What I'm listening to today: "Verbos + Mimeophon Jam", Deaftone Audio
This video is essentially a single held note and some rhythmic clicking for eight minutes, but the musician, hand-driving a complicated modular feedback machine, thoroughly explores every point in the configuration space of that constrained premise, taking you on a journey through a small universe of minimal ambient destinations. It's all very hypnotic and maybe a little sinister.
What I'm listening to today: "Drift", Lähtö
Here's what I eventually figured out: Back in 2006-2007, Lähtö made music and posted it on a Google Site alongside little blog posts. The only distribution method was mediafire links, all dead now. None of these albums are preserved anywhere on the internet. Mysteriously, this month, someone uploaded this one to YouTube.
This first track (ends at 11:00) is a feast of luscious ambient pads, like a bed made entirely of pillows.
What I'm listening to today: "Track 1", rien
Sometimes I just want to listen to a quiet crackling static noise for twenty minutes. So here's just that. This is an untitled song on an untitled album consisting of two seemingly identical tracks.
Try focusing on this sound. Really pick it apart. Try to perceive each individual microsound. You might be inclined to think of it as literally nothing, but there's gobs of complex texture in how the pops & bass rumbles cluster.
from the album untitled
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.
from the album Even if we talk about love in our fantasy, this iron and concrete won't convey its warmth.
What I'm listening to today: "Chaos Of The Galaxy / Happy Man", Sparklehorse
Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) was a beloved one-man indie rock band and multi-instrumentalist in the 00s. This version of "Happy Man" presents the song as if you're hearing it coming in and out of tune on a radio station just slightly too far away to pick up and fighting interference from some rival station. It makes the whole thing really spooky and gives the legible parts an incredible punch.
What I'm listening to today: "Moth", Burial and Four Tet
Burial and Four Tet are two of the most original electronic musicians of this century, and when they were at the height of their powers around 2010 they recorded three songs for singles together ("Moth", "Nova" and "Wolf Cub", and then some other stuff with Thom Yorke). Moth is my favorite of the three, bouncy, a killer Four Tet pop hook but muffled and blurry in Burial's style. Just some incredible sounds here.
from the album Nova/Moth
What I'm listening to today: "Deep progressive house jam with hardware synths - M:S, Model D, Skulpt, Microfreak, NTS-1, Volca FM.", Work4synths
This YouTuber posts a lot of decent improvised trance techno sets, but for this one they seem to have decided to make a Song and they absolutely killed it. This is a catchy, well-produced electronica bop with a lovely clean-feeling emotion to it, performed by a table of mid-range synths driven from a composition in Ableton DAW.
What I'm listening to today: "Down With Silent Night", Irena and Vojtech Havlovi
From 1992, a married couple playing a duet on piano and cello. Feels like a movie score both in the 10,000-foot atmospheric vibes and the weird echoey way the cello is recorded. It's gorgeous, "evocative" and *slow* in a beautifully deliberate way, with chord changes minutes apart. It's also half an hour long so sincere suggestion: Hit stop at 19:41 exactly. That's where I would have cut.
https://havlovi.bandcamp.com/track/down-with-silent-night-a-tichou-noc-snesl-sv
from the album Music of Silence / Hudba ticha
What I'm listening to today: Butt music from hell, Hieronymus Bosch
Around 1500 CE Bosch painted "The Garden of Earthly Delights", an epic triptych of surreal scenes concluding in Hell. In the hell scene, a naked man has a fragment of musical notation painted on his ass. In 2014 a blogger named Amelia Hamrick transcribed it and a YouTuber named James Spalink recorded this ghostly version on period instruments. What Hell left unfinished the Internet has completed
What I'm listening to today: "Brother", Beck
Beck's early albums cleanly alternate hip-hop/pop & folk, but the B-sides from then tend to find a lovely unique otherworld between the two. Like "Brother": Obscure, ballad-like, & my favorite Beck song.
This song staggers like it's drunk. It always gives me a mental image of hanging from a ceiling from ropes, or maybe clutching a loop handle on a moving subway, putting all your weight on it and closing your eyes, swinging.
What I'm listening to today: "Dissolution III (Oversaturated Intervallic Collisions)", Earth
This 15-minute piece, performed live on NYU's college radio station in 2002, is my favorite Earth recording, and one of their most difficult to find a legit copy of.
It's a series of pendulous guitar distortions layering deeper and deeper on themselves. It's impossible to rationally comprehend as music, and best experienced as ritual. Listen to it as loudly as you can stand.
What I'm listening to today: "Super Fxx", Tera Melos
Tera Melos is a band from the Sacramento post-rock clique who started off making what I'd describe as metal played by free-jazz rules, and gradually transitioned to very loud surf rock with unusual chord progressions. Their last album ended with a weird, memorable blast of a song named "Super Fx", and then a single had a b-side named "Super Fxx" which I'd describe as the same song but with different words and chords:
from the album Treasures and Trolls
What I'm listening to today: "Hello Great Architect", Hella
Hella is another Norcal post-rock band, the drummer from the Advantage playing guitar and the drummer from the Death Grips (the legendary Zach Hill) playing drums, specializing in the loudest, densest, most chaotic, most rancid riffs possible. Their live stuff's incredible, so I'm linking a song from the middle of a live set ("Concentration Face" DVD). Song ends at 1:52:27, turn up loud for intended effect.
What I'm listening to today: "My Neighbor Satan", Boris
Boris is a Japanese rock band with an epic and wildly genre-spanning discography spanning metal, pop-rock, and straight-up noise. This is a really fun track where they take what could have been a simple metal song, compress the metal bits until they're flat and turn the volume way down, and layer strange currents of pop and funk on top. Like peacefully floating on the bubble-bath surface atop a dark noise ocean.
What I'm listening to today: "Idols and Anchors", Parkway Drive
I don't have an interesting story about this one. It isn't a rarity or anything. It's just a song I heard on the radio once and liked, from the genre I can never remember if it's called "black metal" or "death metal". The utter sincerity with which this band with a goofy name singing goofy cookie monster vocals goes about its very serious business has always been really charming to me. Good blastbeats.
What I'm listening to today: "Annihilvore", Behold The Arctopus
My favorite track on my favorite metal album. BTA makes instrumental metal with the kind of post-rock musical rule-breaking I don't have the vocabulary to describe so I always fall back on "it's like jazz, I guess?" (or for the stuff after this album, "it's like twelve-tone?"). This one epic track is a rocking mix of the mind-expanding, the accessible, and the "damn, that's just a really good single sound".
from the album Horrorscension
What I'm listening to today: "My Empire's Doom", Emperor
At my college, consensus was Emperor was The Greatest Metal Band In The World. I'm so-so on them, but! What I do *really* like is Emperor's original demo tape, recorded on a 4-track and self-distributed. The low recording quality causes every instrument to blend together into an indistinguishable soup and the resulting aesthetic is *perfect*. Also this was before the knife murderer joined the band, so that's nice.
What I'm listening to today: "Modular jam with Volca Modular, Korg NTS-1 and Playtronica Touch Me", ITSME
This is a short, peaceful synth piece performed on a tree. Like, uh. This person got hold of a device that converts current (capacitance?) changes from human touch into MIDI, and then they wired it to a small tree. So the harder they squeeze the tree the higher the note on the Volca Modular goes. Anyway, it's a real nice song.
What I'm listening to today: "Roland MKS-80 REV5 & MPG-80 (1983)", Werkstatt Matlak
This unusual YouTube account belongs to a synth repair shop in Bavaria. Each video features exactly one vintage or rare synthesizer and a summary like "Final test after service". Apparently when they finish repairing a customer device they make a song with it.
This video features the Super Jupiter (a rackmount MIDI Jupiter-8) and its programmer. They use it to make sick retro hip-hop.
What I'm listening to today: "A8 KM34", Funkstörung
"Appetite for Disctruction" was released in the brief initial golden era of IDM and I think got kinda quickly forgotten?, but almost every track on it would have been the best track on some other album. All bizarre dirty bitcrushed beats and catchy clean synthtone melodies, all really satisfying.
This isn't my *favorite* track on there, but it's the one I'm thinking about today. Sometimes you just have an A8 KM34 day.
What I'm listening to today: "最強ACIDマシーン。The strongest ACID machine.", TUNASAN
The "T-8 Aria Compact" is a neat device from Roland that tries to get some of that Volca money Korg's been scooping up by putting in a single tiny box [digital emulations of] an 808 and 303, Roland's early-80s drum/synth boxes that failed, flooded the used market and accidentally invented ACID.
In this video, a dog wearing a tiny hat makes some ACID. A T-8 review is hidden in the captions.
What I'm listening to today: "Devolver", Stardust
This is a 2021 demo for the Spectrum ZX by demoscene group Stardust. I linked a Stardust demo in this thread before (again: not Thomas Bangalter related) and the other one was more visually impressive, but the music in this one is *incredibly* hype and stands on its own as a piece of relentless, borderline-gabber hardcore dance music. There are acid sounds in here I am sincerely baffled how they tricked a ZX into making.
What I'm listening to today: "Teisco Synthesizer 110F (1980)", Werkstatt Matlak
This is the synth shop I linked earlier this week, posting the "Final test after repair & service" for a fascinating synth by Teisco, a company I've never heard of (in part because they were folded into Kawai shortly after this synth was made). The test track showcases some lovely timbres Boards of Canada would be proud of, in an alternate universe where BoC were interested in drum & bass.
What I'm listening to today: "Eurorack idm", Sinking Feeling
Sinking Feeling appeared way up earlier in this thread with one of my favorite electronica tracks on YouTube, and lately has been streaming a lot. This is a 20-minute stream that seamlessly transitions between 3 or 4 notional songs all using the same sonic palette. It's sparse & minimal in a way that feels like crisp morning air, all skittering taps and distant curious warbles. Really unique in its simplicity.
What I'm listening to today: "Law – Unreleased Jungle Selection"
Jungle is the older, rawer, more chaotic older brother of "Drum & Bass". This YouTube video is mysterious, a CD-R-length mix of 17 songs by 10 artists. Searching I find the tracks all recorded ~1993-1995 and variously unreleased until the 2010s, released in the 90s (but not as the same mix?), or seemingly found nowhere else on the Internet. Who is "Law"? Unclear. It's a *very* good mix tho, dark & driving.
What I'm listening to today: "Digital", Roni Size Reprazent
New Forms was the album that introduced "Drum & Bass" to a lot of people internationally— as a teen in Texas it massively changed how I thought about music. But besides being a D&B position paper it's got an amazingly unique, self-confident tone of its own. "Digital" isn't the most avant-garde track on it but it's maybe the stickiest, building an incredible groove out of soul-flavored vocals and a D&B skeleton:
What I'm listening to today: "Threat Actor", Jamie Myerson
I have this Cohost post of recommendations for Bandcamp Friday, and so I have a Simplenote file where I stash a reminder list of bands to add to it next time Bandcamp Friday rolls around. When I came back to look at it this month, I found the last line was
"threat actors?"
What… was this? I have no idea. Searching Bandcamp finds only this one song, which I don't think I'd ever heard. Actually it heckin rules
from the album Threat Actor - Inflection Point
What I'm listening today: "7:10", Plug
Luke Vibert is a man of many names and many styles. This is the first track on Plug EP 1, which was released as "Visible Crater Funk" in Europe or mashed into CD 2 of "Drum & Bass for Papa" in the US.
This is D&B (Jungle?) by the basics but the basics are pushed to a point of total chaos. Amen break in a blender to create a maelstrom of drums, and discomfiting, minimal synth tones. It grabs you really well.
What I'm listening to today: "Brown Paper Bag (Nobukazu Takemura remix)", Roni Size Reprazent
"Brown Paper Bag" was the album-seller track on New Forms, mostly due to the *incredibly sick* timewarping music video which had a different, punchier, vocal mix not on the album. But my favorite version remains this rare remix by Nobukazu Takemura, a Japanese glitch musician I once saw live by accident.
(You might find the first two minutes here offputting. Give it a chance.)
What I'm listening to today: "Point of View", LTJ Bukem
LTJ Bukem ruined drum & bass for me. This is not his fault. "Journey Inwards" is stripped-down, minimalist D&B that exposes its inner workings, and once Bukem showed me the Pattern I heard it everywhere. D&B's seemingly infinite fractal complexity was revealed to mostly be K–S––KS– over and over.
I have to forgive Bukem. He also gave me this pair of tracks, this Yoko Kanno-esque sea of violin samples—
[CONTINUES]
What I'm listening to today: "Viewpoint", LTJ Bukem
[CONTINUING]
—and then this lovely track, which blows past D&B's occasional aspirations to being an intellectual descendent of jazz by just, like… making some jazz.
"Viewpoint" is a refreshing, bouncy showcase of jazz bass, electric piano riffs and, at one point, threaded in sneakily, the violin sample that "Point of View" (the previous track on the album) deconstructs. Just such a good feeling to it.
What I'm listening to today: "Lessness", Tom Djll
A mesmerizing abstract journey. If you're used to "music" this track might be a good intro to ambient sound collages. Let it guide you from point to point, a soundtrack for images in your mind maybe.
The parts this is made from are kind of interesting: An honest to goodness VCS-3— the closest thing 1971 had to desktop eurorack, famously used by Pink Floyd— mixed in with a modern desktop eurorack, mixed with a trumpet.
What I'm listening to today: "LOST SOULS - MODBAP", leonardoworx
This is a fun, single-minute hip hop jam with an MPC drum machine, Make Noise's desktop modular synths and some Nas samples.
90s west coast hip hop always had a thing for 70s east coast synthesizers, so there's something that feels like a natural extension to try to do that style of hip hop* with the west-coast synth methods used here**.
* Except Nas is east coast.
** And Make Noise is in North Carolina.
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient then heavy", Jay Hosking
Jay runs a Patreon; the deal seems to be people crowdfund him to buy the most expensive synthesizers in existence, in exchange he makes music with them & posts it.
The in-video captions explain this as "I wanted to create something that starts dreamy and goes heavy", and he does this by using a pair of Moog keyboards for huge padscapes then dropping in dense IDM beats from a purpose-built modular skiff box.
What I'm listening to today: "Live Techno Jam #6 - Roland TR6S - Quadrantid Swarm - Minitaur - BlueBox - Blofeld - NTS1", Spadehead
Have I like… boxed myself in to needing something interesting to say about each of these tracks? Because this is just a good, thoughtfully-composed basic four-on-the-floor techno track with a table of 2010s-2020s desktop synths and a really nice 90s feeling. Good background/focus music. I like the obviously-synthesized-strings voice.
What I'm listening to today: "Heavy Medicine", Jon Gee
Jon, like Jay Hosking, is constantly pushing highly-developed synth music to his YouTube, but rather than the community focus it all seems very personal. A lot of his video titles use words like "meditation".
Last April Jon posted a *bunch* of absolute bangers all in quick succession, and this was my favorite from that block, a futuristic synth-rock track based around the two synth "trios" from Make Noise and Moog.
What I'm listening to today: "Serge Modular Live Patching Improv - Modular Notes Vol.2 10 - Pure Serge Eurorack"
This box is a rebuild, in modern form factor, of Serge Tcherepnin's 1970s "west coast" modular synth.
The video builds a patch gradually, one wire at a time, which means just listening to it you get a very slowly evolving drone that grows from a buzz to a weird melodic moan. It's some nice, meditative rhythmic ambiance, and it's cool to watch it being built.
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient patching with Prism Circuits Canvas and Quasar systems, BPoOT (20220825 191252)"
Prism makes modern re-imaginings of Serge/Buchla style modular systems. These systems excel at patches where control is driven by feedback loops and voltage logic rather than programmed sequences.
This strange, spacey patch creates an ocean of strange cross-interacting sounds loosely driven by a 16-step sequence the circuit moves through as it chooses.
mcc
John Carlos Baez
Yoav Kallus