZk
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@kazriko @hisham_hm @mcc it was pretty inscrutable to me as a kid! I just tried playing a bit and it’s really high pressure as the reactor keeps heating up.
What I'm listening to today: "It's Universal", Croaker
Somewhere out there in the 90s, before mp3, there must have been an *incredibly* cool scene of BBS-shared tracker music that I missed out on completely (I had BBSes, but could not figure out how to operate Player Pro). This is a groovy drum & bass bop made in 1998 in ImpulseTracker for DOS by… a teenager named Jaakko Iisalo who… went on to become the creator and lead designer of the Angry Birds series. Um. Okay wow
What I'm listening to today: "Slub", STU
The Atari home computers probably deserve more cred in music production; they had a working MIDI/DAW ecosystem back before Windows was viable or Macs were affordable.
Anyway here's a 2017 Atari ST tracker song I just really like. Chiptune you can just *almost* believe could have been a synth pop song in the 80s. The hook in the second half slays me, there was seriously a day last week I listened to this song like five times.
What I'm listening to today, "Yay Bahar", Görkem Şen
This is a performance on the Yay Bahar, a fully acoustic instrument Mr. Şen himself invented, perfected and built by hand. It's got some similarity to traditional Turkish bowed instruments but with loose springs and large resonating tubs to act as amplification, echo effect and occasional additional playable element. It sounds Evocative as heck and Şen seamlessly moves from wowing you with weird sounds to violin solo.
What I'm listening to today, "Return", STU
This is by the Atari ST tracker artist I linked Friday, from their Bandcamp. This song apparently started life as an ST demo, but at some point they got carried away and made a conventionally produced song that uses an Atari ST as an instrument. The result is dark, echoey dubstep with strange chiptune blood flowing through it and I really ~~~ dig ~~~ the ~~~ vibe ~~~.
What I'm listening to today: "Hivemind II", Max Ravitz
The "Mavis" is a single-oscillator budget Moog synth; it's a more expensive, less interesting version of their old "Werkstatt" kit. But it did give us this really interesting video where a Moog employee densely cross-wires seven Mavises to produce every sound in this complex idm track. (The eurorack at the bottom does sequencing and adds a bit of echo.) Never mind the product demo, this is some good dance techno.
What I'm listening to today: "20230226 - live @ Baitattack!", @nonmateria
"Orca" is a 2D programming language / music production environment by 100 Rabbits. This is a livecoding performance with Orca, recorded at a concert space in Trentino, Italy that I think might be operated out of someone's home. The Karplus is very Strong in this one.
The upload post (https://mastodon.social/@nonmateria@merveilles.town/110044179701228549) links some other sets from the same night. The video contains a slowly flashing light.
What I'm listening to today: "Grongy Time"
Another Spectrum ZX demo, from 2022. This one is entirely self-explanatory from the title. It is Grongy time
I really like the recurring isometric visuals at 1:47/3:38/3:56.
What I'm listening to today: "Noise Box War Drums", Paisley Computer
Contact microphones are *magic*. This is a jam session that sounds like an entire room of percussionists directed by Bear McCreary. In fact you can see what it's being made by, and it's… a small wooden box attached to some springs, rubber bands attached to screws, a doorstop, and one of those head massage scratcher things? being smashed with a single commemorative basketball pen. Sounds great actually.
What I'm listening to today: "Interlaced", MKustomAudio
This is a 27-minute eurorack performance of dark, cinematic atmospheric textures. There's no rhythmic elements but the progression between different ambiances is deliberate and thoughtful and there's a lot of energy in parts. If I imagine this to be the score to a short film set on a haunted spaceship I feel like I can break down each 3-minute segment of this and imagine what is happening in the accompanying scene.
What I'm listening to today: "Roland JX-3P & PG-200 (1984)", Werkstatt Matlak
Another final test after servicing from that Bavarian synth repair shop, this time on a Juno variant that was Roland's first MIDI-supporting synth.
Again I must compare Boards of Canada, as this sounds like one of the half-tracks BOC used to put in between songs. What interests me here is WM balanced the synth on the arms of a deskchair. WM that is a valuable customer device. WM fears nothing
What I'm listening to today: "Our distress call", TRDRT
A moody, melodic eurorack performance driven from a Deluge in CV control mode, made of physical-modeling string and drum synths pushed just slightly past the line where the model makes sounds any real object could produce. Slow but rewarding, it evolves over 15 minutes from crunchy anti-strings to tomdrums jittering like a nervous leg to breathy distorted moans to harps and clicks in fog.
What I'm listening to today: "Make Noise Strega, Korg nu Tekt nts-1", grumpfigrumpf
This is a lovely, brain-stem-grabbing ambient jam I return to sometimes. It's basically the epitome of drone music, because it consists entirely of an echo filter run into a second echo filter. (The Strega *does* have a vco, but it isn't on at first; instead they initially seed the feedback loop by turning the delay speed down until the bbd resolution is so low it introduces crackling.)
What I'm listening to today: "Cartographer - Eurorack Drone", Michael Furtak
This is a slow, threatening ambient piece. It's the length and shape of a "song" but it is definitely all about the sounds. Metal-y FM noises, shimmering sweeps, gradually introduced deathmarch beats. And of course the standard drone moan. It feels like standing on a hill and watching something indescribably enormous passing far overhead.
What I'm listening to today: "Make Noise Shared System Jamuary 11.2023", Lukas Hermann
A minimal synth noodle with some note sequencers and the Shared System (Make Noise's standard eurorack module bundle). Not very complicated but I like it. There's some interesting implicit clicky percussion when the echo gets its teeth into some of the notes' attacks. Goes through an interesting change partway through.
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient improvisation 7 (Soma Enner + Cosmos)", Più
I've linked this same artist using this same equipment before but this piece comprises totally different sounds, starting with gentle buzzy hums and escalating to ominous swarmscapes and rocking thumps (if you pay attention, caused by physically smacking the device). I find this one very emotionally intense; it definitely shows the expressiveness of the Enner as a performance instrument.
What I'm listening to today: "Bombora || Sequential Prophet Rev2", Pat Carroll
A peaceful low-key keyboard solo. A lot of the synth music I link in this thread the focus is on the technical shock of the instrument capabilities, so I'm not sure how to express the idea a synth piece is just about the synth player's performance. This possibly could have been performed on a piano, though the Prophet voice's LFO does add some nice subtle rhythmic elements. Anyway. Feels good
What I'm listening to today: Outro, God Lives Underwater
My favorite thing by 90s industrial group GLU is the "hidden track", not very hidden, from Life in the So-Called Space Age, which starts right after the final song and begins with a repetitive humming noise that goes tens of minutes without noticeably changing.
The best way to listen to this is to put it on speakers and then forget you had it on, so the thing that happens after hits you like a truck. Trust me.
What I'm listening to today: "Last Ap Roach", Squarepusher
When I was in college I had awful insomnia. One night, exhausted, I went to McDonalds at 2 AM. When I got up to the window, they had installed a machine that makes your drink and drops it in a carousel. There were no humans visible. I was alone in the world with a robot and a slowly-rotating coca-cola and, at this song's precise climax on my stereo, I watched the robot smash my unattended drink against the wall