What I'm listening to today: "Perkons HD-01 Bassline and OXI ONE sequencer Jam", Mark Cee

This guy spent a couple months posting jams with this large, unusual blue drum machine and I kept watching his videos like a hawk thinking… eventually he's gonna make something awesome. Eventually he did, with this complex, clicky 6-minute dance techno bop for an entire crowd of people enjoying standing at the back of a room holding drinks and bobbing their heads but not dancing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INLx7tAVoV8

Perkons HD-01 Bassline and OXI ONE sequencer Jam

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Choralberg", Alex Siebenhaar

In this video, a man wearing a bluescreen for a hat sits on a carpet and steers some racks of synths (and one analog drum machine) through a cryptic, funky melody. Just as you think you understand where it's going, it ends; you find yourself wanting more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f81UbrzrTU

Choralberg (live performance)

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "crisping.1 #‍lofi #‍ambient #‍chaseblissgenerationlossmk2 #‍glitch", [moos]

It's not very hard to reproduce Boards of Canada's style, especially not since cassette equipment became a common modular synth add-on. But this piece, based around that guitar pedal that fakes tape degradation, is special, mixing tattered synth pads with a death-march beat that refuses to find a rhythm. It's scary actually, like something's gone horribly wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5_hfSs9Pnc

crisping.1 #lofi #ambient #chaseblissgenerationlossmk2 #glitch

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Pulsar 23 - Sounds you don't usually hear coming from it"

Occasionally in this thread I've praised songs for adapting Pulsar-23 drum channels for non-percussive purposes. This track is *only that*, the dude does not turn on the drum sequencer, clips on a device designed to turn circuit EMF leakage into sound?, and makes something approximating a jazz piano solo alternated with gunky glitch dub sounds. Very weird noises even by my standards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3rfaHNxvkE

Pulsar 23 - Sounds you don't usually hear coming from it

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Filthy Miksher - Demo Jam", Deaftone Audio

This pairs a Pulsar and an acid bass groovebox with some kind of noisemaker box based on a spring attached to a contact microphone. It starts as ambient noise and then grows into a bumping rhythm without ever containing… anything except noise, actually, so you've just got this gradually escalating percussive techno piece made up of different noise textures. I like it

https://youtu.be/1rWoRBNt11M

Filthy Miksher - Demo Jam

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "pulsar 23 rhythmic explorations", clyv

This is 14 minutes of a musician fiddling with a Pulsar-23 drum machine. There are periodic cuts, so I assume this is edited down from a longer recording, leaving only the moments they found a good Beat. Not quite a song, this is like the skeletons of 20 different songs, awaiting someone to loop them and add something more than drums. Good beats tho, and good background if you let your focus wander.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NONbMk8kPyM

pulsar 23 rhythmic explorations

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "LENTIL2C33MOD 400Hz 23", Rzeczy

This song was produced from an NES sound chip, but doesn't sound anything like an NES because:

- It's got the wavetable channel from the Famicom Disk System;
- The sound chip has been overclocked to make possible synthesis techniques (like audio-rate PWM) a normal NES could have never done

The musician uses these powers to make some sick industrial-feeling… "electro breakcore"? EDM genre names are gibberish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxTg70xeMMA

LENTIL2C33MOD 400Hz 23

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Zone J" (Rescue Rangers), Harumi Fujita (Capcom)

Do you ever think about how there's a basically finite number of possible "songs", but our attribution/copyright systems assume each piece of music is written only once? So like what if the most beautiful piano song ever got stuck in a toothpaste commercial. Or if one of the greatest electro-pop hooks ever wound up in the final level of an NES game and is now just "retro game music" forever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0EnL4M1jjE

Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers (NES) Music - Zone J

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Ultraviolet", gasman

Since discovering Stardust I've been watching a lot of ZX Spectrum demos; it's a neat demo platform because it CAN do near anything, but nothing's easy. This 2017 demo is a charming mix of bracingly earnest and legitimately hype, both in the visuals (which YouTube HATES) and the chiptune.

Incidentally, if you know how the ZX works, the still images at the end of the demo are the most technically impressive thing here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aeNtFCaYt8

Ultraviolet - ZX Spectrum demo

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Ufouria" title theme (iNES 0.9 glitched version), Naoki Kodaka (Sunsoft)

iNES 0.9 for Mac OS 9 had an audio bug affecting only a few games (including "Hebereke", aka "Ufouria") causing the noise and PCM channels to be very loud and distorted. In my opinion, this improves the music *tremendously*, giving it a wild industrial/IDM flavor.

The first time I played Ufouria it sounded like this, and I didn't know it was a bug. So this is the canonical soundtrack to me.

What I'm listening to today: "Parallax" loader music, Martin Galway (Sensible Software)

This is My Other Favorite C64 Song, besides Sanxion. This track contains no percussion whatsoever and just takes you on an epic 12-minute journey of every sound possible from grinding detuned saw waveforms, ending with a single 2-minute sound I cannot describe and which sounds different in every recording, I think because it actually sounds different on different SID chip revisions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igVxjCecmEg

Parallax Commodore 64 Title Tune

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "真実を信頼する", Oblique Occasions

This is a track from a deeply confusing album from some sixth-generation "Vaporwave" group on Bandcamp. Like 80% of this is Signifiers and they are not Legible to me. (Sorry, I went to an academic unconference today and am still Talking Like That.)

Anyway! This one track is a really lovely fusion-jazz(?)/hip-hop/trip-hop groove of the kind I spent most of the 00s listening to. Beats and electric pianos.

https://obliqueoccasions.bandcamp.com/track/--105

真実を信頼する, by Oblique Occasions

from the album 原点

Oblique Occasions

What I'm listening to today: "海​に​憎​し​み​を​叫​ぶ", Oblique Occasions

This is another track from the same album I posted yesterday, but it's what I'm posting anyway, because who's going to stop me? This is one of a few tracks from this album that sound like lost music from a PS1 JRPG— and might actually be, since one of the other tracks is literally a Castlevania cover.

I like how this mimics that sound from tracker music where each violin sample starts as if in isolation.

https://obliqueoccasions.bandcamp.com/track/--101

海に憎しみを叫ぶ, by Oblique Occasions

from the album 原点

Oblique Occasions

What I'm listening to today: "Hoss featuring the PERKONS HD-01", Generative Jane

This one is a wild ride, starting with a blast of strange FM noises and then immediately dropping hard into a gradually-mutating industrial dance beat. This is the kind of music you'd show opening credits to, probably over establishing shots of a futuristic city, or possibly people riding futuristic motorcycles at great speed to no particular obvious destination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCMWWiEjWuw

Hoss featuring the PERKONS HD-01 by Erica Synths

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Puppet Master", ZyeKali

This rocking chaos-&-strings jam was made with the Pocket Operator handheld sampler and a hand-modded "Chaos NAND" (seems to be an Atari Punk Console variant). Instead of using the Pocket Operator's sequencer, the musician plays the PO and Chaos NAND by hand, then samples the sampler, layering eight performances on top of each other. I *think* the colored Launchpad grid is starting and stopping the other video clips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1ZF4Oojoo

Puppet Master - Live Loop Arrangement featuring PO-33 K.O. and Chaos NAND

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Hardware Jam 0006 // Shared System and Friends // 162bpm atmospheric drum n' bass", kaleidasonic

This is a neat mix of a classical 90s Drum & Bass beat with modern modular-synthesizer sound design; it starts with 2 minutes of random-notes ambient, then drops an Amen and a lovely chonky bass and keeps evolving in interesting new directions for the entire 15 minute runtime. (Those without long attention spans may wanna quit around minute 7.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfAQxyx5Vng

Hardware Jam 0006 // Shared System and Friends // 162bpm atmospheric drum n' bass

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Ambient improvisation 4 (Soma Enner + Cosmos)", Più

Cosmos is an "asymmetric looper"—a loop pedal whose loops are of varying lengths and so can drift in phase against each other. Here it's fed with tiny sound fragments (with such sources as small plastic frog, whose shape is sonified by rubbing it against the Enner's case and spring reverb) to build up an all-enveloping ambient soundscape partway between a rainpipe and a horror movie score.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpY9hW_My90

Ambient improvisation 4 (Soma Enner + Cosmos)

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Lysergenesis", Lauri Paisley

Paisley in the early 80s was VP of the "International Electronic Music Association", which I've never heard of; this was the final song on a cassette album, "Real-to-Reel", she released in 1983. Not so much a soundscape as an ambient ocean you plunge into and possibly drown, this is probably the most progressive electronic music you're going to find in 1983; 15 minutes of synths following a weird internal logic.

https://anvilcreations.bandcamp.com/track/lysergenesis-2

Lysergenesis, by Lauri Paisley

from the album Real-to-Reel

Anvil Creations

What I'm listening to today: "SOMA PULSAR 23: Live Jam with Microcosm", Among the Trees

This track is incredibly mysterious; there *is* a Pulsar drum machine in here, but it seems to only exist to agitate a chain of reverb filters rigged to produce an enormous, shimmering rushing noise with seemingly little to do with the input.

I would describe this as the music from a movie from the 60s-70s that plays while the protagonists wordlessly explore an alien spaceship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsn2TY7LpKo

SOMA PULSAR 23: Live Jam with Microcosm

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "lofi ambient with lubadh rings morphagene beads shallowwater and nightsky",
[moos]

A chill ambient piece where several large slabs of modular synthesizer, with help from a hand reaching in to tweak something once a minute or so, produces ten minutes of generated-melody tones and plucks and simulated tape wobble. Really good feeling to it, the kind of music you'd hear it distantly, follow it into the woods and never be seen again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Wrr9r_EVM

lofi ambient with lubadh rings morphagene beads shallowwater and nightsky

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Ambient Improvisation Elektron digitone and Moog Mother 32", Surgeons Girl

This track gets a lot of mileage out of fairly minimal elements, synth stabs fighting to rise above the water of a ocean of sorrowful foghorn hums. Sometimes I feel like attempting to describe these pieces makes them lesser and that's definitely something I'd worry about here, this is something meant just to be felt rather than intellectualized.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPfQ5LLQYEs

Ambient Improvisation Elektron digitone and Moog Mother 32

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Verbos + Mimeophon Jam", Deaftone Audio

This video is essentially a single held note and some rhythmic clicking for eight minutes, but the musician, hand-driving a complicated modular feedback machine, thoroughly explores every point in the configuration space of that constrained premise, taking you on a journey through a small universe of minimal ambient destinations. It's all very hypnotic and maybe a little sinister.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvnAjaXo5Iw

Verbos + Mimeophon Jam

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Drift", Lähtö

Here's what I eventually figured out: Back in 2006-2007, Lähtö made music and posted it on a Google Site alongside little blog posts. The only distribution method was mediafire links, all dead now. None of these albums are preserved anywhere on the internet. Mysteriously, this month, someone uploaded this one to YouTube.

This first track (ends at 11:00) is a feast of luscious ambient pads, like a bed made entirely of pillows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv5caGbbZgk

[2006] Lähtö - Leaving Behind the Sun (FULL ALBUM)

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Track 1", rien

Sometimes I just want to listen to a quiet crackling static noise for twenty minutes. So here's just that. This is an untitled song on an untitled album consisting of two seemingly identical tracks.

Try focusing on this sound. Really pick it apart. Try to perceive each individual microsound. You might be inclined to think of it as literally nothing, but there's gobs of complex texture in how the pops & bass rumbles cluster.

https://ominousrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-12

untitled, by rien

from the album untitled

Ominous Recordings

What I'm listening to today: "Track 2", Impermanence

An untitled song from an album named "Even if we talk about love in our fantasy, this iron and concrete won't convey its warmth." It's 15 minutes of a loud, distorted, mostly unchanging static noise, like standing close to heavy machinery. This is the sound of being very stressed and sometimes when I'm very stressed I like to listen to this sort of sound because it externalizes the stress into something apart from me.

https://impermanence.bandcamp.com/track/ii

II, by Impermanence

from the album Even if we talk about love in our fantasy, this iron and concrete won't convey its warmth.

Impermanence

What I'm listening to today: "Chaos Of The Galaxy / Happy Man", Sparklehorse

Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) was a beloved one-man indie rock band and multi-instrumentalist in the 00s. This version of "Happy Man" presents the song as if you're hearing it coming in and out of tune on a radio station just slightly too far away to pick up and fighting interference from some rival station. It makes the whole thing really spooky and gives the legible parts an incredible punch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=737HYy4EQOw

Chaos Of The Galaxy/Happy Man (Medley)

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Moth", Burial and Four Tet

Burial and Four Tet are two of the most original electronic musicians of this century, and when they were at the height of their powers around 2010 they recorded three songs for singles together ("Moth", "Nova" and "Wolf Cub", and then some other stuff with Thom Yorke). Moth is my favorite of the three, bouncy, a killer Four Tet pop hook but muffled and blurry in Burial's style. Just some incredible sounds here.

https://fourtet.bandcamp.com/track/moth

Moth, by Burial + Four Tet

from the album Nova/Moth

Four Tet

What I'm listening to today: "Deep progressive house jam with hardware synths - M:S, Model D, Skulpt, Microfreak, NTS-1, Volca FM.", Work4synths

This YouTuber posts a lot of decent improvised trance techno sets, but for this one they seem to have decided to make a Song and they absolutely killed it. This is a catchy, well-produced electronica bop with a lovely clean-feeling emotion to it, performed by a table of mid-range synths driven from a composition in Ableton DAW.

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.

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Down With Silent Night", Irena and Vojtech Havlovi

From 1992, a married couple playing a duet on piano and cello. Feels like a movie score both in the 10,000-foot atmospheric vibes and the weird echoey way the cello is recorded. It's gorgeous, "evocative" and *slow* in a beautifully deliberate way, with chord changes minutes apart. It's also half an hour long so sincere suggestion: Hit stop at 19:41 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

from the album Music of Silence / Hudba ticha

The Havels / Irena & Vojtech Havlovi

What I'm listening to today: Butt music from hell, Hieronymus Bosch

Around 1500 CE Bosch painted "The Garden of Earthly Delights", an epic triptych of surreal scenes concluding in Hell. In the hell scene, a naked man has a fragment of musical notation painted on his ass. In 2014 a blogger named Amelia Hamrick transcribed it and a YouTuber named James Spalink recorded this ghostly version on period instruments. What Hell left unfinished the Internet has completed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnrICy3Bc2U

Hieronymus Bosch Butt Music

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Brother", Beck

Beck's early albums cleanly alternate hip-hop/pop & folk, but the B-sides from then tend to find a lovely unique otherworld between the two. Like "Brother": Obscure, ballad-like, & my favorite Beck song.

This song staggers like it's drunk. It always gives me a mental image of hanging from a ceiling from ropes, or maybe clutching a loop handle on a moving subway, putting all your weight on it and closing your eyes, swinging.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skTOqCxTohU

Brother

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Dissolution III (Oversaturated Intervallic Collisions)", Earth

This 15-minute piece, performed live on NYU's college radio station in 2002, is my favorite Earth recording, and one of their most difficult to find a legit copy of.

It's a series of pendulous guitar distortions layering deeper and deeper on themselves. It's impossible to rationally comprehend as music, and best experienced as ritual. Listen to it as loudly as you can stand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh1cvSBsqoI

Earth | Dissolution III

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Super Fxx", Tera Melos

Tera Melos is a band from the Sacramento post-rock clique who started off making what I'd describe as metal played by free-jazz rules, and gradually transitioned to very loud surf rock with unusual chord progressions. Their last album ended with a weird, memorable blast of a song named "Super Fx", and then a single had a b-side named "Super Fxx" which I'd describe as the same song but with different words and chords:

https://teramelos.bandcamp.com/track/super-fxx

Super Fxx, by Tera Melos

from the album Treasures and Trolls

Tera Melos

What I'm listening to today: "Hello Great Architect", Hella

Hella is another Norcal post-rock band, the drummer from the Advantage playing guitar and the drummer from the Death Grips (the legendary Zach Hill) playing drums, specializing in the loudest, densest, most chaotic, most rancid riffs possible. Their live stuff's incredible, so I'm linking a song from the middle of a live set ("Concentration Face" DVD). Song ends at 1:52:27, turn up loud for intended effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpNPGKmz4-w&t=6515s

Hella Concentration Face Japan Tour 2004 HQ (default ffmpeg up-scaling)

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "My Neighbor Satan", Boris

Boris is a Japanese rock band with an epic and wildly genre-spanning discography spanning metal, pop-rock, and straight-up noise. This is a really fun track where they take what could have been a simple metal song, compress the metal bits until they're flat and turn the volume way down, and layer strange currents of pop and funk on top. Like peacefully floating on the bubble-bath surface atop a dark noise ocean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs6AjuzJJNk

BORIS "My Neighbor Satan" (Official)

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Idols and Anchors", Parkway Drive

I don't have an interesting story about this one. It isn't a rarity or anything. It's just a song I heard on the radio once and liked, from the genre I can never remember if it's called "black metal" or "death metal". The utter sincerity with which this band with a goofy name singing goofy cookie monster vocals goes about its very serious business has always been really charming to me. Good blastbeats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni4x5uyG1Wc

Parkway Drive - "Idols and Anchors" (Full Album Stream)

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Annihilvore", Behold The Arctopus

My favorite track on my favorite metal album. BTA makes instrumental metal with the kind of post-rock musical rule-breaking I don't have the vocabulary to describe so I always fall back on "it's like jazz, I guess?" (or for the stuff after this album, "it's like twelve-tone?"). This one epic track is a rocking mix of the mind-expanding, the accessible, and the "damn, that's just a really good single sound".

https://beholdthearctopus.bandcamp.com/track/annihilvore

Annihilvore, by Behold The Arctopus

from the album Horrorscension

Behold The Arctopus

What I'm listening to today: "My Empire's Doom", Emperor

At my college, consensus was Emperor was The Greatest Metal Band In The World. I'm so-so on them, but! What I do *really* like is Emperor's original demo tape, recorded on a 4-track and self-distributed. The low recording quality causes every instrument to blend together into an indistinguishable soup and the resulting aesthetic is *perfect*. Also this was before the knife murderer joined the band, so that's nice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C66ei3Y8LCk

Emperor - My Empire's Doom

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Modular jam with Volca Modular, Korg NTS-1 and Playtronica Touch Me", ITSME

This is a short, peaceful synth piece performed on a tree. Like, uh. This person got hold of a device that converts current (capacitance?) changes from human touch into MIDI, and then they wired it to a small tree. So the harder they squeeze the tree the higher the note on the Volca Modular goes. Anyway, it's a real nice song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLcgcX18zk8

Modular jam with Volca Modular, Korg NTS-1 and Playtronica Touch Me

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Roland MKS-80 REV5 & MPG-80 (1983)", Werkstatt Matlak

This unusual YouTube account belongs to a synth repair shop in Bavaria. Each video features exactly one vintage or rare synthesizer and a summary like "Final test after service". Apparently when they finish repairing a customer device they make a song with it.

This video features the Super Jupiter (a rackmount MIDI Jupiter-8) and its programmer. They use it to make sick retro hip-hop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXu6iOy5Tm0

Roland MKS-80 REV5 & MPG-80 (1983) - Werkstatt Matlak

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "A8 KM34", Funkstörung

"Appetite for Disctruction" was released in the brief initial golden era of IDM and I think got kinda quickly forgotten?, but almost every track on it would have been the best track on some other album. All bizarre dirty bitcrushed beats and catchy clean synthtone melodies, all really satisfying.

This isn't my *favorite* track on there, but it's the one I'm thinking about today. Sometimes you just have an A8 KM34 day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHimO77MM4

Funkstörung - A8 KM34

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "最強ACIDマシーン。The strongest ACID machine.", TUNASAN

The "T-8 Aria Compact" is a neat device from Roland that tries to get some of that Volca money Korg's been scooping up by putting in a single tiny box [digital emulations of] an 808 and 303, Roland's early-80s drum/synth boxes that failed, flooded the used market and accidentally invented ACID.

In this video, a dog wearing a tiny hat makes some ACID. A T-8 review is hidden in the captions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUv3zFJ5ZPo

T-8 ROLAND AIRA COMPACT | 最強ACIDマシーン。The strongest ACID machine.

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Devolver", Stardust

This is a 2021 demo for the Spectrum ZX by demoscene group Stardust. I linked a Stardust demo in this thread before (again: not Thomas Bangalter related) and the other one was more visually impressive, but the music in this one is *incredibly* hype and stands on its own as a piece of relentless, borderline-gabber hardcore dance music. There are acid sounds in here I am sincerely baffled how they tricked a ZX into making.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8nWTJnHJ_w

devolver by Stardust

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Teisco Synthesizer 110F (1980)", Werkstatt Matlak

This is the synth shop I linked earlier this week, posting the "Final test after repair & service" for a fascinating synth by Teisco, a company I've never heard of (in part because they were folded into Kawai shortly after this synth was made). The test track showcases some lovely timbres Boards of Canada would be proud of, in an alternate universe where BoC were interested in drum & bass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgI4qjk9z0Y

Teisco Synthesizer 110F (1980) - Werkstatt Matlak

Final test after repair & service

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Eurorack idm", Sinking Feeling

Sinking Feeling appeared way up earlier in this thread with one of my favorite electronica tracks on YouTube, and lately has been streaming a lot. This is a 20-minute stream that seamlessly transitions between 3 or 4 notional songs all using the same sonic palette. It's sparse & minimal in a way that feels like crisp morning air, all skittering taps and distant curious warbles. Really unique in its simplicity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywHtJOl4BTc

Eurorack idm

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Law – Unreleased Jungle Selection"

Jungle is the older, rawer, more chaotic older brother of "Drum & Bass". This YouTube video is mysterious, a CD-R-length mix of 17 songs by 10 artists. Searching I find the tracks all recorded ~1993-1995 and variously unreleased until the 2010s, released in the 90s (but not as the same mix?), or seemingly found nowhere else on the Internet. Who is "Law"? Unclear. It's a *very* good mix tho, dark & driving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7T8br7jO80

Law – Unreleased Jungle Selection

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Digital", Roni Size Reprazent

New Forms was the album that introduced "Drum & Bass" to a lot of people internationally— as a teen in Texas it massively changed how I thought about music. But besides being a D&B position paper it's got an amazingly unique, self-confident tone of its own. "Digital" isn't the most avant-garde track on it but it's maybe the stickiest, building an incredible groove out of soul-flavored vocals and a D&B skeleton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU_KPIjcRS4

Digital

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Threat Actor", Jamie Myerson

I have this Cohost post of recommendations for Bandcamp Friday, and so I have a Simplenote file where I stash a reminder list of bands to add to it next time Bandcamp Friday rolls around. When I came back to look at it this month, I found the last line was

"threat actors?"

What… was this? I have no idea. Searching Bandcamp finds only this one song, which I don't think I'd ever heard. Actually it heckin rules

https://jamiemyerson.com/track/threat-actor

Threat Actor, by Jamie Myerson

from the album Threat Actor - Inflection Point

Jamie Myerson

What I'm listening today: "7:10", Plug

Luke Vibert is a man of many names and many styles. This is the first track on Plug EP 1, which was released as "Visible Crater Funk" in Europe or mashed into CD 2 of "Drum & Bass for Papa" in the US.

This is D&B (Jungle?) by the basics but the basics are pushed to a point of total chaos. Amen break in a blender to create a maelstrom of drums, and discomfiting, minimal synth tones. It grabs you really well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dgrUQbP_nY

Plug (Luke Vibert) - 7:10

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Brown Paper Bag (Nobukazu Takemura remix)", Roni Size Reprazent

"Brown Paper Bag" was the album-seller track on New Forms, mostly due to the *incredibly sick* timewarping music video which had a different, punchier, vocal mix not on the album. But my favorite version remains this rare remix by Nobukazu Takemura, a Japanese glitch musician I once saw live by accident.

(You might find the first two minutes here offputting. Give it a chance.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ-CEoJWQJY

Roni Size/Reprazent - Brown Paper Bag. Nobukazu Takemura Remix

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Point of View", LTJ Bukem

LTJ Bukem ruined drum & bass for me. This is not his fault. "Journey Inwards" is stripped-down, minimalist D&B that exposes its inner workings, and once Bukem showed me the Pattern I heard it everywhere. D&B's seemingly infinite fractal complexity was revealed to mostly be K–S––KS– over and over.

I have to forgive Bukem. He also gave me this pair of tracks, this Yoko Kanno-esque sea of violin samples—

[CONTINUES]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ehV1HsL5o

Point of View

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Viewpoint", LTJ Bukem

[CONTINUING]

—and then this lovely track, which blows past D&B's occasional aspirations to being an intellectual descendent of jazz by just, like… making some jazz.

"Viewpoint" is a refreshing, bouncy showcase of jazz bass, electric piano riffs and, at one point, threaded in sneakily, the violin sample that "Point of View" (the previous track on the album) deconstructs. Just such a good feeling to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ind_xkefnKM

Viewpoint

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Lessness", Tom Djll

A mesmerizing abstract journey. If you're used to "music" this track might be a good intro to ambient sound collages. Let it guide you from point to point, a soundtrack for images in your mind maybe.

The parts this is made from are kind of interesting: An honest to goodness VCS-3— the closest thing 1971 had to desktop eurorack, famously used by Pink Floyd— mixed in with a modern desktop eurorack, mixed with a trumpet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jdWHMPLDSQ

Lessness

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "LOST SOULS - MODBAP", leonardoworx

This is a fun, single-minute hip hop jam with an MPC drum machine, Make Noise's desktop modular synths and some Nas samples.

90s west coast hip hop always had a thing for 70s east coast synthesizers, so there's something that feels like a natural extension to try to do that style of hip hop* with the west-coast synth methods used here**.

* Except Nas is east coast.
** And Make Noise is in North Carolina.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrZ8A_NMdHo

LOST SOULS - MODBAP [ STREGA 0-COAST MPC ONE ]

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Ambient then heavy", Jay Hosking

Jay runs a Patreon; the deal seems to be people crowdfund him to buy the most expensive synthesizers in existence, in exchange he makes music with them & posts it.

The in-video captions explain this as "I wanted to create something that starts dreamy and goes heavy", and he does this by using a pair of Moog keyboards for huge padscapes then dropping in dense IDM beats from a purpose-built modular skiff box.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzfw27iYgKs

Ambient then heavy with Moog One, Subsequent 37, Hologram Microcosm, and eurorack drums

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Live Techno Jam #6 - Roland TR6S - Quadrantid Swarm - Minitaur - BlueBox - Blofeld - NTS1", Spadehead

Have I like… boxed myself in to needing something interesting to say about each of these tracks? Because this is just a good, thoughtfully-composed basic four-on-the-floor techno track with a table of 2010s-2020s desktop synths and a really nice 90s feeling. Good background/focus music. I like the obviously-synthesized-strings voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdWNPAjq-lM

Live Techno Jam #6 - Roland TR6S - Quadrantid Swarm - Minitaur - BlueBox - Blofeld - NTS1

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Heavy Medicine", Jon Gee

Jon, like Jay Hosking, is constantly pushing highly-developed synth music to his YouTube, but rather than the community focus it all seems very personal. A lot of his video titles use words like "meditation".

Last April Jon posted a *bunch* of absolute bangers all in quick succession, and this was my favorite from that block, a futuristic synth-rock track based around the two synth "trios" from Make Noise and Moog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxm-OOEkulo

Heavy Medicine // Make Noise Strega, 0-coast, 0-CTRL // Moog Mother, Matriarch, Elektron

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Serge Modular Live Patching Improv - Modular Notes Vol.2 10 - Pure Serge Eurorack"

This box is a rebuild, in modern form factor, of Serge Tcherepnin's 1970s "west coast" modular synth.

The video builds a patch gradually, one wire at a time, which means just listening to it you get a very slowly evolving drone that grows from a buzz to a weird melodic moan. It's some nice, meditative rhythmic ambiance, and it's cool to watch it being built.

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

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Ambient patching with Prism Circuits Canvas and Quasar systems, BPoOT (20220825 191252)"

Prism makes modern re-imaginings of Serge/Buchla style modular systems. These systems excel at patches where control is driven by feedback loops and voltage logic rather than programmed sequences.

This strange, spacey patch creates an ocean of strange cross-interacting sounds loosely driven by a 16-step sequence the circuit moves through as it chooses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2yL9NCNkKY

Ambient patching with Prism Circuits Canvas (paperface) and Quasar systems, BPoOT (20220825 191252)

YouTube
@mcc - cool, wow! Do you just like this stuff or do you also make stuff like this?
@mcc really enjoyed this… thanks for sharing! 🔊 🙏
@mcc I think if you have a Moog One then the onus is on you to make something pretty f***ing awesome with it. But that's just what I think.
@mcc Yay, Jay Hosking! As one of his Patreon supporters: most of us don't seem to care very much what he makes his music with; we like his music, but also we like that he's an extremely thoughtful, compassionate person who brings a lot of chill humanity to his music-making community and encourages his community members to do the same.
@mcc (This performance - specifically, his captioned commentary over it around 1:34, about how he got into hardware because life is relentless and music keeps him in one piece - is what drew me to join his community initially: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBL1IMEPrT0 )
Ableton Push 2 - Live ambient performance

YouTube
@mcc thanks for the memory trip through dnb. I remember being really into photek back in the day https://youtu.be/gtA9Asr30RE
Photek - Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu (Two Swords Technique) (vinyl)

YouTube
@juv3nal Photek is actually on that "Unreleased jungle selection" from Monday! Twice as Photek, and once under the name "System X".

@mcc I remember we've talked about autechre before, this album by Russian outfit Fizzarum is pretty good if you never came across it at the time (they wear their Autechre influence on their sleeve thought it's more melodic)

https://youtu.be/Xn4byzjDswU

Fizzarum - Monochrome Plural [Full Album]

YouTube
@juv3nal @mcc I used to be really into Bukem but I kinda lost interest. I do keep coming back to Photek’s Form & Function vol 2 though. So good.
@mcc I'm trying to remember how I found nobukazu takemura - check out this bill though, autechre, tortoise, prefuse 73 and nobukazu takemura all in one show: http://www.evilsponge.org/concert/Tortoise__24May01.htm
EvilSponge: Concert: TORTOISE w/ Autechre and Nobukazu Takemura

@jonbro oh my *god*

This was the tour I saw Takemura on— my indie rock friends were like, come see Tortoise, I was like OK, looked at the bill and was like oh! Mouse on Mars! And then showed up and Takemura and Virt were additional openers that I don't think had even been announced?

I'm trying to remember if this concert or me stumbling across the Brown Paper Bag remix came first. Either way, the second one was a surprise. "Oh, that guy"

@jonbro Takemura was one of the best two concert sets I've ever witnessed, though
@mcc haha, yeah thats such a wild lineup. Checking into it I think I saw him with tortoise and prefuse 73 on this same tour. No autechre though.
@jonbro In retrospect I'm still confused it if it was "Vert" or "Virt", and if it was Virt, if it's the same Virt who later was active in chiptune scenes?! It's the only one of the four sets that failed to burn itself into my memory
@mcc this single is special to me this remix specifically. Such a journey

@mcc New Forms, This remix, and Roni Size's remix of Metaforce are still core to my conception of what I want to produce in terms of hip hop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaqiQikbRdM

Rakim + Art of Noise - Metaforce : Roni Size remix

YouTube

@griotspeak Okay, this is stellar.

(Do you mind if I boost this?)

@mcc I don’t mind, no!
@griotspeak @mcc Rakim's lines on this remind me a lot of Subculture by Styles of Beyond. can definitely hear Roni Size in here too - he (like me) does love a double-bass.
@griotspeak out of curiosity, where did you encounter the remix? For me it was a JP imported remix compilation and I'm unsure where else it even shows up. It isn't on Tidal's New Forms expanded edition.

@mcc I bought the single for Brown Paper Bag! I might even still have it somewhere.

I got in to the habit of buying singles because that was the way to get instrumentals for cyphers. (Took me a while to accept that Roni Size instrumentals didn't go over well in that setting LoL)

@griotspeak Ohh, that's super cool :O
@mcc Oh wow. Thanks for the share. The first few seconds got me
@mcc People who find the first two minutes offputting also found offputting: Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich
THREAT ACTORS, by asymptotes

from the album IN PROGRESS

asymptotes
@apaleslimghost Oh, haha, I think this actually was it
The Corporation - Soundtrack / Theme / Music - Leonard J. Paul

YouTube

@mcc Man, New Forms was definitely formative for me as well (although I was forever mildly disappointed it did not have the video version of Brown Paper Bag: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwI0gbGEyuI)

_Digital_ has a very odd dream-like, maybe feverish vibe for me.

Roni Size, Reprazent - Brown Paper Bag

YouTube
@WAHa_06x36 As far as I can tell, the video version's never been released as music ?! There's a "full vocal remix" that was on some of the roni size bonus discs and one of the Amp compilations, which is definitely interesting, but the video version (full vocal remix but the choruses only) is probably the best and I'm not aware of a commercial release for it
@mcc But man it's so good though. Rhythms get great and the rhythms they get greater.
@mcc such an amazing album. Got to it a bit later in my "DnB career" but instantly fell in love with it.
Law - Unreleased Jungle Selection - Old Skool Jungle, Hardcore & Drum and Bass - Drumtrip

If there is one thing synonymous with jungle (or is that infamous?), its dubplate culture. Whilst the dubplate may be more a symbol of the past in these digital times, anyone into D&B for 10+ years will probably remember waiting for months on end for that tune, they heard on the radio or in a …

Old Skool Jungle, Hardcore & Drum and Bass - Drumtrip

@mcc this reminds me of my Rover Metro, a car that could just about get to 60mph with the wind behind it while going down hill.

I couldn’t afford a good stereo, but jungle played to distortion while driving down twisty British country lanes was amazing as a 17y/o in the latter half of the 90s. I have no idea how I didn’t die.

#JungleIsMassive

@mcc oh and if you haven’t heard this mix, it’s worth giving it a go: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00f14qc
BBC Radio 1 - Radio 1 and 1Xtra's Stories, The Story of Drum 'n' Bass with Jaguar Skills, Jaguar Skills - History of Drum & Bass in the Mix

The definitive guide to Drum and Bass in the mix. From the earliest jungle breaks to modern day masterpieces.

BBC

@mcc this rocks!

(It could also maybe benefit from an added warning for flashing lights?)

@b_cavello Huh, you think so?
@mcc I am not an expert, but maybe for folks who don’t know what a demo scene video is like
@mcc i read your post thinking it was about databases and was thoroughly confused
@clementd No, I am talking about Acid. But I am yelling it
@mcc wow i had almost forgotten about that album and yet… there it is in my library. time to spin some crunchy goodness.
@mcc good memories from that era. I'd have Limbik Frequencies on, all day long.