What I'm listening to today: "Cruel", Tori Amos
"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.
What I'm listening to today: "random noise 076 SOMA RoAT, NTS-1"
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.
What I'm listening to today: "22 Minutes of Live Modular Techno \\ Verbos, Make Noise Easel, Pulsar 23"
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.
What I'm listening to today: "SUMMER COMES EARLY TONIGHT", thofabyq
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.
What I'm listening to today: "Shebang II", Oren Ambarchi
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.
What I'm listening to today: "It's Gonna Rain, Pt. II", Steve Reich
"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.
What I'm listening to today: "1/2", Brian Eno
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.
What I'm listening to today: "Call Me Maybe Acapella 147 Times Exponentially Layered", Dan Deacon
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.)
from the album Call Me Maybe
What I'm listening to today: "Modular Techno Performance// Verbos + SOMA Pulsar 23 + Digitakt", Raucous Studio
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.
What I'm listening to today: "AepoK feat. Pit&Gore 〓 Visa 96 ☰ Korg EMX - Electro Set live Electribe", CycLoop
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.
What I'm listening to today: "Open Your Mind // First Jam with the MAKENOISE XPO", Jon Gee
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.
Never quite know how to begin with a new module. Might as well see what it can do. I love XPO. Also included in this little numba is Deckard’s Voice & Rachae...
What I'm listening to today: "Unstability", Hidenobu Ito
One of the best ever songs from the early 00s "Glitch" genre was this track by this mostly-forgotten artist from the soundtrack of Boogiepop Phantom, a mostly-forgotten anime. Several cut-up synth lines (or maybe just a Reaktor script?) collide together and spill ruptured tonal organs all over the floor.
The bass in this YouTube rip is unfortunately a little de-emphasized, so subwoofer or headphones recommended.
What I'm listening to today: "Mutable Marbles experiment., eastern drone swedgling.", Jonny Riddles
"Marbles" is a randomness generator for modular racks, but for structured randomness, it's designed to make values cluster. Here it's being used to pilot timbres of hypnotic clanging noises—like gongs swinging in the wind somewhere distant at the edge of your hearing, but made of metal not of this world, gritty and distorted.
Warning, the mix is biased a bit to left ear.
What I'm listening to today: "Tribute", Guano Apes
The Guano Apes were a nu-metal one-hit-wonder on German radio in the late 90s. This isn't their hit; it's their album's final track, where they cut loose and made something really *weird*, starting with funky metal then… devolving? I can't describe it. There's a sense of dread, the vocalist is trying to communicate something she seems to think is very important but doesn't quite have the English skills to get across.
What I'm listening to today: "Ondes Sonores", Jean François Lavielle
Some good focused modular ambient. Chaotic windchime sounds, skittering against a quiet but driving beat that gives the piece a good backbone.
What I'm listening to today: "Shell Fish", Cool Breeze Rack
This is a low-tempo, slightly unsettling VCV rack patch with some interesting dynamics shifts, but what's interesting about it is all of the multiple melody lines appear to be sequenced by random generators. Despite this the brain does a startlingly convincing job of seeing patterns in the chaos even if it knows there is no pattern. This is the true power of randomly selected notes.
Video image is a still.
What I'm listening to today: "Soma DVINA / Make Noise Strega / 0-CTRL", Jon Gee
Chill, dreamy and atmospheric. Here Jon combines my favorite echo/feedback/hiss device (the Strega) with a new device from SOMA which is actually not a synthesizer but is sort of a two-stringed duxianqin [Vietnamese monochord]. (SOMA say they were inspired by Persian and Hindustani instruments.) Jon uses all this to create bowed-string and synth-tone sounds drifting in and out of aural fog.
What I'm listening to today: "Guess The Picture", DSP Kills
A fun, peppy jam that seems to be trying to hit as many different electronic music genres within three minutes as possible, but especially seems to love timbres from IDM and jungle. Created on an absolute nuclear control panel of a modular setup, but it's orchestrated from a PC running some sort of tracker so it's structured more like a complex mixed/prerecorded piece than typical live modular. I like the bass.
What I'm listening to today: "3x NYMPHES and 1 spare hour to shoot a video", Dimitra Manthou
As the title says, a synth designer/cofounder at Dreadbox had a slow afternoon one day, so she grabbed a Nymphes and over an hour dubbed it on itself 3 times to make this strange little song. It's short but it turned out really compelling, there's a fascinating mood to it. It tastes to me like aluminum.
What I'm listening to today: "SynthCone VISMUTH with Universe Zen Audio VOSKHOD-2 -=|=- DRONE DARK AMBIENT", GIPNOZER
If you've been following this thread you'll notice I keep returning to tracks that consist entirely of ominous howling, and this is for a simple reason, which is that I *really like* ominous howling. This is a great 10-minute track depicting the constant approach of an enormous swarm of invisible insects, punctuated by periodic electric squealing.
What I'm listening to today: "Finding Beauty in Distortion", Raucous Studio
Six minutes of meditative "weird noises" based around using an analog implementation of an OR gate as a distortion filter. Mostly very quiet actually, but full of lovely subtle moments. A good demonstration of how one can perceive rhythm in otherwise ambient works through simple things like a repeating click or a phaser pedal.
Headphones recommended.
What I'm listening to today: "L.E.S. Artistes", Santigold
The late 00s had a wealth of excellent female producer/songwriter/singers (Janelle Monae, Robyn etc) and among that group Santigold never quite got the attention she deserved, I thought. She's still releasing albums but her first album still stands out to me for its unusual synth accents and the first track, "L.E.S. Artistes", a basically perfect pop song that delivers unforgettably catchy funk from moment one.
What I'm listening to today: "Les Artisans", Theoreme
This album's from 2021 but what it makes me think of more than anything else is like old Einstürzende Neubauten or Swans songs with industrial-sounding (in the sense of "like a factory") bass sounds and clanging beats and prose being intoned in a low voice, except that in this one woman intoning the prose is speaking French instead of German. Anyway, I liked it. The first track on here is the best:
from the album Les Artisans
What I'm listening to today: "Les Artistes", Rachid Taha
So if you have Spotify or Tidal or one of those other big unethical streaming sites, a weird thing you can do is search for a song by name, click "play" from the search page and it will *play all the search results alphabetically*, which sounds like it should not work but is sometimes startlingly effective.
Anyway here's some jamming French rockabilly by an Algerian singer / social activist. Guess how I found it
What I'm listening to today: "THE LIZ", Armani Caesar
Armani Caesar is a new rapper from Buffalo NY with a distinct and really satisfying musical aesthetic. Her rap style evokes 90s rappers like Lil Kim and Foxy Brown, her production evokes Dan the Automator and Kool Keith. I'm making comparisons to old stuff but this isn't retro, it feels like she picked up where those artists left off. She has two good albums in the last two years, both of them named "THE LIZ".
What I'm listening to today: "Communiqué: Approach Spiral", Michael Shrieve
Awhile back I posted a music link here and someone said it gave them "Approach Spiral vibes". I didn't know what that was but it turns out in 1984 the drummer for Santana released an album of chill electronic music. This track features what I guess 80s Americans would have called a "world music" beat, 12 minutes long with a slow but increasingly intense build, and the vibes are excellent.
What I'm listening to today: "Celestial Soda Pop", Ray Lynch
This album, "Deep Breakfast" was self-produced/self-released by Ray Lynch in 1984, before "techno" was a word; back then it would have been sold as "New Age". Things were fuzzier then.
I heard this song in the 7th grade. I hadn't awakened into musical consciousness yet, so the only way I knew then to explain the extremely deep impression it left on me was "this is the best Final Fantasy overworld music ever".
What I'm listening to today: "Korg Wavestate relax", Ondřej Štěpánek
This is someone's synth jam with Korg's Minilogue-ized Wavestation equivalent; it's recorded last year, but has a deliciously early-90s vibe to it. The piece feels like it's building toward something, but stays quiet and slow right to the end; I get the sense of a song from a movie soundtrack, an early establishing scene, laying down leitmotifs that will pay off in tense and action-packed scenes later.
What I'm listening to today: "Children", Robert Miles
It wasn't easy to be a techno fan in Texas in 1995. The Chemical Brothers and "electronica" were still a couple years off so the rock station gave me nothing to work with. My only sources were college radio and, occasionally, 104.1, the soft rock station, which targeted moms but because it played pop *occasionally* would allow dance tracks into its lineup. Occasionally this meant true synth bangers, like "Children".
What I'm listening to today: "Full Performance (Live on KEXP)", Hania Rani
About a month ago this lady and her synthesizers did a live set on a Seattle radio station. The first six or so minutes are some basic chill 90s style ambient synths, but then she starts layering in piano and singing and from that point to the end it feels like she's banging on your heart with a hammer.
The final minutes are an interview, so you'll probably want to stop the video around 26:00.
What I'm listening to today: "Triple Kastle", alloutofsync
The Bastl Kastle is a lovely toy-like palmtop instrument that mocks the entire expensive idiom of modular synths by costing like $60, running off 3 AA batteries and yet sounding like it contains an entire universe of glitchy noise.
This piece combines three Kastles crosswired to make otherworldly noises unlike anything you've ever heard, although oddly it does remind me a bit of the Earthbound cave music.
What I'm listening to today: "Strega processing LF radio signals", Tom Zicarelli
"Software Defined Radio" is a technique where an untuned radio receiver shovels the bottom 48 kilohertz of the spectrum into a computer's audio-in "raw", at which point bandpass/demodulation are performed in software. In this video an iPad runs SDR with intentionally incorrect demodulation/frequency settings, so the only output is chaotic squealing that a Strega smears into audio ambience.
What I'm listening to today: "Every song on Björk's album 'Vespertine' at the same time"
This experiment starts off feeling kind of pointless; all the first 30 seconds do for me is reveal 606 drums and the harpsicord from "Pagan Poetry" stand out well amidst noise.
But then there's a shift, like the floor dropping out under you. Once the song intros are past everything blends, and coalesces into a slowly-mutating, gloriously creepy, shockingly emotional uniform howl.
What I'm listening to today: "Saigon Window // Crunchy Ambient [Live Performance]", Dexba
A flowing 20-minute live set featuring a slightly unusual setup (multiple Meng Qi synths) and, as advertised, a window on a Vietnamese street. Starts with some basically okay distorted chimes and echoing howls but around the seven to ten minute mark it finds an atmospheric groove and from there to the end is a transcendent cosmic journey.
What I'm listening to today: "Twelfth", Daniel M. Karlsson
Karlsson (@t36s) is a composer I've been following for years who constantly produces lovely and intense noise/ambient. This was his Nov 12 entry for the "#Noisevember" event (he's now moved on to Dronecember).
Karlsson explains this track is based on a string physical model (https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]rdinal.garden/109333185610168206); the model seems to be pushed to (past?) its limit, producing unearthly, sorrowful noise.
Source code included:
from the album Noisevember
What I'm listening to today: "POCKET OPERATOR ACID RAVE", L҉̵͘P̴̶͘
I've mentioned the Pocket Operator in this thread before, but I don't think I've mentioned how much I love it. It's designed with the aesthetics and sense of play of a toy but you can do serious music production with it. This is demonstrated here via, as the title promises, some absolutely MASSIVE acid rave techno performed live from a PO-33 sampler unit on a tiny calculator-like PCB in the musician's hands.
What I'm listening to today: "Discovering Ambient with the Verbos Multi-Delay", Raucous Studio
This piece is based on a very simple feedback patch; a signal is amplified into itself, piped first through a delay echo and a bandpass with oscillating boundaries to sculpt the frequencies. It's extremely sparse and mostly quiet and almost nothing in it is intentional— just a man turning knobs to see what happens— but the echoing, moaning chirps are very evocative to me.
What I'm listening to today: "Soma RoAT Exploration N°2", HELL F.O
This is based on the Soma "Rumble of Ancient Times", an opinionated/toy synth. The normal problem of noise synths is they sound cool but wind up just making one undifferentiated drone; the ROAT solves this by making *four* drones (pad-triggered).
Here the ROAT's combined with Korg's desktop drum-modeling synth to make a cool and nicely structured glitch hop jam. "It's just like listening to real music!"
What I'm listening to today: "Soma ROAT Jam - Mélodie d'automne", Sidney Cote Nadon
This one uses *two* Rumble of Ancient Times units plus an Akai sampler to make dance techno with the ROATs' various noise generators providing the sirens, swells and background beepy noises you expect to be drifting in and out in the background of such music. It jams. If you liked whatever "Electro" was in 2008 ("Electroclash"? Was that the same thing?) you'll probably like this.
What I'm listening to today: "random noise 079", glenn clyatt
A bizarre journey back and forth across the border between music and noise, this uses a Bastl Kastle and a chiptune synth to pile together bizarre noises until suddenly the noise coalesces into some pretty cool sounding dance techno!… before just as suddenly slowing down 800% and becoming one of, depending on your mindset,
1. A blissful, psychadelic trip
2. The sound of something crying out in pain
What I'm listening to today: "Koma Krell | 0-Coast | Field Kit | Part Two | Extended Cut", Bottle Makes Music
The "Krell Patch" is a setup various synthesizers make possible to construct, where the closing envelope at the end of one note triggers the start of the next note. The name is a reference to the movie "Forbidden Planet". This Krell is augmented with a synth-controlled radio and a church fellowship hall used for natural echo.
TLDR: This is 12 minutes of beeps.
What I'm listening to today: "live stream #1 … subroom signals", substan
substan posts a lot of chill electronic music on YouTube; I've linked him in this thread before. This is an absolutely lovely two-hour (!) flowing set of chill-beats ambient songs, alternating "music they'd play in a yoga class" and "music to program to" with flavors of acid and dubby clicks-and-cuts floating in and out. Every song in this set individually is a song I'd recommend by itself. Massive
What I'm listening to today: "Messed up", KUČKA
KUČKA is a singer-songwriter who produces her own tracks and makes lush, grimy* hyperpop. This track is a single off what I think is an upcoming album and it's super intense, it's got a good driving beat and works as both pop and avant-garde sound design.
* in the sense of "reminiscent of Grimes"
What I'm listening to today: "Limited Access", GOLDEN BOY
At some point last week this tab got opened on my browser and I d… I honestly don't remember where it came from. The song in the tab is from an album named "I NEVER MEANT FOR THIS TO HAPPEN" and is frankly pretty hype. As is the wont of Bandcamp electronic musicians, GOLDEN BOY (she/her) seems to be trying to fit as many different club genres into one song as possible. Kinda reminds me of early Prodigy.
from the album I NEVER MEANT FOR THIS TO HAPPEN
What I'm listening to today: "◯" (Vision Creation Newsun part 1), The Boredoms
The Boredoms started off making entire EPs of just screaming, but evolved into a mindblowing mix of psychadelia, surf rock, and Taiko drumming. And screaming. This is their masterpiece, a joyous explosion like the sound of a world being created, cf "Victory over the Sun".
I couldn't find a good single-track rip on YouTube, so this is the whole album. "Oops." Press stop whereever feels right.
What I'm listening to today: "Asozan", OOIOO
OOIOO is the side band organized by Yoshimi P-We, the drummer from the Boredoms. (If you are a millennial hipster: Yes, this is the Yoshimi who allegedly battled the pink robots.) OOIOO usually offer a slightly more structured take on the Boredoms formula, mixing P-We's drumming with funk stylings. This particular track is a longtime frequent re-listen to me; it has a feeling like a dream, something drifting close and away.
What I'm listening to today: "Super Are", The Boredoms
This is from an album on which every song name begins with "Super".
If I were going to give someone exactly one Boredoms track to listen to it would probably be this one. I mentioned before the Boredoms combine a few different musical styles; this one basically splits them apart and showcases each of them one by one, taking time to savor each flavor, starting with Eno-ish 60s organs and ending with Taiko surf rock.
What I'm listening to today: July 22, 2009 total solar eclipse, BOADRUM
In the 00s the Boredoms spent a while organizing increasingly complex performance art pieces involving very many drum kits, with the largest being 88 drummers in a giant spiral in a Brooklyn park. In my favorite, they took a boat into the pacific ocean to perform this ecstatic noise music ritual in the umbra of a solar eclipse. The dude next to Yoshimi P-We is Zach Hill of Hella and the Death Grips.
What I'm listening to today: "kawasemi Ah", OOIOO
OOIOO released a new album in 2020 that was mostly alternate-version rerecordings of older songs, but one of the new tracks is this song called "kawasemi Ah" with a really good groove. My summary of this song is: kawasemi Ah
from the album nijimusi
What I'm listening to today: "Mixed Emotions", Bebe Barron
In 1956, experimental electronic musicians (and married couple) Bebe and Louis Barron composed the score for Forbidden Planet, inspiring a generation.
In 2000, Bebe visited the music lab at UCSB and recorded a new piece. It is *sick*. It seems to be inventing entirely new emotions. It sounds exactly like the music 60s electronic artists would have made if not held back by the friction of contemporary recording.
What I'm listening to today: "La Jetée", Sines of Exquisite Pleasure
I somehow, happily, managed to wedge YouTube in a state this weekend where it recommended me nothing but albums from the early 80s artists self-published on cassette tape. S.O.E.P. was a particularly exciting find from this; their 1981 album "Modular Systems" is *amazing*, but this one serene track from their 1984 tape stands out to me for its retro-invocations of Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Air.
from the album Music for Hospitals
What I'm listening to today: "pulsar 23 volca fm jam", clyv
This jam gets some *wonderfully* bizarre noises out of Volca's cheap modern DX-7 clone box, combined with some wonderful grungy noises from using the Pulsar-23 (a drum machine) as a synth voice. Once the (chugging, dirty) beat comes in the overall feeling is pleasantly disorienting, like listening from afar to a rock concert, or perhaps an alien invasion, happening on the far other side of an echoey valley.
What I'm listening to today: "Spirals & Orbits", Benge
This was recorded this year but is going *hard* in both audio and visuals for the aesthetics of a 60s-70s educational filmreel, all baffling diagrams and radiophonic-workshop abstract noises, video feedback, quiet glimmering echoes on slow oscillator sweeps. As a piece of ambient music it's entrancing.
What I'm listening to today: "Elysium State", Stardust
The "demoscene" if you're not familiar makes tiny audiovisual programs that push the limits of computer hardware. The community started on 80s hardware, and since wowing on modern GPUs is less challenging they to a large extent stayed on 80s hardware, making them a good chiptune source. Here's a new 2022 demo by Stardust (not to be confused with the 1998 Thomas Bangalter side project).
TLDR Dubstep on a ZX Spectrum
What I'm listening to today: "I Am A Recording", m 10538
The poster of this song claims it's a cassette tape they recorded in 1981, when they were a child, on a toy organ in their parents basement. It definitely sounds like a child hitting random notes, but after a bit something clicks and they hit this powerful, spooky groove. Daniel-Johnston-esque in more ways than the conceptual.
The YouTube summary ends with a strange rant about digital preservation, worth reading.
What I'm listening to today: "Almost in tune live play pulsar 23 buchla easel", Amon Tobin
I spend a lot of time listening to bedroom synth jams by YouTube randos and I've gotten *very* used to incredibly hype stuff posted by accounts with 23 subscribers, so when I got to the end of this driving, buzzing techno jam I was shocked to realize THIS rando was Amon Tobin, a Ninja Tune-signed musician I've seen live three times. Apparently he also has synths in his bedroom.
What I'm listening to today: "Bedroom electro test demo (live electro track feat Elektron Octatrack // Analog Rytm // Slav Squat)", Matt Leagre
Now *this* is a true bedroom synth jam, as in, you can literally see the bed and the dude visibly doesn't have enough space for all the synths he has jammed in the corner there (the unplugged Arp Odyssey reissue! D:). Eight minutes of shifting groove with 90s dance and vaporwave flavors. Really good stuff actually.
What I'm listening to today: "Volca Keys + Beats ambient jam - Volca Dreams", Fortress of Sound
A lovely, gentle electronic groove made on the two most basic Korg Volca units and one guitar pedal. Feels like water level music from a lost Donkey Kong Country game. The basics, they work. This is 13 minutes long and realistically probably could/should have been like seven but you just kind of zone out and you don't notice how long it's been.
What I'm listening to today: "True Love Will Find You In The End (Daniel Johnston cover)", The Mathletes
I went to high school with Joe Mathlete, the lead / occasional only member of this band, so I guess I'm one of their oldest fans. As a home-recording indie musician from Texas Joe's got a deep love for Daniel Johnston and played a version of Johnston in Speeding Motorcycle, a stage musical in Houston and Austin. This cover is super intense to me; best listened loud.
I've been wanting to port/remake a demoscene program to Verilog or some other HDL, and play it on an FPGA. Nearly made it into a final class project, but the board I was using couldn't produce sound output.
1 track album
@kailysrat The main Soma Labs guy actually made a large number of process videos while he was designing the Pulsar! Some of them he's performing on early prototype versions with no case.
I have a Soma device called the "Ether" which is a tunerless radio (just blasting the EM spectrum raw into your ear, and your ear happens to ignore everything above about ~22khz) and I love it to pieces. It's like a sixth sense, you can detect buried power mains by the EM leakage when you walk over them
@mcc woah that does sound very cool!
I have a lyra-8 diy but I am not convinced I put it together correctly... They're all fascinating instruments and it's nice to see them used by someone who knows that they're doing
I have this long-running "What I'm listening to today [https://mastodon.social/@mcc/108199886340178151]" thread on Mastodon where I post music I found (mostly from the bedroom synth jam community on YouTube) that infatuated me on some particular day. This week the YouTube recommendation algorithm gave me a bounty of jams based around the synths by SOMA Laboratories (a company that makes idiosyncratic, opinionated electronics that center the imperfections and unpredictability of analogue electronics-- they call this approach "organismic"), so I wound up doing a week every song I posted was based on SOMA equipment: (I use the Cohost embedding feature below instead of the thumbnail+link approach I normally use when reposting videos here. Is this better? Worse?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uogGR5Ox_v0 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uogGR5Ox_v0] 1. "Chudraga" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uogGR5Ox_v0], porfiry A piece based around the Pulsar, SOMA's drum machine. This one's paired with the Ornament, SOMA's oblique "sequencer": a controlled chaos generator based around crosswired capacitors that build up accumulated charge like timers until they discharge to fire drum triggers and empty new charge into adjacent capacitors. Here the Ornament triggers congo patterns and distorted industrial drums while something (also the Ornament?) pushes semirandom notes into a 90s-IDM-reminiscent synth lead that the musician seems to have jury-rigged from nowhere by hijacking one of the Pulsar's drum oscillators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ9iP8kJ1Vo [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ9iP8kJ1Vo] 2. "Poology Jungle with Pulsar-23 and Digitakt" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ9iP8kJ1Vo], raphito_ 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 Elektron Digitakt; the Pulsar supplies glitchy sounding analog drums while the Digitakt overdubs the standard Amen break samples. The tension between the two modes of techno fixes a mood that's a fascinating split between chill and anxious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDsjpKJ3H5k [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDsjpKJ3H5k] 3. "Lyra 8 + Strega" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDsjpKJ3H5k], afxtr SOMA's Lyra-8 is all about reverb; its oscillators are detuned and modulated to maximize skittering harmonics, so the reverb can smear those harmonics out into airy tones. 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, and every button does the same thing; it's wired just so the harder he presses the keyboard the more the reverb expands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ys7ETM4CdY [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ys7ETM4CdY] 4. "Industrial Raga 1" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ys7ETM4CdY], adjuse Again, the Ornament is a machine for algorithmically sequencing triggers. But one of its trigger output types is "connect to ground", which means 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 picks out a note sequence on the Lyra's finger keys, producing something intense and unsettlingly alien. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT4X9rSbTjM [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT4X9rSbTjM] 5. "Soma Lyra 8 Pulsar 23 2X Ornament 8 Patch" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT4X9rSbTjM], NodiWolf 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". The result: 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 one— definitely my favorite track linked in this post. ---------------------------------------- Cohost bonus tracks There were two more Pulsar jams I ran across this week I liked but didn't link on Mastodon because they're not really "songs". Both of these are just long running recordings while the musician fiddles trying to create a good loop, which means long periods of repetition intercut with two-minute stretches where they nail something that is absolutely lovely. Presented for anyone with a long attention span: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx2Ol9EjFak [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx2Ol9EjFak] 6. "Soma Laboratory Pulsar-23 Dawless Jam" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx2Ol9EjFak], Colby Kennedy (Pulsar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGqMGzMdEA8 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGqMGzMdEA8] 7. "Pulsar-23 / Ornament-8 Long Sketch #1 - "???" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGqMGzMdEA8], Synthesist Sketches (Pulsar, Ornament)
@mcc That is fucking awesome
I'm going to listen to all of these later
thank you! :3
@mcc Are you familiar with works from Polish Radio Experimental Studio? There's a lot of 60s/70s avant-garde musique concrète originating from there that this piece makes me think of.
I happen to have worked on a short game that exclusively used samples from compositions made at PRES (more specifically by Knittel, Sikora and Szeremeta) for all its sounds and music, you may find it interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hqDk6IRbNI
@mcc Love your listening posts, loads of gems there. Note that if you tag your posts you can get Eldritch Radio to make it into a playlist automatically https://radio.eldritch.cafe/
(with that said, mb someone should poke the Eldritch Radio people to implement support for playlists from threads, profiles, etc...)
I haven't seen the Boredoms since they opened for Nirvana and the Meat Puppets in Akron on Halloween, just before Kurt took his own life. They were ... fascinating, jumping around on stage doing all sorts of bizzarre noise stuff, and the fellow in the center of this video had a large horn with a big, rubber bellows... and that was used a LOT in the songs. There were a LOT of people who did NOT understand them and, well, just didn't go down to the main floor... but then there were a lot of folks who didn't realize they didn't have tickets FOR the main floor, and were in the seats, and boy did they want to switch after the Boredoms. They didn't really get the Meat Puppets either.
You could sort of tell that Nirvana _did_ enjoy them, as well as the Meat Puppets.
(I did find a recording of the Nirvana part of that show on youtube at one point, not sure it's still there.)
I drove from Chicago to Akron to see them with my friends from college.
So yes.
It was.
(Also, they totally trolled the audience when they started playing 'Rape Me' which all of my friends and I knew was happening, and ... somehow the audience hadn't figured that out...
And at one point my friend Ed shouts at Kurt "Hey, play Dive!" and Kurt goes "hey, let's play Dive" and they did, except Pat Smear didn't really know how, so they had to teach him during the set... I think it was Pat Smear who was with them... anyway...
found 2 copies: This one is remastered: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=_gnbJNgAKHA (using an anonymizer for youtube there)
Now at the start of that, you'll notice there's a lot of wierd noise. That's when Kurt and Kris came out dressed as Barney and Slash, and fought each other sonically. (Notice the part which has Slash starting to play... yeah. This was ... a great show.)
Nirvana Sunday, October 31, 1993 James A. Rhodes Arena, University of Akron, Akron, Ohio Halloween Intro Radio Friendly Unit Shifter Drain You Breed About a Girl Heart-Shaped Box Sliver Dumb In Bloom Come As You Are Lithium Pennyroyal Tea School Polly Milk It Rape Me Territorial Pissings All Apologies Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam Dive On a Plain Serve The Servants audio remastered in Sony Vegas Pro 11.0
No, we just went as normal -
there was a fellow in the audience who had a cast on his arm and was wielding it like a club, in the pit, threatening people. To the right of the stage, up front, a family with 2 younger girls was there; the father looked very, very scared of this situation (obviously they'd come because the girls wanted to see the concert and they went together to be sure they'd be safe, and... yeah) however Ed was a large, menacing fellow and we sort of parked ourselves in the area by the family and when the fellow with the cast came over Ed just said "NO." and pointed away, and he sort of danced away and did not return for the rest of the concert. The father looked relieved but still like he had NO idea what the heck was going on.
I believe the girls had a fantastic time anyway.
I imagine, also, the Boredoms had something to do with the confusion (:
I'm really glad to have seen something from them.
@mcc I saw the Boredoms play in Vancouver in support of 1998’s Super æ.
It was a transformative experience. Good album.
Warner Music Group / Birdman Records, 1998TRACKLIST0:00 Super You7:37 Super Are16:07 Super Going28:34 Super Coming40:54 Super Are You49:42 Super Shine1:02:27...
@mcc omg this album is so incredible thank you for reminding me of its existence.
I know of this album because I found the CD in my parents' basement, but both of them claim to know nothing about it, so I have no idea how it got there or who actually bought it
@mcc this has been in my rotation lately:
4 track album
mcc
vv 💫 [follow my new artist profile!]
Tai Viinikka
fack
Ben Jerrit
Tathar is dragons! ΘΔ
acb
Matt Bowen
moliver
Kailys
provisionalidea
Doctor M. Popular
Sebastian Krzyszkowiak
Esi
Gil Hova
Sir Garbagetruck
72mena
Henry Faber
Adil Sadik
Cyborg Medusa
sirshannon