What I'm listening to today ("best techno on Youtube" 11/13): "AFX Station, Korg Wavestate, Elektron Digitone, Stutter Edit 2", Sinking Feeling
Some unusual synths involved here: Korg's modern wavetable synth and a variant of the Novation Bass Station coproduced with Aphex Twin. What sells it tho is MIDI and a stutter plugin generating quasi-random sequences and changing things up every few seconds to make something unpredictable, haunting and a little bit frightening.
What I'm listening to today ("best techno on Youtube" 12/13): "Oscillation", Jeanie
Modular synthesizers are usually about sculpting single finely tuned timbres, and YouTube synth videos are often just to show off one single sound or groove. It's kinda rare to see anything with conventional song structure. Which is fine! But then here's a complete, compelling pop song, with singing!— very good singing!— based around modular synths and a Buchla easel, and it's *amazing*.
What I'm listening to today ("best techno on Youtube" 13/13): "Futuresonus Parva analog poly-synth with LinnStrument demo", Geert Bevin
Another MPE controller, but plugged into a fancypants 24-saw oscillator, so you have a synth being controlled moment to moment with the expressive dimension of a violin. I worry these writeups overemphasize the technical so to be clear the piece performed is gutpunch stunning. This is the power of a human playing a musical instrument.
What I'm listening to today: "Roland TR6S Arturia Microfreak 1 hour Techno Liveset Experiments #19 w/ strymon timeline, HOF, Ph90"
This is a one-hour live music set with a single synth and a single drum machine, that I literally did listen to today as programming focus music. It's effective techno, completely self-assured, that quickly hits a groove in one of those trance subgenres I never bothered learning the name of. I especially liked the first twenty minutes.
What I'm listening to today: "Microtonal Tetris", mannfishh
Okay so this one… might be asking a lot of you… but. This is a rule-based composition based on a two-dimensional just-intonation scale and the tetronimoes from Tetris. Each chord is 4 frequencies related by Tetris-piece-shaped positions on a grid of ratios, and each chord "touches" the previous one on the grid. There's a full explanation on YouTube but if you think about how it works it might just distract you.
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient Impro with Strega, 0-COAST, 0-CTRL, Starlab, Magneto", Syndrive
This is a 36 minute piece consisting entirely of what appears to be two eight-note sequences combined in various ways, with a human operator switching up the tempo and mix levels every five minutes or so to keep it fresh. Honestly, IMO, it works. Sometimes it is good to listen to 8 notes for 36 minutes. Embrace the ambience! Zone out! Eno compels you! Satie compels you!
What I'm listening to today: "Orbita - 1 hour generative ambient - a tribute to Befaco VCV module collection", Massi
I think I posted one of this person's hourlong self-playing VCV Rack patches before; this one's much more "songlike" than the other. It walks a fine razor's edge, really; if you pay attention it seems to have a lot of nonlooping detail, it sounds structured and composed, but if you allow your attention to wander it returns to being ambient primeval soup.
What I'm listening to today: "001//Slumber [Melodic Ambient] - 2x Mother 32 and Eventide Space"
Remember "Plastic Love"? For a while the "Plastic Love" of YouTube synth jams was "Slumber", the first of Alastair Wilson's many excellent ambient self-playing patch videos. YouTube recs played this for me *so* many times. I didn't really mind though as this is ambient music at its best, low slow tones suggesting musical structure at some geological scale you can't perceive.
What I'm listening to today: "Make Noise Morphagene, Rings, Pianoteq", Synthusiast
Modular artists love "self-playing patches". It's like a game: find enough mechanical structure in your rack to produce enough novelty to keep people interested for the length of a "song".
This piece starts with the modular trope of "Rings plucks at random times and pitches into echo" but then asks a different question: What if I just sat down and played the frickin piano? And it's great
What I'm listening to today: "Strega Wild Textures", Matthew Shapiro
Three minutes of strange but interesting noises (warning, a bit harsh) based around unusual feedback loops in the Strega patch points. The oscillator's pitch is being modulated by its own subharmonic, which produces rhythmic popping clicks on a chaotically determined tempo as it rapidly jumps from under to above human hearing range and back, until the clicks run together and something stranger happens.
What I'm listening to today: "Repellent", Helm
This starts as electric/datastream noise then falls into a lovely spacey Burial-like rhythmic groove for the duration, like listening to industrial music being played at the far other end of an abandoned subway station. I dunno. I just liked it.
from the album Axis
What I'm listening to today: "Microchip Girl", Self
So I feel like if I was going to recommend exactly one Self song it probably should not be "Microchip Girl", but there's something just really charming about this borderline-jazz vaudeville(?) serenade. This was put out on an "album of b-sides" that Self (Matt Mahaffey) released via mail-order at one point between major-label albums, and I guess the song's probably a little more relatable to me now than it was in 1997.
What I'm listening to today: "Pittsburgh Modular Abstract Drone Lab 2"
This is a hypnotic, constantly churning 80-minute ambient piece by the lead designer of the Pittsburgh Modular synth company, performed live and streamed from the company's account. It seems to me this would make great background music for a programming trance, guided meditation or drug trip, assuming you want your code, meditation or trip to take a sinister turn somewhere around the 36 minute mark.
What I'm listening to today: "Modular Experient - 30 Minutes of Generative Eurorack Ambient"
This is an endlessly shifting self-playing patch on a synth eurorack sitting out on a back porch. Throughout the take some dudes are visible out of focus in the background. You know, just some dudes hanging out on the porch chilling to mechanically generated aleatoric music scientifically optimized for chilling on the back porch to
What I'm listening to today: "Alchemic", Jure Jerebic
Short, cryptic-but-compelling piece exploring the configuration space of the Strega, with the musician tweaking the knobs and controls so constantly it's like they're playing a conventional instrument. BTW if this wasn't clear, those gold circles and squares on the Strega face are "patch points" you bridge by touching them. The human body conducts electricity so you can run control voltage thru it like a patch cable.
What I'm listening to today: "Let Go (VCV Rack 2 patch)", Alex Kiss
I normally think of VCV Rack as being an instrument—a signal chain you control from external MIDI, or a incubator for self-playing music generation. Here tho is a video of a guy who's set it up as a full music production environment, piano roll sequencers and mixers and multiband-compression mastering and all, and deploys it to make some classic 90s techno.
(The cables are there, just at ~10% opacity.)
What I'm listening to today: "Breaking Point [live improvisation]", Stephen Torto
Here's a video showing off the power of the Novation MIDI controllers with Ableton Live, specifically the looper interface. Torto builds an entire dark electronic song from nothing as the song itself is playing; other than what seems to be a pre-prepared drum loop, Torto is playing every note himself on the Launchpad's weird isomorphic-keyboard scale grid thing. It's legit cool to watch.
What I'm listening to today: "Negions Fail"
This is a melodic drum&bass track with a lovely feeling to it from the golden age of IDM (circa 2005). The artist is named either "Wisp" or "RWD", it's not clear. I feel like this is something I should have known about at the time it was released but I'd somehow never heard of this artist until I stumbled across this album on YouTube this week.
from the album NRTHNDR
What I'm listening to today: "Polyend Play + Arturia Microfreak - Techno", AMB
An extremely cool dub techno sorta track, only two and a half minutes but there's a lot going on.
If you look it's being driven from the Polyend Play which is kind of like a Novation Launchpad and a portable DAW all in one, the musician will have previously programmed in loops with the button grid and now is using special play-mode functions mapped to those buttons to guide the performance.
What I'm listening to today: "autechre_mod Max MSP", Adisquo Solardali
A cool little groove full of subtle quiet noises. Cuts off suddenly.
It's not 100% clear what this video is, though the thumbnail seems to link it to an alleged max/msp file used by the band Autechre that leaked in the 00s. So did this person mod the leak to create a (partially) new song, and the use of illicit files is why they're cagey explaining the video? Or is this just inspired by Autechre?
What I'm listening to today: "If You Knew", Le Solitaire
This is a simply charming desktop synth duet from 2016 (which for Synth Jam YouTube is basically the paleolithic era). One musician drives the bass and drums while the other one sings into the looper function of an OP-1, constantly tweaking until she's singing in harmony with an entire choir of her own voice.
What I'm listening to today: "Mini Jam Monday #8", littleBIGsynths / Mod Maquina
A jam from 2016 that does absolutely the most with the absolute least. This sets up a killer hook on one Volca Keys and one Pocket Operator drum machine and then explores it as completely as the sequencing capabilities of the devices allow, and then some, as the musician proceeds to hand-animate what seems like every single knob the Volca has. You could dance to this.
What I'm listening to today: "PO-33 & NTS-1 | LoFi | Synthwave jam", Stefan Torto
A lo-fi hip hop beats track with a sort of Earthbound feeling to it. The entire complicated track is produced from the PO-33 (the little calculator looking thing on the left, it's a sampler) with Korg's DIY-kit microsynth used to add reverb.
What I'm listening to today: "Qu-Bit Aurora getting angry", synthe sizer83
I listen to a lot of extremely varied electronic music and this one is still very mysterious to me. I guess this is "drone". Six minutes of enigmatic hums and distant flutters and clanks. There seems to be a melody, but it's too large and slow to see the entire thing at once. This all appears to be the result of using a reverb filter for something entirely other than reverb.
What I'm listening to today: "[D]RONIN + Soma COSMOS + Eventide PITCH FACTOR", Giovanni B
A looper with automated chaotic phasing, an octave doubler, and a… "horror playground live rig"? This person appears to have built a kind of prepared piano without the piano part, a random chunk of wood with guitar pickups and vibratey bits of metal stuck into it at random, ostensibly so they can make horror movie soundtracks?, in practice for making Einsturzende Neubauten grooves.
What I'm listening to today: "Three Views Of A Secret", Daisuke Kawai & Hidenobu "KALTA" Otsuki
So I'm watching this video of a synth trade show, and one of the comments mentions that a guy walking by in the background is "the best organ player in Japan". Huh.
So I look the guy up and find him doing this intense and moody live cover of an old Jaco Pastorius jazz piece, in collaboration with a drummer who seems to be picking up psychic transmissions from another galaxy:
What I'm listening to today: Unused song, Maniac Mansion
If you dump the ROM of the NES version of Maniac Mansion, there's an entire completed song on the cart the game never uses. According to game composer George Sanger, it was originally supposed to be the theme for Dr. Fred (I'm not sure it really fits him). I'm really captivated by this song, it's weird and rocking and it has a really particular emotion to it I'm not sure I can identify in any other piece of music.
What I'm listening to today: "Volca Sample meets Eventide H9", ShurSoma
This is a lovely performance on a cheap sampling drum machine drowned in reverb, centered on a gong-like bell sample that swirls hypnotically close and away. A good track to just lay back and float in.
What I'm listening to today: "SOMA Pulsar-23 (a brief sequence to try things out)", TÆT
I think I've posted a few tracks before based on SOMA's idiosyncratic instruments; the Pulsar is their take on a drum machine, based around heavy rewirability, chaos injection and a *lot* of distortion. This is a fun robot dance number showing off what the Pulsar can do.
What I'm listening to today: "Mørkeredd" (Analog Four)
This is in some ways a very gentle track, the only thing that resembles a beat is a shaped bass, but it's got this enormous cinematic feeling to it. Basically this is good music for listening to as you awake at the bottom of a dying space station, barely feeling your bruises. You have been betrayed. You climb the levels in low-g slow motion, knowing who awaits you at the top. Your destiny is above you, or your doom
What I'm listening to today: "defenestrate (live ambient improv)", TRDRT
This is a 15-minute ambient-plucking-noises-and-bass groove that builds in a really good way. Another one of those tracks that's good background sound when you're doing something else.
What I'm listening to today: "Chudraga", porfiry
Another piece with the Pulsar, SOMA's drum machine. This time it's paired with the Ornament, SOMA's oblique "sequencer": a controlled chaos generator used in this case to trigger congo patterns and distorted industrial drums while something (also the Ornament?) pushes semirandom notes into a 90s-IDM-reminiscent synth lead (which the musician seems to have jury-rigged from nowhere by hijacking one of the drum oscillators).
What I'm listening to today: "Poology Jungle with Pulsar-23 and Digitakt", raphito_
So if I'd made this I'd probably have named it "poolcore", but… whatever. This is a spaced-out clicks-and-cuts percussive blend with the Pulsar, controlled via MIDI from the Digitakt, supplying glitchy sounding analog drums while the Digitakt overdubs the standard Amen break samples. The tension between the two modes of techno keeps the mood a fascinating split between chill and anxious.
What I'm listening to today: "Lyra 8 + Strega", afxtr
What if I just did an entire week of these posting only SOMA synth pieces?
So the Lyra-8 is all about reverb; its oscillators maximize harmonics so the reverb can smear those out. This musician decided that *wasn't enough reverb*, so he added the Strega for maximum possible ominous howling drone.
Note the 0-CTRL isn't sequencing anything; it's wired so the harder he presses the keyboard the more the reverb expands.
What I'm listening to today: "Industrial Raga 1", Vadjuse
The Ornament is a machine for algorithmically sequencing triggers. One of its trigger output modes is "connect to ground", and wiring those outputs to the touch plates on the Lyra simulates the touch of a human finger. So in this one a PO-32 drum machine plays highly distorted beats while the ornament is picking out a note sequence on the Lyra's finger keys, producing something intense and unsettlingly alien.
What I'm listening to today: "Soma Lyra 8 Pulsar 23 2X Ornament 8 Patch", NodiWolf
A long, slow dirge with a beat so chill it's frigid and a sinister hissing hum, like you're being serenaded by a bank of air conditioners or a swarm of wasps. I absolutely love this.
This one has the full SOMA complement of a Lyra, a Pulsar, and two Ornaments, with each Ornament controlling one device and the Lyra controller on a much slower timescale to differentiate drums and "melody".
What I'm listening to today: "I'm Out", Tom Ehrlich
Four minutes of lovely blasting industrial noise, evolving from the drone of evil bagpipes to drunkenly stagging almost-melodic cinematic synthwave.
What I'm listening to today: "Off The Wall", Kurena Ishikawa
Live jazz performance of a woman playing a standup bass and singing to her own accompaniment. A really compelling piece with a good groove.
What I'm listening to today: "Volcano", The Swans
This album is mostly spacy shoegaze until suddenly this track hits in a blast of desynced dance beats, electronic buzzing and ghostly singing; what I didn't know until this week is the reason it's so different is it's the album's one track produced entirely by Jarboe, the woman singing on it. I always assumed this was a sample collage and that the singing was some folk song they'd dug up.
IMO should be experienced loud.
What I'm listening to today: "G-Spot Tornado", Frank Zappa
I didn't know this existed until last week, but Zappa's final album ("Jazz from Hell") was created entirely on the Synclavier, a late-70s DAW predating microcomputers and shipping on several large cabinets. It's impossible to comprehend what this felt like in 1986 as at the time it must have felt impossibly futuristic but to me (and probably you) it indelibly sounds like general MIDI on cheap 90s PC sound cards.
mcc
Bill Seitz