What I'm listening to today: "Canton", Nils Frahm
Did I mention I really like it when Nils Frahm plays the piano? This piece is so gentle it feels, when he finishes, as if he was never there. A whisper, a bubble. You are aware someone spoke but not a word they said. You wake from a dream and find you can't remember what you dreamed of
from the album Night
What I'm listening to today: "curtain sequence", Silhouette Synthesizers (Pit Przygodda)
This guy designs and manufactures unusual synthesizers on the concept of converting images into sounds. Sweep a line across part of an image, read brightness data from underneath your line, convert it to waveform or spectral data. He's posted various demos of his synths at work on YouTube, of which this is one of the less flashy but more musically interesting examples. Morning bell
What I'm listening to today: "Relaxing Experimental Ambient [Vinyl Studio Session]", Raica
Here a lady who runs a record store in Seattle for experimental music spins some mind-expanding space-journey ambient techno in a kitchen (not her kitchen, just *a* kitchen). A good solid 75-minute block of unnameable emotions.
(There's a second set by the same DJ on the same YouTube account which had some good highs, but I didn't find that other one as consistent.)
DJ Raica, the mesmerizing project of Chloe Harris, is a name synonymous with the ethereal and experimental. As the head of Seattle’s iconic Further Records, ...
What I'm listening to today: "The Lie That Is Sin", YOB
My friend Ro recommended this when I said I liked doom metal. This live version (0:00-12:18 in the video) takes what was already a pretty great song and slows it down, picks apart each element and leaves it torn open on a dissecting table, luxuriates in each little sound, floating in isolation, icebergs on a dark ocean
What I'm listening to today: "7 string IR test", Daniel M Karlsson
Posted by @t36s as part of a series of computer sound synthesis tests, I'm not sure I understand it exactly but I *think* he used a recording of a string instrument as an echo characteristic and then by agitating it produced super realistic synthesized string plucks. Gorgeous little superresonating classical guitar improvisation with touches at once obviously human-driven and obviously computer-generated
Attached: 1 audio 7 string IR test. The *scordatura* open strings are the IR. It's just a file in there. No sweeps or nothing. Just regular ol recordings of each string spread out a lil bit with panning is all. Super fun to play. This works in realtime to my ears at 192kHz samplerate and a blocksize of 64 samples.
What I'm listening to today: "Push Pull", Mark Thibideau
If you're up on electronic music genres: Imagine 90s French house but strip out the funk and substitute 00 dub techno instrumentation?
If you're not: Chill dance music for sitting in your chair. There are a lot of really cool sounds and I liked how good the sounds were, they were all like swoop swoop chikchikchik
2019 release. Apparently this artist is from Ontario
2 track album
What I'm listening to today: "only in it for Euro Cash", Doak 16
Been listening to this YouTube synth collector's tracks all morning. This isn't the friendliest ["Remember it"] or the most provocative ["an ewok…"] track in the channel backlog…
But *oh*, I love the drums in this one! I love the way it comes together like a magic eye, nonsense into sense. Dense, dreamy, unique
What I'm listening to today: "Outside In", Linkwood
This track opens the other Raica ambient mix I was talking about Tuesday. It's just a really good frozen moment. Quiet, crackly, passes quickly. The sound of something starting, and then silence. A Feel
from the album Expressions
What I'm listening to today: "303 Day", Wizart
YouTube musicians have this tradition of making tributes to the Roland 303 acid bassline machine on March 3. Here's a lovely midtempo live jam made with Behringer's modern 303 reproduction, several modern Roland desktop reproduction units¹, and some guitar pedals. A good groove such as one might blast at the LAN party in 1999.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxJp4XEU-yA
¹ Including a 303, meaning at a certain point you can catch him actually running TWO 303s AT ONCE
What I'm listening to today: "Rei Ayanami", Brian Altano
This is an EP I love from 2019, which remixes various songs from the "Neon Genesis Evangelion" OST as megastructure trip-hop, and although there's only 7 songs every one is a banger. Here's a "big beat" version of Rei's theme:
https://brianaltano.bandcamp.com/track/rei-ayanami
In my friend group our traditional road trip music is this EP and also that 2Mello album where he complains about people coming up to him in the supermarket and asking him to make beats
from the album Revangelion
What I'm listening to today: "unleashed voices", Black Cookies
What the musician calls a "lo-fi tape loop ambient experiment". Super evocative. Sounds on free-running tape, four tracks on the left deck, one on the right, three separate echo pedals. Watch and you can see each little action the musician does to manipulate the sound, listen and you can hear all these little chunky sounds where the tape has mechanical imperfections. Deeply physical music.
What I'm listening to today: "Chinurareta Zabi-ke" ("The Bloody Zabi Family"), Takeo Watanabe
We've been watching the original 1979 "Gundam" and the music in it is actually *incredibly sick*? 70s Children's TV would just effortlessly toss off the rawest funk music.
There's this one obscure cue, it isn't even on the regular OST (you have to go to the extended 45th anniversary soundtrack), it plays during quiet moments. I *love* the vibe on this, the bass is so emotive
What I'm listening to today: "Afternoon Chill: Live Electronic Session", Jai Cuzco
This is uh, a bit gentler than the electronic music I usually post.
Chill beats and synth tones, a fluid medley of 2 or 3 songs. It's not clear where in the world this video was taken, only that the view from this guy's window is incredible
What I'm listening to today: "More disturbing wave bard sounds", OSVoS
There's a new Bastl Kastle and one of its configurations is a tiny "modular"¹ sample scrambler. This artist did a number of pieces mixing the Kastle 2 with other gear, this one I thought had the most interesting beat (You might prefer "More Wave Bard Experimentation" if you like kalimbas more than I do). Alien Gregorian chants + hip hop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHcFkUliO6w
¹ Jump wires instead of patch cables…take a look, it's weird
What I'm listening to today: "Legendary Wings", Hyakutaro Tsukumo (arranged by Yuu)
This is a General MIDI arrangement of the main theme to Thunder Force V, a sidescrolling shooter made by Technosoft in 1997 for the Sega Saturn. For whatever reason, this is the version I got hooked on!
Rendered on (splitting channels) a Roland SC-8850 and Yamaha MU2000, both of which were released in 1999, so if TF.V had come out just two years later it could have sounded like this.
What I'm listening to today: "Walk On Girl", Linda from Work
Christine's been listening to this band lately and I really like them. They give me a vibe like whoever Linda is was a riot grrl 20 years ago and now she's 35 and she has a ghastly office job and her life is a lot slower, but she's still in a punk band after work
This is the last track from their album "The Night is Short", which has at least three "oh, I should put that in the music thread" level bangers:
from the album The Night Is Short
What I'm listening to today: "Pure Data Breakcore Live Coding", GrundTon
Distant barking. Weird overwhelming synth swells and one of the most unusual treatments of the Amen break I've ever encountered. (EDIT: It turns out to be a Funky Drummer break, which makes it even weirder it turned out like this?!) Generated by PureData and the YouTuber actually has several videos wandering around this same script's configuration space; this seems like the most focused.
What I'm listening to today: "Akai S950 - Deep House Music - Vintage Sampler", MikeSynth
Hype little house techno fragment made on a plausible circa-90s vintage hardware setup (1986 Akai rack sampler sequenced by a 2003 Akai sequencer, mixing board as an instrument). Really refreshing vibe, has a bit of a trip-hop feel to me.
What I'm listening to today: "Volume", Pylon
@onelson linked this and I don't know anything about it. It rocks! When I started typing this post I was gonna say something about krautrock but in fact it turns out she is *not* singing in German, only indistinctly. Wikipedia says this is from Athens, Georgia. Well that explains a lot. Cool crisp Clashy vibes that seem to predict everything that's gonna happen in pop music in the ten years after it was recorded (that's 1980)
What I'm listening to today: "Metric", Bryan Zentz
So there was this first golden age of "techno" in Detroit or whatever, when the genre was new and raw, but then there was this second golden age around 2000, when we (as a species) had gotten *really good* at the Detroit style and were just making a lot of it. This YouTube account spins a bunch of that era of music on vinyl. This track is a dense crystal structure of dance beats and staccato samples and it is sick
What I'm listening to today: "Untitled A ( Rock To The Beat )", Ferro
Another from the "Techno Vinyl Records" account's collection, this one's a little more genrefucky, with a more variety, bringing in strange sounds and "House Music" feels. A good gradual buildup.
(Honestly, I linked you that other track yesterday so I could link you this track today. This is how much variety you can get out of a initially-seemingly-rigid genre with some slight changes in texture.)
What I'm listening to today: "Goldener Reiter", Joachim Witt
A long time ago I got captivated by this odd 1980 Krautrock track, with its weird mix of melancholy and peppy, 90s CGI video, and breaking into English with "und I'm feeling up" in the chorus. I was wrong about everything! The video (now copyright-claimed off YouTube) was for a 1994 remix and re-synced with the original audio; there's no English; and the lyrics are about medical abuse so uh, CW German speakers
What I'm listening to today: "BLK ZMBY", billy woods
As far as I can tell, this song is intended as a political condemnation of the living dead. Mr. woods makes hip-hop with complex and layered messaging, some of which is not intended to be Legible to me personally. This track is slow murky deep fried jazz
"In 2023, Woods published a children's book titled A is for Anarchist.[11][27]"
from the album GOLLIWOG
What I'm listening to today: "Funknitium-99", Fearofdark
This guy is a prolific Bandcamp/YouTube tracker musician, and here he pulls out some fusion funk with an immaculately crisp, clean energy. If you like the music in Sonic the Hedgehog levels listen to this
What I'm listening to today: Yoyaku instore session, Karla Böhm
Here is a Belgian DJ spinning an hourlong techno set in a record store in Paris. Chill deep house beats, slowly transitioning into French Touch over the course of the set. Great feeling throughout. I think this video was produced as promo for the store, as the camerawork is unusually professional for this sort of video.
What I'm listening to today: "End Of The Abyss | Erica Synths Steampipe + Perkons x Soma Cosmos | Drone Day 2025 Live Jam", Travis Benjamin Simpson
Evolves in a way which suggests internal narrative, a journey through a long dark pipe. This is intense, atmospheric, horror-movie music given an unusual color by the fact it is being performed in a bright, sunny backyard with a pink flamingo. Three boxes, two near-designed for ambient drone, but the third is…a drum machine?
What I'm listening to today: "Citrus Cirrus", Muscises
It's hard for chiptune to surprise me at this point, but this surprised me. Impossible sounds coming out of the Sega Genesis sound-chip pair, funk music that has returned from the planet Jupiter with terrifying psychic powers, an evening drive in a convertible while the skyline of an impossible ruined city rises in the distance. A plausible soundtrack for your dreams
What I'm listening to today: "Bound For The Floor", Local H
Grunge is really good actually and there's some great gems if you look a layer or two deeper than the big 3 acts. This, from 1996, is a late (last?) gasp of "alternative rock" before slick acts like Creed and Matchbox 20 took over the space completely. It's a beautiful sustained single note, a monotone intonation, a hoarse, frustrated yell.
Supposedly this album is about how much it sucks to live in Illinois.
What I'm listening to today: "Dawless Dreamz #2", Glemii
Here Korg's long-forgotten ur-groovebox, the Electribe, does a duet with an actual Game Boy to create what the musician calls "ambient jungle". This is one minute long and feels fantastic, objects from the past breaking through the envelope of time to show a glimpse of the beautiful feature we deserve.
What I'm listening to today: "Tiny Setup, HUGE Sound: Jungle with the PO-33 KO! + Monotron Delay", Pocket Trax
The Pocket Operator and Monotron Delay remain the bang-for-buck champions of the desktop synth world, "toy" devices that at one time retailed for $60-80 in the Guitar Center checkout line (…before inflation…) and pair beautifully.
This shockingly hard track shows just how far you can push these little PCBs. Lightspeed 12-bit drum & bass
What I'm listening to today: "4 dollar casio sa5 processed through EQD avalanche run, afterneath and transmisser reverb", Anne Sulikowski
Gorgeous, slow ambient music composed live on [see above]. Time-lapse video of clouds over cliffs, a cat sleeping for nine hours, chunky kalimba echoing over brainfog. Three blocks away there is a cement mixer running, just at the edge of your hearing, far enough the acoustics of the street turn the grinding into soothing white noise
What I'm listening to today: "Slack", Gar Hoover
Here's the PO-33/Monotron Delay tiny power combo again, making what the musician calls "Chill House" with more than a bit of French touch. Stands out from its genre with some strange sample freaking (is that Paul McCartney??).
Notice the YouTube synth community pro tactic of leaving some random objects on the desktop for Visual Interest.
What I'm listening to today: "kickstart my heart", elricfd
oversaturated brainglaze vaporwave fuck music
This URL was in a text file on my computer where I must have stashed it at some point. I have no idea what this is and I do not remember where I got it from. Bandcamp informs me this musician is the inventor of "Frasierwave". Ok
What I'm listening to today: "[You Caught Me] Smilin'", Sly and the Family Stone
My favorite track from "There's a Riot Goin' On", possibly the most stoned funk album ever made. I have heard so many weird stories about the production of this album, and I don't know which ones are true. Everybody sounds like they just woke up. Everybody sounds like they love making music. The music itself sounds like it's drunk
What I'm listening to today: "The Ocean Floor" (part 1), Kazumi Totaka (Nintendo)
In Japan, Mario Paint got a sequel for the 64DD (an N64 peripheral that added internet access, mouse support, and a floppy drive). The music for Mario Artist is *amazing*. This track is moody fusion jazz, vaporwave in 1999; it pushes the N64 to the limit, synthesizing most things but then dropping in what seems to be an entire realtime guitar track. (I think part 2 samples Massive Attack.)
What I'm listening to today: " DRIVIN' ", Fox Capture Plan
*Incredibly* funky Tokyo jazz, tons of energy and wild futuristic synths that just slam you from the start like you're a movie character who just opened the forbidden box and it was full of otherworldly light that disintegrates you instantly. But like, in a smooth jazz kinda way. Do you like electric piano
from the album XRONICLE
What I'm listening to today: "Level 3", Jim Andron
The Phillips CD-I is one of the most infamous video game system failures ever, and it hides a secret: *The CD-I Tetris game had a bizarrely kind of amazing soundtrack.* 10 tracks (I also love "level 0") of the kind of pure vibes "Vaporwave" was trying to chase in the 2010s slowing down 80s r&b. This version comes pre-slowed down! Strange murky easy-listening swamp jazz, general MIDI instruments only
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRVEtOL6Kho&list=PLFCp1PLqgPzCrfc4BALfINUs7ueJMkUcP&index=4
What I'm listening to today: "Wanted", Hiromi
Some chill loungey jazz by a Japanese pianist and her band. Wonderful feel.
This is the kind of music that trip hop was processed from and I believe trip-hop fans should listen to some of the raw uncut stuff once in a while, perceive the woman who casts the shadow. Actually I'm not sure there ARE any trip-hop fans under 40. Maybe liking Portishead in 2025 is the equivalent of liking jazz in 1998. But I did like jazz in 1998
from the album Sonicwonderland
What I'm listening to today: "When The Catholic Girls Go Camping, The Nicotine Vampires Rule Supreme.", GIRAFFES? GIRAFFES!
Basically whenever I listen to Tera Melos, Tidal recommends this next. It's actually a pretty good four-minute primer on "math rock"!
What is Math Rock, at core? It's jazz. It's just jazz with rock instruments. Or maybe metal with jazz instruments. In the 70s we called this prog, now it's math or post rock. Anyway here's guitar played very fast
from the album More Skin With Milk-Mouth
What I'm listening to today: "Main Menu" (Mario Artist: Communication Kit), Hideaki Shimizu (Nintendo)
"Mario Artist" for the N64DD consisted of 4 separately-sold "games", of which this is the slightest and most utilitarian (a piece of modem software that let you upload and download creations from the other 3 games). It has possibly the most interesting soundtrack; it seemed to want to be unobtrusive, so it's minimal and ambient. This is a wonderful sparse techno track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmREOQxh0rU&list=PLWgMiwPdlU0WEnBTjEeCIRnf15uuvydJo&index=2
@mcc The other Artist soundtracks are awesome as well. Talent Studio has this proto-Wii flamboyant vibes (how fitting for a proto-Mii game), whereas Polygon Studio has Totaka as his most unhinged, channelling the IDM energy of Hip Tanaka and Ryoji Yoshitomi on the OG Mario Paint soundtrack.
(isn't that one composed by Hideaki Shimizu though?)
mcc
ailepet