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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MUkdU67-Gg
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MUkdU67-Gg
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •So the Strega is a truly remarkable piece of hardware—a collaboration between a synth company and a musician (Alessandro Cortini) that blends "musical instrument" and "toy" in the way my old art-game projects strove to. It's a delay reverb simultaneously uglified and overpowered to make the perfect drone machine. Here it is at its best, tearing apart the spectra of an iPad piano synthesizer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ-4HM7E9J8
Make Noise Strega & Pianoteq Bechstein | Ambient
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This one shows the limits of Synth Jam Improv Youtube. It has so many good elements (the spooky start, the recurring high foghorn note, emergent bells), but overall doesn't seem to hang together. This probably would've worked better in conventional music production where you jam for 10 minutes then edit down to the most structured 3! Still, that beginning…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_kiXtPjl3s
Sunset Meditation - Drone for Peace // Make Noise Strega / 0-Coast / 0-CTRL
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •I made this for a jam on Battle of the Bits way back in 2007; they made a pack of sound samples and challenged us to make a song with it. This ISN'T the song I made, it was a junk file I made during testing that cut up all 25 samples into 1/10th-second chunks and sorted them per a loudness criterion. I didn't publish this one but I still pull it out and listen to it sometimes. It's oddly compelling, with lots of surprising structure and melodic sections.
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This unusual variant of "Eraser" is, IMO the most underrated Nine Inch Nails track. It's from a widely-distributed bootleg of a live NIN show in 1995, from the tour where Trent was touring with David Bowie; in the middle of those shows they'd do a few duets. This was from the start of the Bowie set. I've never figured out whose band this is (Trent's or Bowie's) but the altered arrangement brings an already great song to a new level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV0PcyOHVok
Nine Inch Nails & David Bowie 11 Eraser 1995 Live Remastered
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •…what? It's what I'm listening to.
Should I actually explain this? Part of what makes the Touhou shmup series popular is not just the games themselves but the many fanworks, like re-recordings of the songs. This particular fansong, and particular frankly incredible video, became a Remix Culture Thing.
I encountered the original for the first time this weekend playing Lotus Land Story for my stream and was like 😁 it's the song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkgK8eUdpAo
[HD] Touhou - Bad Apple!! [ＰＶ] (Shadow Art)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This showed up in my YouTube synth vids recs. I think "Tefty & Meems" started out here just trying to test out / demo one of Behringer's many clone synths but got carried away and recorded basically a 45 minute album of chill ambient techno with improvised vocals. Just one synth, one woman singing, and tons of echo, but the mood is intense.
I suggest starting about 11 minutes 45 seconds in, as that's when it gets Good
https://youtu.be/shP9As1PrrY?t=700
Ambient MonoPoly Set // Aeros Loop Studio, Microcosm, Strymon Pedals
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Elektron just released the "Syntakt" (afaict an update of the Machinedrum with the Digitakt interface & modern features like Overbridge). As usual for new synth releases, Synth Jam Youtube is falling over themselves to post stuff showcasing the new gear; I really liked on its own terms this one track "substan" posted of huge drones to swim in. (If you want more of a beat, look up "synbiosis" from the same set in the related videos.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXSFR1oNtjc
unfold ... elektron syntakt ... ambient
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •So when David Byrne left the Talking Heads they renamed themselves the Heads and released an album named "No Talking Just Head". The album used a rotation of random guest vocalists most of whom utterly failed to deliver, but there's one song on there, "Damage I've Done", that is Basically Perfect and fit in well with the surge of pop-flavored industrial music that was swarming the radio at the start of 1997.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62Mye3v3_KQ
The Heads - Damage I've done (with J.Napolitano)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •A weird video (with surprisingly high production values) of dark warehouse techno with hard gabber beats, accompanied by VHS distortion.
The Lyra-8 is a drone synthesizer that mostly produces indistinct woomy noises; I assume it is the source of the various beeswarm sounds in the song.
Video contains intermittent brief flashing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSNBjvm25lY
the Lyra 8 is perfect for atmospheric techno
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Modular synthesis is a great way to make complex sounds, but it's also REALLY expensive… unless you use VCV Rack, the free+open source eurorack emulator. This track uses a virtual synth rack that, IRL, would be impossibly huge to create a signal chain that generates a subtly nonrepeating musical pattern for, as advertised, a full hour. It's really nice, I think!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqBz2Wngaw
Incanta - 60 minutes ambient for deep focus - VCV modular generative ambient
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Does "20 minutes of distant howling noises" sound like something you want to listen to? Because "20 minutes of distant howling noises" is basically my favorite genre of music. The first two minutes of this are dominated by a siren sound I find by itself kinda obnoxious but then the wet/dry reaches its intended level and it's off to distant howling city
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8g4OJUWJaQ
Cosmic Radiation - Subharmonicon + DFAM (Drone Ambient)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is the best track on Delinquent Habits' self-titled/debut album, still my favorite hip hop album of all time, an album featuring openly political gangsta rap in an era when that was starting to be less common, incredibly heavy beats, a certain amount of rapping in Spanish, and three tracks that memorably sample mariachi music.
I recommend listening to this on something with good bass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWivY4hJdd4
If You Want Some
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This short downtempo piece is based around Moog's generative-rhythm-and-chords machine, the Subharmonicon. (Actually this piece uses the same desktop Moog gear as the distant-howling piece I posted Monday, though *that* one was so drowned in distortion and echo you weren't likely to distinguish any one element). I really like the groove on this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmYrwLHeclc
moog mother-32 + Subharmonicon + DFAM Jam by Saya 'zonbi' Nishida
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a drum solo with a physical trigger on the bass drum so every time the bass drum hits it advances a sequence on a modular synthesizer. In other words the drummer controls the entire piece, the synth conforms its tempo to the drumming and when the drummer starts switching the rhythm up the music adjusts to it in a really natural way. Technically interesting, but also an incredible mood!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au1WWJxWE4Q
Mutable Instruments Rings triggered by drums
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •The most interesting thing about this album is its opening track "Body Stone", a slowly forming chaotic soup of bits of free jazz and funk and less identifiable things smashed together according to the thing's own totally internal logic, a sort of peaceful nightmare
"Hagiography" from the same album is also pretty good.
https://joyfultalk.bandcamp.com/track/body-stone
Body Stone, by JOYFULTALK
JOYFULTALKmcc
in reply to mcc • • •A good track that starts with wind-sound static and slowly builds into what the author calls "danceable", although unless your dancers are real electronic music heads it might wind up less as dancing and more like "a group of people standing around with drinks, bobbing their heads thoughtfully".
"Oom" might be short for "Out of Memory".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DraP5YQF44A
Oom // Analog Live Set / Moog Subharmonicon + Mother 32 + DFAM + Grandmother / Digitakt / Retroverb
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •So the premise here seems to be two people laid out a bunch of electronic music equipment they had on a table and recorded themselves just… *doing* stuff for eight minutes, resulting in a messy but engaging mix of noise and music. The YouTube summary claims they were just having fun and they clearly are, it is fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58raQ8W4xQ8
Electronic Jam - Arturia Microfreak/ Digitakt/ Walrus SLÖ/ Norns/ Portastudio/ Make Noise Strega
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •r beny is my favorite artist in the YouTube synth jams community. He's got a Bandcamp, but then he's got this YouTube where he posts entirely different songs recorded live, mostly ambient pieces each using a single piece of hardware.
This one is made with a toy groovebox plugged into a fairly complex processing chain including a Disintegration Loops effect from a vintage tape player with a busted tape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7DmfbW2Q1A
Alluvial // OP-Z + PMD 221 + OTO BAM
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Alva Noto is an amazing musician and installation artist who's done collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Ryoji Ikeda. This is the song of his I find myself constantly coming back to. It is basically one violin synth and a modem but to me it is everything ambient music can be and ought to be. It is dread and joy and an emotion I cannot describe in words and can only express to someone by playing them this song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NYbcxCbv_w
Haloid Xerrox Copy 1
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Akihiko Matsumoto posts lengthy, often complex live ambient pieces on YouTube virtually every day. This one, besides the music itself being an entire buffet of indistinct moods, is technically interesting for unifying desktop production methods of two different decades: A classic Tascam four-track loaded with loops and an Intellijel 62HP mini eurorack, both getting constant tweaks over 15 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YjGGy1NW0M
Modular Synth & TASCAM Porta One | Ambient
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •A lovely smooth live-DJ mix, by rotating DJs, with tracks ranging from about 1990 to about 2020 but all feeling timeless.
This mix is *three hours*, so I have to admit I didn't listen to it "today" (I listened gradually over the last two weeks). This will definitely be the best 3-hour techno mix you listen to today, if only because by the time you're done you won't have time to listen to another.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLd_knBGG5U
Techno vinyl mix by Sol Ortega & E110101
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •"Rings" is a resonator unit for physical modeling synthesis, a technique that can be used to simulate strings, gongs, or—as this video does—if you turn the knobs to their midpoints, an otherworldly non-instrument halfway between a string and gong. This track starts with gentle plucks and then floods over with surreal metal-shimmery sounds accompanied by an ominous beat.
Biased left, so may be nicer on speakers than headphones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZHNIsQYW8
Resonator I [ EURORACK ] Mutable Instruments RINGS + BEADS + SHADES
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is another "substan" track. It's made entirely on the Digitone, Elektron's FM groovebox, and the youtube title claims it is "downbeat psybient". Okay. Anyway lovely little piece of electronic pop, I really like the progression on this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvjHRdUQgdE
kaleidoscope ... elektron digitone ... psybient, downbeat
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a weird, wild ambient soundscape, with multiple independent movements; I imagine being in some kind of dimly lit warehouse or abandoned factory, with something inscrutable and maybe slightly terrifying happening at the distant end, the buzzing of electrical transformers and the straining of machines of cryptic purpose echoing off the walls.
(In fact, it's all generated from a small box in Martin's lap.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKLjCHS_Epc
MARTIN LORENZ: Farsleben (2021)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •I'm interested in music that works by varying timbre rather than pitch, so Autechre has grown into my favorite band in the world. This one is from Move of Ten, the album-length "bonus EP" from their album Oversteps; except Oversteps is inscrutable atonal experiments and Move of Ten is like… danceable, mostly. This is straight up slap-bass funk, except it's by a band that once described their genre as "digital signal processing".
https://autechre.bandcamp.com/track/rew-1
rew(1), by Autechre
Autechremcc
in reply to mcc • • •A structurally complex six minute performance of a man very enthusiastically playing the drums accompanied by a shifting set of semi-generative synth loops. This piece rules but as of this writing only has 367 views on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEdHAgM5zIo
A Synthesist's Drum Solo // Drum & Synth / Moog DFAM / Subharmonicon / Mother 32 / Elektron Digitakt
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This person used VCV Rack to create a machine that eternally generates drum & bass. The human operator then introduces structure by turning different elements up and down in the mixer (the drums and bass, although random, are *uniformly* random, so without intervention one stretch is much like any other). Honestly gets old after about 7 minutes but those first 7 minutes are pretty sick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZDNnlEU4Y
jbro 73 // VCV Rack 2 // 180 bpm chopped choir jungle
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Portishead is one of my favorite bands ever and probably my fav track of theirs is "Scorn", which I'd describe as "Glory Box" turned inside out. (That description probably won't make sense unless you've listened to Glory Box a lot.)
The track is pretty hard to find; it's on a 10-track Dummy remix/outtake compilation called "Glory Times" and, inexplicably, in the background of one scene in the 1996 Wiccasploitation film "The Craft".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBx6BUTqvQ0
Portishead - Scorn
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a 0-Ctrl sequencer and a 606 drum machine in an unusual setup where the 0-Ctrl isn't *sequencing* anything; instead, certain steps gate into the "sync" plug that advances the 606's drum pattern. The 0-Ctrl has fine control over step length so this imposes unusual rhythms on the drum machine, transforming (after some fiddling) a single basic drum pattern into a chaotic percussive symphony.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiyoF8G0Eas
Make Noise 0-Ctrl & Roland Boutique TR-06
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •I've linked pieces featuring the Moog Subharmonicon before, but this is more of an archetypical "Subharmonicon Piece". The MS uses polyrhythms and subharmonics to generate music no human would design but that feels weirdly "right".
After taking a minute to come together like a magic eye picture, this one finds an amazing groove. I imagine what the back half would sound like sung by a choir, or with drums added.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WGxsCYFRFdE
Balloons | Moog Subharmonicon
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Enner is a tactile electroacoustic instrument where touching the plates and knobs bridges signal-bearing electrical connections, and a contact mic/exposed spring reverb introduce further noise from the vibrations of touching or moving the unit itself.
The creator of this piece claims to have been trying to create a pack of sound effects, but it succeeds as "college radio at 4 PM" experimental music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrfqz_I34Sw
Soma Enner Sound Samples
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •"Slow down this song 5x" was a meme for a while, but this was the one Paulstretch track I feel really, really stands up as a legitimate piece of music. Every element of the track is transformed into something intense and epic and maybe a little spiritual. Back in 2011 I used to listen to this (no joke) every day while I worked, and it still holds up today. I have still never heard the original song.
https://youtu.be/9jUtYVm3MzA
Rebecca Black - Friday (EXTREMELY SLOW)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •YouTube recommendations turned up this mysterious EP it identified only as "Cat Steps", which turns out to be a Japanese musician releasing on an Indian record label. The cover has no English or Japanese writing, just a cat juggling Pocket Operators.
Anyway this first track is really good, an energetic clicks-and-cuts techno beat with glitchy instrumentation.
https://daisuketanabe.bandcamp.com/track/for-the-twin
for the twin, by Daisuke Tanabe
daisuke tanabemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Radiohead has a lot of odd, interesting corners in their discography, and some of their best tracks are hiding as B-sides. My sometimes-favorite song of theirs is an OK Computer b-side, "Meeting in the Aisle", which in the US was released on the "Airbag / How Am I Driving?" EP. This is one of Radiohead's very few instrumentals and it nails a dreamy, layered vibe. I recommend listening on something with bass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvh5mKrYf8Q
Meeting in the Aisle
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •The Commodore 64 had an unusually featureful, musician-friendly and *weird* sound chip. It also had a problem: Games took a *long* time to load off tape. The solution was epic and very long (often 10+ minutes) "loader" songs that played while the game code loaded. The loader for "Sanxion", by C64 master Rob Hubbard, suggests an alternate universe where 00s IDM musicians had a knack for perfect pop hooks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It7yJh-NwPY
Sanxion Commodore 64 Loader Tune
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Terry Riley is a giant of 60s experimental music, but IMO his true legacy is this long-lost artifact, created in 1967 for a nightclub opening and largely buried until 2000. This feels like it *should not have been possible* with pre-digital 1967 tech; it's all tape splicing, one Moog, and a soul song recorded off the radio. You'll think you know where this is going, but you don't.
This is a journey. Headphones recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75QFsgDMHDM
Terry Riley - You're No Good
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is an epic and extremely fun little synth-rock song performed live by a drummer and a man frantically using every device in a 270° battle station of synths, two-thirds of which is taken up by an incredibly rare Moog Modular 55 (either that hardware dates from the late seventies, or else it's one of exactly 55 units Moog manufactured for the 2015 reissue).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xLY-69Jkxw
Moog System 55, Ben Crook on drums, Peak and Eurorack afternoon teatime
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •The creator of this video claims to have accidentally invented a genre called "Acid Drone" (or rather, algorithmically uncovered it by running a plugin that randomizes all the connections in your VCV Rack patch, which applied to this particular patch happened to result in the world's first Acid Drone track). I… can't really disagree. If "Acid Drone" is anything, this is it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TDL0lZAGj8
ACID Drone Patch in VCV Rack with eclectic help of WhatTheRack
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •In this video a dude with an absolutely enormous beard slowly lays down a series of loops on a modular synth, feeling his way forward without any particular plan. The track thus evolves from two repeating tones, to what sounds like unusually evocative save point music from an early 80s video game, to a sort of IDM-flavored dance techno with a chill yet slightly anxious vibe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXKnFgxOsp4
TL066F04A11097 Eurorack Modular Synth Live Jam dawless
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in reply to mcc • • •Death in Vegas is a consistently inconsistent band; almost every release has a completely different lineup and their debut album "Dead Elvis", though amazing, seems to be two EPs and a single ("Dirt") jammed together. That second implied EP tho, starting with "Rocco", perfects a blend of 90s techno & 60s psychedelic rock that no one, except occasionally Death in Vegas, has nailed quite so precisely before or since.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzcfKkhcO7Q
Rocco (Dub)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •So as I've mentioned the normal way to use the Subharmonicon is to let it free-run with some echo to generate ambient music. In this track tho the musician continuously switches settings and modes to actually play it like an instrument, and the result is not just fun to watch but incredibly catchy.
In some Synth Youtube stunt casting, drums are handled by Yamaha's now-forgotten 1990 MIDI PDA, the QY10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84IKLzO-DMQ
Moog Subharmonicon Jump and Run Jam
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •So a couple weekends ago I was listening to the radio on scan (an interesting novelty; I hadn't been in a car for like a year at that point). We stopped for a while on one of those stations that play jazz music for old people, and this strange little track from 2020 popped up in the mix. What even… is this? Jazz? Indie rock? Beat poetry? It's definitely got a memorable off-kilter vibe to it.
https://thisisthekit.bandcamp.com/track/coming-to-get-you-nowhere
Coming to Get You Nowhere, by This Is The Kit
This Is The Kitmcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a full techno track performed on a wooden box containing almost every one of Korg's cheap desktop synths (although since there are about eight devices here, it's overall probably no longer cheap). The real attraction here though is the guy's cat, which writhes on the carpet next to him unable to understand why he is not petting her. Why do you not pet the cat!! She is right there!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv9l3XvTzt4
Stefan Torto - Chilling Queen [analog live]
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in reply to mcc • • •https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLIjft6ja7DM5rJYHWll4Y427vZOh1oyY
Because nobody can really stop me, I'm going to spend the next two weeks of my "What I'm listening to today" posts on giving my thoughts on this playlist track by track. Starting with:
The best electronic music on YouTube
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Caspar Hesselager
This is a 15-minute, totally unearthly piece wherein a loop of Nina Simone singing, fed to an envelope follower, controls a swarm of oscillators "following" her voice. The piece builds incredibly slowly, from indecipherable bass rumbling to distorted singing to indecipherable chaos again as Nina's voice is drowned out by tones flying off on trajectories she merely suggested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKE5QsT0NcA
'Follow Nina' - Make Noise B&G Shared System
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •I've linked r beny from here before; this is my favorite song of his. It's so simple but so powerful, a few chords run through steadily increasing distortion until they become a universe of sound. When I first heard it I just posted "Why did my heart just stop"
Used to when I felt like listening to this track I'd search YouTube for "Peak Ambient". That pretty much covers it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g14c8VU9h28
Novation Peak | Ambient
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This one's fun.
This is a good showcase of the jam genre I think of as "misfit toys". It makes use of a drum machine, echo, and tiny keyboard (the last modded with a soldering iron and drill into a CV controller) literally designed as toys; all three used to hang in the checkout lane at Guitar Center. Combined with a high-end 0-coast, the sound is massive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNx7GnHkc_c
A Healthy Dose of Dope AF
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This has a strange vibe but is really catchy. The poster deploys the Lyra and Subharmonicon, two machines designed for ambient music, to create rhythmic pop, and in the background uses Moog's drum machine as a melodic element. Regardless nothing feels mismatched, it's all very cohesive. It feels like the soundtrack to something, but I can't identify what.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vglXFJCHu7k
201002 Moog DFAM, Subharmonicon, Lyra 8
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This… this is the good drone. This piece is based around the two most advanced of Korg's Volca desktop synths (a patchwire modular unit that's basically a Buchla clone, and a physical modeling drum synth with some strange corners in its parameter space) and a LOT of echo. The result: Wwwwoooooooommmmmmmmmm weyyyyeyrrrerrwowwwwwww wwwwwwooooooooooooooooommmm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOLoPoJ2mzI
Volca Tribal || Volca Drum & Volca Modular
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Elektron has this family of "Grooveboxes" that all have similar casing and interfaces. Their unchallenged master on YouTube is Ivar Tryti, who three years ago got a Digitakt and in time since has posted at least 3 albums' worth of trip-hop excellence. This track combines Elektron's FM synth box with their sampler to build an incredible, blissfully loopy, unnamable energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDroSNld2bg
DT&DN #4 I Learned A Cool Secret
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in reply to mcc • • •Mr. Zarubin has a bunch of videos that stand out to me for getting a ton of mileage out of simple, low-end synths and guitar pedals (its not in this one, but some of his best tracks make amazing use of the Casio SA-5 keyboard for children). This one track in particular sticks with me for just having a really great chill feeling to it.
https://youtu.be/zSbueTShmnw
Square (Volca Keys, Volca FM, OP-1, PO-32,
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Here beny uses a Roli Seaboard MPE controller (a kind of squishy keyboard that records how hard you press and how you slide your fingers around the keys) to play a violin sample synth with the expressiveness of real violins. Run thru chunky reverb, each note becomes a stuttery chorus of violins. Result is an intense feeling of floating in viscous air, slowly orbiting an indistinct point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFGpIWZZgHo
Sempervirens | Felt Instruments Blisko, Strymon Magneto
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •The Minibrute is my favorite monosynth, really full sounds. In this video Hosking sat down to do a product demo of the absurdly-expensive polyphonic Brute, but wound up just incidentally composing an independently gorgeous piece of music.
What originally fascinated me about this is it's the only song I can think of that has no drums yet still has a drop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dAyO_ndHf4
Ambient jam with the Arturia PolyBrute
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •I made a rule for myself no more than two songs from a single artist on this list, so I had to pick just two r beny and now here's the second Ivar Tryti song.
I'm not sure what genre this is. Not quite trip hop. Whatever DJ Shadow and maybe early Four Tet were? A lot of Tryti songs have long piano samples in them; I think he might actually just have a piano somewhere off camera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFrxeRDuUaE
Digitakt Sketch #46 Comfort Zone
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Some unusual synths involved here: Korg's modern wavetable synth and a variant of the Novation Bass Station coproduced with Aphex Twin. What sells it tho is MIDI and a stutter plugin generating quasi-random sequences and changing things up every few seconds to make something unpredictable, haunting and a little bit frightening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5LDPzawxEM
AFX Station, Korg Wavestate, Elektron Digitone, Stutter Edit 2
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in reply to mcc • • •Modular synthesizers are usually about sculpting single finely tuned timbres, and YouTube synth videos are often just to show off one single sound or groove. It's kinda rare to see anything with conventional song structure. Which is fine! But then here's a complete, compelling pop song, with singing!— very good singing!— based around modular synths and a Buchla easel, and it's *amazing*.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pjpZeUQdCI
Modular / Eurorack Music - Oscillation
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •Another MPE controller, but plugged into a fancypants 24-saw oscillator, so you have a synth being controlled moment to moment with the expressive dimension of a violin. I worry these writeups overemphasize the technical so to be clear the piece performed is gutpunch stunning. This is the power of a human playing a musical instrument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQilV-OrDYQ
Futuresonus Parva analog poly-synth with LinnStrument demo
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a one-hour live music set with a single synth and a single drum machine, that I literally did listen to today as programming focus music. It's effective techno, completely self-assured, that quickly hits a groove in one of those trance subgenres I never bothered learning the name of. I especially liked the first twenty minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiQPj-48cPY
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Okay so this one… might be asking a lot of you… but. This is a rule-based composition based on a two-dimensional just-intonation scale and the tetronimoes from Tetris. Each chord is 4 frequencies related by Tetris-piece-shaped positions on a grid of ratios, and each chord "touches" the previous one on the grid. There's a full explanation on YouTube but if you think about how it works it might just distract you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSL_Axohw94
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a 36 minute piece consisting entirely of what appears to be two eight-note sequences combined in various ways, with a human operator switching up the tempo and mix levels every five minutes or so to keep it fresh. Honestly, IMO, it works. Sometimes it is good to listen to 8 notes for 36 minutes. Embrace the ambience! Zone out! Eno compels you! Satie compels you!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ_q528fbHM
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •I think I posted one of this person's hourlong self-playing VCV Rack patches before; this one's much more "songlike" than the other. It walks a fine razor's edge, really; if you pay attention it seems to have a lot of nonlooping detail, it sounds structured and composed, but if you allow your attention to wander it returns to being ambient primeval soup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDa2KC8o8Uk
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Remember "Plastic Love"? For a while the "Plastic Love" of YouTube synth jams was "Slumber", the first of Alastair Wilson's many excellent ambient self-playing patch videos. YouTube recs played this for me *so* many times. I didn't really mind though as this is ambient music at its best, low slow tones suggesting musical structure at some geological scale you can't perceive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1RXypmPCwA
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Modular artists love "self-playing patches". It's like a game: find enough mechanical structure in your rack to produce enough novelty to keep people interested for the length of a "song".
This piece starts with the modular trope of "Rings plucks at random times and pitches into echo" but then asks a different question: What if I just sat down and played the frickin piano? And it's great
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1F83-wTbLQ
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Three minutes of strange but interesting noises (warning, a bit harsh) based around unusual feedback loops in the Strega patch points. The oscillator's pitch is being modulated by its own subharmonic, which produces rhythmic popping clicks on a chaotically determined tempo as it rapidly jumps from under to above human hearing range and back, until the clicks run together and something stranger happens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQtsdyXgwII
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This starts as electric/datastream noise then falls into a lovely spacey Burial-like rhythmic groove for the duration, like listening to industrial music being played at the far other end of an abandoned subway station. I dunno. I just liked it.
https://hhelmm.bandcamp.com/track/repellent
Repellent, by Helm
Helmmcc
in reply to mcc • • •So I feel like if I was going to recommend exactly one Self song it probably should not be "Microchip Girl", but there's something just really charming about this borderline-jazz vaudeville(?) serenade. This was put out on an "album of b-sides" that Self (Matt Mahaffey) released via mail-order at one point between major-label albums, and I guess the song's probably a little more relatable to me now than it was in 1997.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL5leclCiv8
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a hypnotic, constantly churning 80-minute ambient piece by the lead designer of the Pittsburgh Modular synth company, performed live and streamed from the company's account. It seems to me this would make great background music for a programming trance, guided meditation or drug trip, assuming you want your code, meditation or trip to take a sinister turn somewhere around the 36 minute mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ieXd1oHguU
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is an endlessly shifting self-playing patch on a synth eurorack sitting out on a back porch. Throughout the take some dudes are visible out of focus in the background. You know, just some dudes hanging out on the porch chilling to mechanically generated aleatoric music scientifically optimized for chilling on the back porch to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD7Jk7YNOTg
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Short, cryptic-but-compelling piece exploring the configuration space of the Strega, with the musician tweaking the knobs and controls so constantly it's like they're playing a conventional instrument. BTW if this wasn't clear, those gold circles and squares on the Strega face are "patch points" you bridge by touching them. The human body conducts electricity so you can run control voltage thru it like a patch cable.
https://youtu.be/AexFEvhJisk
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •I normally think of VCV Rack as being an instrument—a signal chain you control from external MIDI, or a incubator for self-playing music generation. Here tho is a video of a guy who's set it up as a full music production environment, piano roll sequencers and mixers and multiband-compression mastering and all, and deploys it to make some classic 90s techno.
(The cables are there, just at ~10% opacity.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvXi_oaCDDo
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Here's a video showing off the power of the Novation MIDI controllers with Ableton Live, specifically the looper interface. Torto builds an entire dark electronic song from nothing as the song itself is playing; other than what seems to be a pre-prepared drum loop, Torto is playing every note himself on the Launchpad's weird isomorphic-keyboard scale grid thing. It's legit cool to watch.
https://youtu.be/A0PL1sleszk
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a melodic drum&bass track with a lovely feeling to it from the golden age of IDM (circa 2005). The artist is named either "Wisp" or "RWD", it's not clear. I feel like this is something I should have known about at the time it was released but I'd somehow never heard of this artist until I stumbled across this album on YouTube this week.
https://reiddunn.bandcamp.com/track/negions-fail
Negions Fail, by RWD
RWDmcc
in reply to mcc • • •An extremely cool dub techno sorta track, only two and a half minutes but there's a lot going on.
If you look it's being driven from the Polyend Play which is kind of like a Novation Launchpad and a portable DAW all in one, the musician will have previously programmed in loops with the button grid and now is using special play-mode functions mapped to those buttons to guide the performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVsoynrsIIU
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •A cool little groove full of subtle quiet noises. Cuts off suddenly.
It's not 100% clear what this video is, though the thumbnail seems to link it to an alleged max/msp file used by the band Autechre that leaked in the 00s. So did this person mod the leak to create a (partially) new song, and the use of illicit files is why they're cagey explaining the video? Or is this just inspired by Autechre?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5SpeXGYbME
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a simply charming desktop synth duet from 2016 (which for Synth Jam YouTube is basically the paleolithic era). One musician drives the bass and drums while the other one sings into the looper function of an OP-1, constantly tweaking until she's singing in harmony with an entire choir of her own voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ_goAThKkI
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •A jam from 2016 that does absolutely the most with the absolute least. This sets up a killer hook on one Volca Keys and one Pocket Operator drum machine and then explores it as completely as the sequencing capabilities of the devices allow, and then some, as the musician proceeds to hand-animate what seems like every single knob the Volca has. You could dance to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwBQcAHuQY4
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •A lo-fi hip hop beats track with a sort of Earthbound feeling to it. The entire complicated track is produced from the PO-33 (the little calculator looking thing on the left, it's a sampler) with Korg's DIY-kit microsynth used to add reverb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogBZxAd5vW4
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •I listen to a lot of extremely varied electronic music and this one is still very mysterious to me. I guess this is "drone". Six minutes of enigmatic hums and distant flutters and clanks. There seems to be a melody, but it's too large and slow to see the entire thing at once. This all appears to be the result of using a reverb filter for something entirely other than reverb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmPjvxKF3-Q
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •A looper with automated chaotic phasing, an octave doubler, and a… "horror playground live rig"? This person appears to have built a kind of prepared piano without the piano part, a random chunk of wood with guitar pickups and vibratey bits of metal stuck into it at random, ostensibly so they can make horror movie soundtracks?, in practice for making Einsturzende Neubauten grooves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjiIlQmg6Ok
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •So I'm watching this video of a synth trade show, and one of the comments mentions that a guy walking by in the background is "the best organ player in Japan". Huh.
So I look the guy up and find him doing this intense and moody live cover of an old Jaco Pastorius jazz piece, in collaboration with a drummer who seems to be picking up psychic transmissions from another galaxy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SkH8M1MVos
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •If you dump the ROM of the NES version of Maniac Mansion, there's an entire completed song on the cart the game never uses. According to game composer George Sanger, it was originally supposed to be the theme for Dr. Fred (I'm not sure it really fits him). I'm really captivated by this song, it's weird and rocking and it has a really particular emotion to it I'm not sure I can identify in any other piece of music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7eVjYJl4nw
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a lovely performance on a cheap sampling drum machine drowned in reverb, centered on a gong-like bell sample that swirls hypnotically close and away. A good track to just lay back and float in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpVqVaxlY2g
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •I think I've posted a few tracks before based on SOMA's idiosyncratic instruments; the Pulsar is their take on a drum machine, based around heavy rewirability, chaos injection and a *lot* of distortion. This is a fun robot dance number showing off what the Pulsar can do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDq-g9MTbE4
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is in some ways a very gentle track, the only thing that resembles a beat is a shaped bass, but it's got this enormous cinematic feeling to it. Basically this is good music for listening to as you awake at the bottom of a dying space station, barely feeling your bruises. You have been betrayed. You climb the levels in low-g slow motion, knowing who awaits you at the top. Your destiny is above you, or your doom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpCo33BEZD4
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a 15-minute ambient-plucking-noises-and-bass groove that builds in a really good way. Another one of those tracks that's good background sound when you're doing something else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjOLfaeHK0A
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Another piece with the Pulsar, SOMA's drum machine. This time it's paired with the Ornament, SOMA's oblique "sequencer": a controlled chaos generator used in this case to trigger congo patterns and distorted industrial drums while something (also the Ornament?) pushes semirandom notes into a 90s-IDM-reminiscent synth lead (which the musician seems to have jury-rigged from nowhere by hijacking one of the drum oscillators).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uogGR5Ox_v0
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •So if I'd made this I'd probably have named it "poolcore", but… whatever. This is a spaced-out clicks-and-cuts percussive blend with the Pulsar, controlled via MIDI from the Digitakt, supplying glitchy sounding analog drums while the Digitakt overdubs the standard Amen break samples. The tension between the two modes of techno keeps the mood a fascinating split between chill and anxious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ9iP8kJ1Vo
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •What if I just did an entire week of these posting only SOMA synth pieces?
So the Lyra-8 is all about reverb; its oscillators maximize harmonics so the reverb can smear those out. This musician decided that *wasn't enough reverb*, so he added the Strega for maximum possible ominous howling drone.
Note the 0-CTRL isn't sequencing anything; it's wired so the harder he presses the keyboard the more the reverb expands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDsjpKJ3H5k
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •The Ornament is a machine for algorithmically sequencing triggers. One of its trigger output modes is "connect to ground", and wiring those outputs to the touch plates on the Lyra simulates the touch of a human finger. So in this one a PO-32 drum machine plays highly distorted beats while the ornament is picking out a note sequence on the Lyra's finger keys, producing something intense and unsettlingly alien.
https://youtu.be/3Ys7ETM4CdY
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •A long, slow dirge with a beat so chill it's frigid and a sinister hissing hum, like you're being serenaded by a bank of air conditioners or a swarm of wasps. I absolutely love this.
This one has the full SOMA complement of a Lyra, a Pulsar, and two Ornaments, with each Ornament controlling one device and the Lyra controller on a much slower timescale to differentiate drums and "melody".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT4X9rSbTjM
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Four minutes of lovely blasting industrial noise, evolving from the drone of evil bagpipes to drunkenly stagging almost-melodic cinematic synthwave.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCy5KgTWQ4s
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Live jazz performance of a woman playing a standup bass and singing to her own accompaniment. A really compelling piece with a good groove.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlVpBTpaOU8
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This album is mostly spacy shoegaze until suddenly this track hits in a blast of desynced dance beats, electronic buzzing and ghostly singing; what I didn't know until this week is the reason it's so different is it's the album's one track produced entirely by Jarboe, the woman singing on it. I always assumed this was a sample collage and that the singing was some folk song they'd dug up.
IMO should be experienced loud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpWiicPTnCo
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •I didn't know this existed until last week, but Zappa's final album ("Jazz from Hell") was created entirely on the Synclavier, a late-70s DAW predating microcomputers and shipping on several large cabinets. It's impossible to comprehend what this felt like in 1986 as at the time it must have felt impossibly futuristic but to me (and probably you) it indelibly sounds like general MIDI on cheap 90s PC sound cards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvpdiIaZZLg
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Incredibly quiet and gentle, this one is a few minutes of soft hissing hums with sharper melodic synths bubbling under the surface. The piece is performed on a Buchla-style modular suitcase; the "Verbos" is the touch keyboard, which is screwed into the suitcase along with the synth modules.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ1jzrhYvVM
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •SOMA demo by SOMA's founder, using a Pulsar, Lyra and two Ornaments (this time crosswired to make one giant 16-operator Ornament).
This one is *incredibly* challenging, with every element controlled by analog generative circuits; all the elements of a "song" are present but arranged in an alien way, with cryptic harmonic leaps and no consistent tempo. The structure here has nothing to do with humans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCYxEBDfX4Y
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This came up on Tidal's new releases stream and I just really liked it. A voice floating in a sea of shimmer pedals. If people had never stopped making trip-hop maybe it would sound like this by now.
There's an official upload of this on YouTube with cool analog video accompaniment, but the sound quality (mastering?!) on that version's real bad. Maybe pull that up and watch it simultaneously but muted.
https://danielavery.bandcamp.com/track/wall-of-sleep
Wall of Sleep, by Daniel Avery
Daniel Averymcc
in reply to mcc • • •This song was recorded, and rejected, for With Teeth, and unheard until September 2005 when MTV held a benefit concert for victims of Hurricane Katrina and Trent Reznor (a longtime New Orleans resident) showed up and played this version solo on piano accompanied only by a drum machine.
The chorus chord progression was later used in "34 Ghosts IV", so this is technically the original version of Old Town Road.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RGYBP1_D1U
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Thom Yorke's solo stuff tends to a stripped-down style, seemingly limited to whatever electronic gear Yorke can program himself. This is often stark and haunting, but in the case of the album version of "Cymbal Rush" it's just undercooked.
But then there's this incredible one-off live version, which, given inclusion of Johnny Greenwood and Nigel Godrich (watch at 2:50) I guess is more like a Radiohead cover.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4hZt--0Yno
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •These are some dudes who crowdfund recording their jazz band performances and posting them on YouTube and they just happen to be super good. I found them through a track they called "Sad Boy Anthem" but they've got a bunch of these full-length 50-minute-ish "Live!" performances up and that's the real gold. I listened to a few of their livestream sets and this one was my favorite.
https://youtu.be/dHb-RtxO2nA?t=90
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Does anyone remember "dub"? For a while in the early 00s we had this techno genre we called "dub", which was an annoying name because it was inspired by but not the same as dub reggae. Anyway this guy posts daily-ish synth doodles on YouTube and this particular one has strong dub vibes. Good energy here, starts chill and builds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJHWuMED4yY
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •"Songs from the Choir Girl Hotel" had a markedly different style from basically every other Tori Amos release (she got a backup band, basically) in a way that Tori Amos herself did not actually seem to like, but wow, what a unique album. Each of the first 9 tracks is a standout in some way but "Cruel", a song which has no piano at all but anchors itself around *incredibly* dirty electric bass, has always been my favorite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j3IQH74jXc
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is the same guy from Monday I guess? Whatever. This is a good ominous ambient piece with the "Rumble of Ancient Times", SOMA's toy 8-bit synth, combined with Korg's DIY reverb filter. It's made from two improvised takes spliced together so it has a really good movement structure to it ("it's like listening to a real song!"). If you can listen to this on speakers with bass that's an amazing experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n63V-okqcE0
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a live set of that hardkore classic 90s style four on the floor techno. It's somewhat of note that it's being made with a collection of modern synths (like the Pulsar and Strega, to say nothing of the modular synth rack) that I associate more with noise/ambient, but rather than grabbing your attention the sculpted noises just integrate cleanly into the groove.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eleLA1OH_iQ
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is a super chill lo-fi hip hop beats track on the PO-12 and PO-33 toy synthesizers (a drum machine and a sampler). Soul singing chopped up into vaguely pleasant but entirely asemic syllabic soup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4KeFImCGao
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •I found "Shebang", a lovely little EP thing, on Tidal and was immediately enraptured by the second track, a dark and atmospheric cauldron of unpredictably roiling bass and jazz noises. Like a band all simultaneously woke up from a nap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbO4Z3hqlk0
The whole album (a playlist is linked on YouTube, or https://orenambarchi.bandcamp.com/album/shebang on Bandcamp) is honestly really worth a listen, it flows well and "II" extends into a 3-song suite.
Shebang, by Oren Ambarchi
Oren Ambarchimcc
in reply to mcc • • •"It's Gonna Rain" is based on a recording of a San Francisco street preacher and "phasing" (multiple copies of a tape playing at different speeds, drifting in and out of sync).
The first part, which sounds oddly like trance music, Reich exhibited in 1965; he initially withheld this, the more-complex second part, fearing it was imbued with so much chaos its release would be dangerous for the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=957pqIqPE7I
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is the start of side 2 of "Ambient I: Music for Airports", Eno's infamous album that coined "ambient music" and made his experimental music forever overshadow his pop work (w/ Roxy Music, David Bowie etc). The songs all utilize Reich-style phasing of long loops; this track is the most complex, and my favorite.
Although MFA is great ambient for many contexts, in my opinion it is not appropriate for airports. Wrong mood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4S8be2xlD8
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •This is the acapella version of "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen, layered on itself 147 times exponentially increasing. In other words, self-explanatory.
https://mabsonenterprises.bandcamp.com/track/call-me-maybe-acapella-147-times-exponentially-layered
(There is a clear line running through Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Negativland, Plunderphonics, Martin Arnold, "It's Over 9000!"/YTP/YTMND and Neil Cicierega/meme mashups. It's all one artistic tradition.)
Call Me Maybe Acapella 147 Times Exponentially Layered, by Dan Deacon
Mabson Enterprisesmcc
in reply to mcc • • •Some classic industrial-flavored dark-trance dance music with a lot of juicy clipping. I would describe it as "hype". It is very easy to imagine this being played in a warehouse or some other very large room full of people so if you have not been able to visit a large room full of people in the last couple years maybe this will be a good simulacrum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdK8Xj2z5Kg
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •More 90s-style hard rave music: a 10-minute flowing set of various songs played on the EMX-1 groovebox, a precursor to the Volca (but aimed at professional DJs rather than hobbyists). In 2004 when this device was released these sounds would have probably sounded five years out of date, but listening now in 2022 sounding like it's from 1999 only sounds charming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrM2xCglnZE
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •So the concept here is real simple: This guy got a new synthesizer and he's trying it out, by feeding in a single semi-randomized sequence (bottom left) and turning knobs. The result is like watching something go in and out of focus, as different knob configs make more or less sonic sense (peaking in hypeness around 2:00).
The XPO is based around stereo so headphones recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBNEgcV-2tYnm
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPt4zmYRCys
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •"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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaJT6mvNUwU
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNJhSs9Q0SU
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Some good focused modular ambient. Chaotic windchime sounds, skittering against a quiet but driving beat that gives the piece a good backbone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1nW5HYLNUA
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUzZmFrTGBw
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0Pr_BQQWbs
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoOQPhMxYGs
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_HPzhfxg9g
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPX3Nq5znVQ
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACIjT_hHuyg
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz0Qb5ws98k
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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:
https://mapledeathrecords.bandcamp.com/track/les-artisans
Les Artisans, by Theoreme
Maple Death Recordsmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSA1F9D0RH8
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y--563E_-Mk
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqZzBtIN30A
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YtOWeAKTlo
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsc-_qbOrdo
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LafSIzwdo-s
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3EuiU1qdpE
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrIHd5qAffU
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •"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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLFDYwzU56s
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsT3-B1zQBc
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO11wOrGxSA
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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:
https://danielmkarlsson.bandcamp.com/track/twelfth
Twelfth, by Daniel M Karlsson
Daniel M Karlssonmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_1glqhmX-Q
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_h7YZ-PDiU
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvoolkTIa2w
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sr5JBlofM0
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh20zAi3l5o
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECBiZ8P_Xs
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvmciNTS60A
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTRDMKQyPSM
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://deathbysheep.com/track/limited-access
Limited access, by GOLDEN BOY
DEATHBYSHEEP RECORDSmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdPCt5ZEf40
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekNkMkF9qig
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC2vqPHUw7s
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAriDgdd8J4
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://ooioojp.bandcamp.com/track/kawasemi-ah
kawasemi Ah, by OOIOO
OOIOOmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Biqz1r2d_xY
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://candlefam.bandcamp.com/track/la-jet-e
La Jetée, by Sines of Exquisite Pleasure
Fantasy Audio Magazinemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5sEjtfmPVw
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSNVv2x6QT8
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEOv-OCil58
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8Y9vVDyuzg
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlzb7XnCoAc
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1TDKIWG6DY
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5LKC0h6NbU
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArNMLWOM2_o
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4syAC6LxT1Y
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHgY892cYtg
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQatVhfxHK0
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDN_Zy8sg4w
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://boardsofcanada.bandcamp.com/track/sixtyniner
Sixtyniner, by Boards of Canada
Boards of Canadamcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQf7tEJmKEg
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLQenWSEQ-I
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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/
r/synthesizers - Push for woogies
redditmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggQX4bPwnlo
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3egwPIkSGk
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE3LsBuzXv8
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNL8eU7aAX4
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAtLRZxt1_8
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4byztyOvIjU
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugZfdFJwrdA
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQyT9aEeLEY
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK6Xf-dS4gI
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7o2BMR66Sw
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS1lMn42l04
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi8f5cub7-s
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StnhhR_S-mM
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2YFw8JJjmI
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INLx7tAVoV8
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f81UbrzrTU
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •[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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5_hfSs9Pnc
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3rfaHNxvkE
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://youtu.be/1rWoRBNt11M
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NONbMk8kPyM
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxTg70xeMMA
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0EnL4M1jjE
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aeNtFCaYt8
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igVxjCecmEg
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://obliqueoccasions.bandcamp.com/track/--105
真実を信頼する, by Oblique Occasions
Oblique Occasionsmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://obliqueoccasions.bandcamp.com/track/--101
海に憎しみを叫ぶ, by Oblique Occasions
Oblique Occasionsmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCMWWiEjWuw
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1ZF4Oojoo
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfAQxyx5Vng
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpY9hW_My90
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://anvilcreations.bandcamp.com/track/lysergenesis-2
Lysergenesis, by Lauri Paisley
Anvil Creationsmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsn2TY7LpKo
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •[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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Wrr9r_EVM
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPfQ5LLQYEs
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvnAjaXo5Iw
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv5caGbbZgk
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://ominousrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-12
untitled, by rien
Ominous Recordingsmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://impermanence.bandcamp.com/track/ii
II, by Impermanence
Impermanencemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=737HYy4EQOw
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://fourtet.bandcamp.com/track/moth
Moth, by Burial + Four Tet
Four TetDevine Lu Linvega
in reply to mcc • • •mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_NLoZDp7tA
Deep progressive house jam with hardware synths - M:S, Model D, Skulpt, Microfreak, NTS-1, Volca FM.
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
Down With Silent Night / A tichou nocí snesl svá, by The Havels / Irena & Vojtech Havlovi
The Havels / Irena & Vojtech Havlovimcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnrICy3Bc2U
Hieronymus Bosch Butt Music
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skTOqCxTohU
Brother
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh1cvSBsqoI
Earth | Dissolution III
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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:
https://teramelos.bandcamp.com/track/super-fxx
Super Fxx, by Tera Melos
Tera Melosmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpNPGKmz4-w&t=6515s
Hella Concentration Face Japan Tour 2004 HQ (default ffmpeg up-scaling)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs6AjuzJJNk
BORIS "My Neighbor Satan" (Official)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni4x5uyG1Wc
Parkway Drive - "Idols and Anchors" (Full Album Stream)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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".
https://beholdthearctopus.bandcamp.com/track/annihilvore
Annihilvore, by Behold The Arctopus
Behold The Arctopusmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C66ei3Y8LCk
Emperor - My Empire's Doom
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLcgcX18zk8
Modular jam with Volca Modular, Korg NTS-1 and Playtronica Touch Me
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXu6iOy5Tm0
Roland MKS-80 REV5 & MPG-80 (1983) - Werkstatt Matlak
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •"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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHimO77MM4
Funkstörung - A8 KM34
YouTubeDevine Lu Linvega
in reply to mcc • • •mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUv3zFJ5ZPo
T-8 ROLAND AIRA COMPACT | 最強ACIDマシーン。The strongest ACID machine.
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8nWTJnHJ_w
devolver by Stardust
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgI4qjk9z0Y
Teisco Synthesizer 110F (1980) - Werkstatt Matlak
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywHtJOl4BTc
Eurorack idm
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7T8br7jO80
Law – Unreleased Jungle Selection
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU_KPIjcRS4
Digital
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://jamiemyerson.com/track/threat-actor
Threat Actor, by Jamie Myerson
Jamie Myersonmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dgrUQbP_nY
Plug (Luke Vibert) - 7:10
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •"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.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ-CEoJWQJY
Roni Size/Reprazent - Brown Paper Bag. Nobukazu Takemura Remix
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ehV1HsL5o
Point of View
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •[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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ind_xkefnKM
Viewpoint
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jdWHMPLDSQ
Lessness
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrZ8A_NMdHo
LOST SOULS - MODBAP [ STREGA 0-COAST MPC ONE ]
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzfw27iYgKs
Ambient then heavy with Moog One, Subsequent 37, Hologram Microcosm, and eurorack drums
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdWNPAjq-lM
Live Techno Jam #6 - Roland TR6S - Quadrantid Swarm - Minitaur - BlueBox - Blofeld - NTS1
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxm-OOEkulo
Heavy Medicine // Make Noise Strega, 0-coast, 0-CTRL // Moog Mother, Matriarch, Elektron
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leu_bSCx3S4
Serge Modular Live Patching Improv - Modular Notes Vol.2 10 - Pure Serge Eurorack - 模塊兒筆記
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2yL9NCNkKY
Ambient patching with Prism Circuits Canvas (paperface) and Quasar systems, BPoOT (20220825 191252)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF1nsMBS5SY
Cartesian Somersaults (PET 4032)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STp1IxOk6ME
Call Me Up Again (Channel F, Sleizsa Trio, real hardware)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kOZEckhuLc
Chi-Fou-Mi (Channel F, Sleizsa Duo, real hardware)
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRblrgQ3Jiw
Croaker - It's universal
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuOcR2cAPWw
STU - “Slub” (ST) [Oscilloscope View]
YouTubeChapel of Ghouls 'n' Ghosts
in reply to mcc • • •mcc
in reply to Chapel of Ghouls 'n' Ghosts • • •series of personal computer models
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)mcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIRTYKuZYu4
Gorkem Sen - Yay Bahar
YouTubemcc
in reply to mcc • • •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 ~~~.
https://stumusic.bandcamp.com/track/return
Return, by STU
STUmcc
in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2GbnenF5vc
Moog Mavis | Hivemind II
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in reply to mcc • • •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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWNW_wWMoH4
nonmateria
2023-03-18 12:01:54