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

What I'm listening to today: "Cartesian Somersaults", FΛDE

Okay, do you remember the "PC speaker"? The piezoelectric beeper thing inside old tower PCs, could only play one note at a time? Well this is a full, catchy, multi-instrumental song created entirely for one of those monophonic beepers (apparently the one in the 1980 Commodore PET). It even fakes drums with short chirps. It hurts to listen to and the waveform in the video hurts to look at, and I kind of love it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF1nsMBS5SY

Cartesian Somersaults (PET 4032)

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Call Me Up Again", FΛDE

The PC speaker musician again, making something even weirder: have you heard of the "Fairchild Channel F"? The very first "video game console", 1976. It had a beeper inside the case, but it could only play 3 different notes. This song, recorded on actual Channel F hardware, uses some bizarre modern algorithmic magic (manual FM synthesis!?) to squeeze out "impossible" sounds like arbitrary chords & white noise snares.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STp1IxOk6ME

Call Me Up Again (Channel F, Sleizsa Trio, real hardware)

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Chi-Fou-Mi", FΛDE

Okay this is my third song in a row from the same musician but like, how many songs do you know running on Channel F hardware? Because I only know these two (or I did until I got this reply yesterday: https://mastodon.social/@Korcenton@mas.to/110142793919008016). This is less catchy than the other track but more technically impressive (and more enjoyably technically disastrous). The video has the cryptic caption "HOW IN THE F*CK DID THE TRIGGERING GET BETTER"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kOZEckhuLc

Chi-Fou-Mi (Channel F, Sleizsa Duo, real hardware)

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "It's Universal", Croaker

Somewhere out there in the 90s, before mp3, there must have been an *incredibly* cool scene of BBS-shared tracker music that I missed out on completely (I had BBSes, but could not figure out how to operate Player Pro). This is a groovy drum & bass bop made in 1998 in ImpulseTracker for DOS by… a teenager named Jaakko Iisalo who… went on to become the creator and lead designer of the Angry Birds series. Um. Okay wow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRblrgQ3Jiw

Croaker - It's universal

YouTube

What I'm listening to today: "Slub", STU

The Atari home computers probably deserve more cred in music production; they had a working MIDI/DAW ecosystem back before Windows was viable or Macs were affordable.

Anyway here's a 2017 Atari ST tracker song I just really like. Chiptune you can just *almost* believe could have been a synth pop song in the 80s. The hook in the second half slays me, there was seriously a day last week I listened to this song like five times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuOcR2cAPWw

STU - “Slub” (ST) [Oscilloscope View]

YouTube
@mcc i know a grammy-nominated engineer who is still using his ST for sequencing
@mcc the ST is still extremely famous in the music industry for shipping out of the box with everything you needed to sequence tons of external gear !! there's a bbc interview from like 2016 of fatboy slim running a whole rack of akai samplers off an atari ST
@mcc this is like finding out that EA DICE was founded by demoscene kids
Worms? - Wikipedia

@mcc That is, indeed, a very wild ending to that particular story.

I was so, so into MOD files in the 90s, pre-MP3. Having a PC output real music was magical, and stuff like Cubic Player made it look terrific, too.

There was a ton of original stuff, but also many MOD versions of pop music. Lots of techno and techno-adjacent music translated well, since you can do instrumental with some voice samples pretty easily in a tracker.

Started out getting them off local BBSs, but got plenty off the internet in the later days. I still have a CD with volume 1 of the KFMF archives on it, which I bought new, direct from them, in the late 90s. I'm pretty sure I had to print out an order form, fill it out in pen, and mail it along with a paper check.

@mcc Oh, the other great thing about MOD files? If you were curious how they did something, you could just open it up in a tracker and see. Or change stuff around, if you liked, remix it, steal the samples and make something completely new.

MP3s were a big step up in quality, but a major loss for openness and creativity.

@mcc One of my neighbors had a Channel F when I was growing up. This reminds me of the clever workarounds programmers came up with on the TRS-80 Color Computer for sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PVZ-iv6nAA
Audio Stuff from the TRS-80 Color Computer

YouTube
@mcc as someone who’s sometimes felt I did not want to dance, I have to wonder whether these devices enjoy this. But also very cool.

@mcc wow, that's wicked awesome!

I'm sure Jerry Lawson would be impressed at what people are getting his nearly 50 year old hardware to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Lawson_(engineer)

Jerry Lawson (engineer) - Wikipedia

@mcc I used to throw bits at that thing, one at a time ca 286? Also in the late 70s you could make music on an altair with a radio on a not channel, by reading and writing to a memory over and over. I tuned the asr33 enough to play gavotte in g using the punched tape

@otheorange_tag @mcc Yup - the one-bit sound card. The ZX Spectrum had the same thing - it was a single bit, and if you wrote a 1 to it the speaker moved out, and if you wrote a 0 the speaker moved in.

The ZX81 didn't even have that. But VSYNC was under software control, so by screwing with that, you could fool the TV into emitting a very soft sound. But it was sound!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_WUmhJ9QLk

ZX Spectrum 1-Bit Music playing on TK85 (ZX81)

YouTube
@TomF @mcc Yup the only thing I remember was asm and outs? maybe I used the C wrapper for iob? I don't think there was any card, but that was a long time ago
@otheorange_tag @mcc I was joking about "soundcard" - it was (and still is!) part of the fundamental PC chipset. Though I have no idea if modern machines still actually hook a speaker up to those pins.
@TomF @otheorange_tag I believe at some point they started just forwarding the piezo beeps to the "real" Windows sound card. I don't know how to test because the "beep" tool I'm used to from Linux isn't present on Windows.
@TomF @otheorange_tag @mcc my understanding is that the only 64-bit windows release with a driver that allowed full access to the piezo through the beep() win32 api was the 64-bit version of xp.

starting with vista, the api in question was redirected to the sound card for accessibility reasons (given that piezos were no longer a guarantee on modern boards, and the beep functionality had become integrated into assistive technologies like stickykeys):

https://web.archive.org/web/20151017145119/http://blogs.msdn.com:80/b/larryosterman/archive/2010/01/04/what-s-up-with-the-beep-driver-in-windows-7.aspx
What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? - Larry Osterman's WebLog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

@TomF @mcc @otheorange_tag (and this is why the vintage piezo speaker i salvaged from an 80s pc i found in the garbage 15 years ago and shoved into our modern gaming rig chirps once at boot and never again)
@mcc @TomF @otheorange_tag I don't think it's possible to sound the beeper at all from Windows NT derivatives. Because you have to drive it from software in realtime and that's not great on a multitasking OS. There are some DOS-compatible APIs that would sound the beeper under DOS, but in Windows NT they just play the Windows alert (ding) sound afaik. For example if you print a BEL character to the console.
@whimsy @mcc @otheorange_tag Driving a 16kHz wave "from software in realtime" is much much simpler on a 5GHz CPU :-)
@TomF @mcc @otheorange_tag oh for sure but not ideal if you're doing preemptive multitasking 😊
@TomF @mcc @otheorange_tag (plus even modern softsynths use a buffer of at least a millisecond or two)
@whimsy @mcc @otheorange_tag
"Doctor it hurts when I do pre-emptive multitasking on my 16-core machine"
"Well don't do that."
This is not a new problem for folks doing VR :-)
@TomF @mcc @otheorange_tag imagine how much harder VR would be if you had to race the beam, plotting one pixel at a time in perfect sync with hardware timings 😊
@whimsy @mcc @otheorange_tag Er... that's exactly what we did. And yes, it was inspired by my days coding Amiga and ST demos.
@TomF @mcc @otheorange_tag it's probable I'm misinterpreting what you mean when you say "VR" because I'm very aware chasing the beam was common on 8 and 16 bit platforms, I've written such code myself, that's why I said it 🤷‍♂️
@whimsy @mcc @otheorange_tag VR as in the DK2 and Rift that I worked on at Oculus. Those need to match the scanout very precisely. We actually did try literally racing the beam - updating the framebuffer whle it was being scanned out. It worked, it looked AMAZING, but it was really expensive, and we could do 90% as well with TimeWarp/SpaceWarp.
@mcc @TomF @otheorange_tag There's as much variance in how the beeper is implemented on motherboards as there ever was. Sometimes it's routed through the onboard sound. I've seen recent motherboards with a tiny piezo buzzer soldered onto the board. That's useful when there's no way other than the beeper to diagnose post failures because cases don't usually come with a beeper any more. There is usually also a header for attaching your own.
@mcc @TomF @otheorange_tag correction: as Tom said here https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@TomF/110136694406071533 you don't have to drive it in realtime, at least not in the sense of bitbanging twice per wavelength, I misremembered. But I'm still fairly sure that there's no way to sound the beeper from an application in Windows NT and there are good reasons for that if you consider the timings required to make any coherent tune.
Tom Forsyth (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] The PC beeper had both a programmable square-wave output, or just a direct bit-bashing 0/1 mode. The Spectrum didn't - it just had the second mode.

Gamedev Mastodon

@mcc

1. This is wonderful.
2. I think I am helped along by the fact that I am listening through headphones that are laying on the table. It mellows everything

@mcc

this is great!

oh, i remember that pc speaker, though. the ibm pc (5150) dos 1.0 disk came with some sample programs, one of which was a music player that, indeed, played one note at a time.

electronic arts later came out with a "music construction set" that *tried* to play more than one note at a time. you can play with the apple 2 version here: https://archive.org/details/EAMusicConstructionSet1987

i never understood why the apple 2 sounded better than the pc, when their original sound abilities were the same.

Music Construction Set (1987) : Will Harvey : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Will Harvey’s Music Construction Setfrom Electronic ArtsThis is the 1987 Version of the Music Construction Set (MCS). New features include support for the...

Internet Archive
@apgarcia I could have sworn the Apple II was duophonic, given how often I heard two-note chords in the thing, but … nope, 1 bit speaker. What the hey?
@mcc in the dos days, there were examples floating around of playing back pcm samples by converting it to pwm, learned a lot about x86 interrupts writing my own. early linux included an oss driver that did the same.
@oliviaselenic @mcc A common thing on the Atari ST was to play regular FM-synth through the three music channels (similar to C64 music), and then do PWM drums with the "noise" channel. Drums are low-frequency enough that it doesn't take crazy amounts of CPU time to bit-bash the PWM samples and still sound decent (for the time).
@oliviaselenic @mcc Not just DOS days. In Windows 3.1 you could, if you didn't have a proper sound card, install a pc-speaker sound driver and it would be treated like a normal sound output device. Voice was intelligible and music playback generally recognizable. I truly felt like living in the future!
Music! Coming out of my computer!!
@henryk @mcc yep, i had that driver too. with the unfortunate side-effect that it ran with interrupts disabled, so everything else on the machine stopped while the sample played. 🤷‍♀️

@oliviaselenic @mcc I've been meaning to do one of these drivers myself, but perhaps w/ a microcontroller attached to a speaker using GPIO.

The OSDev article on PC speaker, _and others_ say that driving the speaker for 60 microseconds (for PWM value == 255) is enough. I wonder where 60us comes from?

(1/60us is 16666.66 Hz, which is convenient, but the OSDev article says to run the interrupt at 44100 Hz... hmmm...)

@cr1901 @mcc back in the day, people also built "soundcards" by putting on an r2r ladder on the parallel port. as for timing, early x86 programmable interrupt controllers didn't run terribly fast.. and also were in charge of servicing dram refresh, so running your audio too fast would mean your dram would erase itself.
@cr1901 The Atmel microcontrollers in most microcontrollers have a PWM quasi-DAC feature where you can send a PWM'd wave out through a port and if you configure it right plus attach an RC filter to the port it averages out to the software-designated voltage. The PWM is very high rate so I suspect you could do "real" audio with this.
@mcc update: i found one of them! i used this as a prank on someone and they thought they had hallucinated it: https://www.crossfire-designs.de/index.php?lang=en&what=articles&name=showarticle.htm&article=soundcards&page=3
Crossfire Designs

Crossfire Designs - Audio Apps, UI Designs, Photography and more

@mcc - cool, wow! Do you just like this stuff or do you also make stuff like this?

@johncarlosbaez Heh, I have a little collection of modular gear and have made music of this type, but I've recorded almost none of it ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQpjW5tvP5o )— mostly I just perform it for myself :) My music recording days were mostly in the 00s and mostly with pure-software DSP ( https://data.runhello.com/abk/awk%20-%20ecnalubma.mp3 ).

I think synth tech is fascinating to research tho, if for no other reason than as a sometimes author of audio software…! I think designing an instrument like this would be *fascinating*.

Kastle Drum sequenced by Korg SQ-1

YouTube
@johncarlosbaez Uh, wait, I don't know if you were even going to click them but it's suddenly occurring to me I should warn you the second of those two links is kind of loud lol

@mcc - fun stuff! Yes, that second one sounds loud even when it's quiet. 🙃 I'd enjoy putting a melody on top of the first one.

Here's something I made using a weird setup:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/music/quasimusic/callisto/

It's a lot more mellow than your stuff, so you may find it disgusting. Note that the really smeared-out sounds play the same notes as the plucked sounds, *before* those others, as if foreshadowing them.

Callisto

@johncarlosbaez Oh, I liked this one a lot! The percussion is nice.

The peaceful one was pleasant too, that's actually something that would be fairly feasible to make on a modern modular setup (because one of the most popular workhorse modules is a particular karplus-strong synthesizer running on a little cpu…)

@johncarlosbaez @mcc it just struck me that modular synth is the most category theory instrument out there (maybe you've already addressed this)
@ykallus - I had a musician try ask me to use category theory to help them design modular synths, but I didn't think we had enough of a common language to work well together, and I didn't have time back then to try to develop it.
@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

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