What I'm listening to today: "Small drops 2025-08-02", atnr
"Minimal Ambient". Giant reverb landscapes. Sitting on a dark hill, your hair mussed by gentle breeze, watching on the horizon the spaceships take off.
Made by combining Yamaha's modern DX7 revival, an original Game Boy, and three guitar pedals, one of which only exists to simulate the sound of cassette tape; someone probably *could* have made this exact music in 1989, in principle.
What I'm listening to today: "Fly to the Leaden Sky", Manabu Namiki
This is the stage 1 music from "Battle Garegga", an incredibly maximalist top-down shooter made in 1996 by former Compile staff. This is from the 2016 PS4/XBox rerelease, so the original onboard chip synthesis is replaced with slightly different instrumentation including crisper drum samples that really do improve this one track. A giant glowing idol to the 1980s, an exuberant tower of electric guitars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF-ENkufyCY&list=PLguGBzflGahMxYlXtQxX5e4yuqPMWKBAn&index=3
What I'm listening to today: "Speciation", Passepartout Duo
An old technique in ambient music is "phasing", where you play two loops of different lengths and let them go in and out of sync, creating different interesting patterns. It's a truism this requires electronics or tape, because two humans trying to play out-of-sync tempos would confuse each other. These two seem to be actually doing a live phase performance, dueling xylophone and gameboy-style squarewave loops
What I'm listening to today: "Souzou Suru", Haru Nemuri
High-energy Japanese rap with seriously weird production. My wife was listening to this and now I'm listening to it.
https://specific.bandcamp.com/track/souzou-suru
Every lyrics site swears up and down she's saying "Touch my Yes", not whatever it is you thought you heard.
( If you're enjoying yourself by the end of this song maybe listen to the next one on the album, which I like for its mid-90s-arcade-shooter-style sampled guitars… https://specific.bandcamp.com/track/bang )
from the album Shunka Ryougen
What I'm listening to today: "Finally", a773
This Danish musician uses the modular synth rack— usually the domain of weird noise ambient— for a purpose I've never seen it turned to: incredibly sincere Fusion Jazz. 80s fusion did use simple, early synths— and modular also tends toward the simple, because simple base tones respond best to layering in complications. So there's a lot of plausible 80s feel but with the strangest mystery sounds slipping through the background
What I'm listening to today: "Mood piece from one machine to another", Sonaura
Three minutes of degraded humming, drone piece on two cassette tape machines one of which seems to be having serious problems. The desert in late evening, a wisp of smoke moving in a way smoke shouldn't. A transmission you pick up briefly on the radio and then can't find again. Do you hear it? No, it's gone. As far as recordings of degraded humming sounds go I'd say this is a pretty good one
What I'm listening to today: "Level 0", Jim Andron
In the 90s there was a thing called "smooth jazz". I think boomers probably understood it, but I was never clear how it was different from "easy listening music".
This opener from 1992's famously odd "CD-I" version of Tetris is easy-listening music transcended to the point you can understand why people like the genre. Hold music pulling at your heartstrings, incredibly cheesy FM piano over shockingly hype bass work
What I'm listening to today: "Orange", Tristan Baldi
Chill tabla groove on the Dirtywave M8, a small handheld tracker. Big warm analog-style pads and lots of fun little sound design scribbles low in the mix. Sun shining through some sort of medium, like the fronds of trees or the smog of southern California
What I'm listening to today: "Mocktapus, Rocktapus, Unlocktapus Rex", Prince Charming featuring Philosophy Major
I'm … I'm really not sure what's happening here! A two-minute hip hop hallucination, two or three stations fighting for control of your FM radio, a bunch of musical instruments thrown in a dryer and they turned it on. Sometimes my brain sort of demagnetizes and thoughts swarm in all directions aimlessly like bees. What if that felt pleasant? That's this song
What I'm listening to today: "White Paws", Tristan Baldi
This piece hijacks the Subharmonicon, Moog's idiosyncratic semi-generative synth, to a purpose it's not typically used for: Acid, coaxing some surprisingly 303-like sounds out of it. Combine this with an unusually clicky configuration for the DFAM and you have an unusual, unpredictable, quiet but punchy little electronic jam.
What I'm listening to today: "While you were gone", a773
This is the fusion-jazz-on-modular-synths guy I linked last Sunday. This track has that "downtempo Sega" feel but leans into the weirdness/jazziness by being in 7/8 time. Most people listening to 5/4 can tell they're listening to "a weird time signature" but 7/8 sounds like "normal music" with a strange pressured feel you can't explain. If you sleep too long the fire goes out you dare to dream and we have no doubt
What I'm listening to today: "Biology 101", Dr. Octagon ft. "Chewbacca"
Removed track from Kool Keith's career-redefining "Dr. Octagonecologyst", present on the original indie release but not the Dreamworks version. The point where they apparently went "too far". Too weird, too creative, too surprising, too hard to follow, too "Kool Keith". A Dan the Automator groove slowed down to the breaking point, with a flood of incredibly dense sci-fi rap wordplay running over it.
What I'm listening to today: "Cosmic Interlude", LTJ Bukem
Chill jazzy electronic from the year 2000 with delicious stand-up bass sounds. Bukem spent the mid 90s staking a flag on what he called "Intelligent Jungle" (as far as I can tell he invented "the Dreamcast menu sound") but then as the 90s ended pushed past that and crafted a distinct brand of self-confident instrumental jazz with skeletal drum&bass patterns as support. Would feel at home on a Ninja Tune mixtape.
What I'm listening to today: "Time 4 Breaks", Breakbeat Era
This album was supposed to be the Roni Size clique's breakout moment into pop domination, but a series of odd decisions left it as a one-off artifact that you've either never heard of or are still obsessed with 25 years later. This track shows the project at its best: A pop song structure with heart-gripping vocals and the production gloss of 1999's best D&B production team. Progressive but goes down smooth.
What I'm listening to today: "Imouha", Etran de LAïr
Incredible surfrock¹ jam by a band that describes themselves as "the stars of the Agadez guitar scene" (Agadez is the fifth largest city in the Republic of Niger). Do not miss the video-toaster-core video. Dudes rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xeytuhn0irM
I found this as the YouTube algorithm's next recommendation after watching "Prisencolinensinainciusol".
¹ Sahara rock?
Imouha (Official Music Video)🎸✨ 🎸✨ 🎸✨ from "100% SAHARA GUITAR", the new album by Etran de L’Aïrhttps://tinyurl.com/100saharaguitarhttps://etrandelair.ban...
What I'm listening to today: "Late Morning", Breakbeat Era
A couple days ago I linked the song from this album I thought had the closest chance of getting mainstream euro radio recognition for this odd Roni Size project. This (incidentally the next song on the album) is the track I think appeals best if you just like SOUNDS. Six minutes onrushing bull head down subway to an afternoon headache, breakbeat jungle boiled down to annihilation of all thought, moksha in motion
What I'm listening to today: "icm", a773
One last track from the musician I've been calling "the fusion-jazz-on-modular-synths guy". So thing is, mixing jazz and electronic music is not odd, it's just what you're *expected* to do is cut up the jazz as a backing for sampled breakbeats. This raises a question: What if a773 made a track with breaks? Turns out it turns out extremely well. Something here for both prog and Ninja Tune lovers. Nice understated bassline groove.
What I'm listening to today: "Hold Tight London", Chemical Brothers
This is just literally the song stuck in my head today.
Chemical Brothers are underrated TBH. They got some radio play with "Dig Your Own Hole" and I think the electronic heads (in the US?) mentally classified them as pop and tuned out. They continued making jams. I think this might be the best song they ever made. Does it stop being rock music if the guitars are sampled? *Are* these guitars sampled?
What I'm listening to today: "Erm...Yes, This Is Yamaha RS7000", Isobutane
This ungainly 1999 pro groovebox from Yamaha is fairly capable at making techno and hip hop. It… doesn't sound like this at all! Apparently using no external samples only tweaked presets this musician creates a drunken rush of chaotic glitch sounds, a simply wild wobbling bass line and this one sound like an angel got stuck in your crawlspace and is moaning in divine ecstasy until you let it out
What I'm listening to today: "AudCalc, Zeptocore, Phantasmal Force, GREAT CONJUNCTION Micro Synth Coordination", Arman Bohn
I at one point considered myself an authority on small handheld devices that make odd sounds, and I… I recognize exactly two of the six devices on this table. A glorious mess but it all comes together, floats your mind on a melange of algorithmic beeps, chirpy synth beats and bitcrushed Amen like a crashing sea. More is more. I like the buzzy bass.
What I'm listening to today: "souvenir d'autrefois", Trhä & Midoran
Asked on bsky for metal that makes every bar on the graphic equalizer jam all the way up. Blurry thrashy metal with kinda those stoner jam feels and this amazing softness like cassette tape, every blast of sound is a little bit rounded off. Ends with an inexplicable detour into… like… if I say "title screen music for a strip mahjong tabletop unit in a dingy bar in Kabukichō in 1994" will you understand?
from the album Trhä & Midoran
What I'm listening to today: "沈む！", Banshimoku
I saw these folks live last night! Shizumu (沈む) appears to be "Sinking" or "Sink!", like a command. The word she yells at the end of the chorus is "ILLUMINATION!" in English. "Banshimoku" is a Japanese name for the Placodont, an extinct triassic reptile. Walking through the market this morning, kept yelling to myself under my breath, the quietest yell, "ILLUMINATION!". May the bridges we burn be the lights that show our way
What I'm listening to today: "Untitled", Åreknuteknyterne
In 1986 a tiny Norwegian cassette label named "Yecch Tapes" released a compilation named "FFFFF" with this song. It would be wrong to say it sounds like it does because these are ghosts reaching out of history to haunt us. That's just the cassette sound. But this sure *sounds* like ghosts trapped outside time, trying to score an epic 80s action thriller, but they're ghosts so it only feels like inexpressible loss
https://tribetapes.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-fffff-version
from the album Åreknuteknyterne
What I'm listening to today: "Virtual Star Embryology" (Revolutionary Girl Utena ED 2), J.A. Seazer
Ancient times. Perfection. Isolation in the desert.
Atmosphere, atom, a star of causality.
Yes, a child of earth is conceived
The embryo of philosophy.
The endless surface of the torus,
A single organic mechanism
A single perpetual motion.
Ah, it is empty movement!
Just empty movement,
Empty
What I'm listening to today: "My Cancerous Body in Music", Entropic Echo
Industrial-grade modular electronica with a focus on gigantic distorted pads. The large block of wood in the corner is a SOMA device that as far as I know works by your body grounding or bridging spontaneous circuits in the electrically active orbs. Hundreds of figures in hooded monk robes trudge determinedly across a gray wasteland. Raindrops pick their way down staircases of leaves.
Cool ending.
What I'm listening to today: "Time III: plastic ego", StereoMan
Fun tracker tune (original upload September 1998) that leans into the uncanny feeling of sample tracker music with stunning results. Echoes of a SNES game where a robot jumps through 2D mazes made of girders, except if one single song from a 1998 game OST went this hard you'd still be talking about it 30 years later. (The ImpulseTracker file is 768k; maybe nobody shipping games wanted to invest that much?)
What I'm listening to today: "Benevolent Incubator", Icarus / @olliebown
A Certain Type of Jazz thrown through the sample blender in a Certain Way, makes me think of Amon Tobin or the Michael Fakesch solo albums or Four Tet remixing Andrew Bird. Fantastic groove. Has an arc to it, a tension, a single set of sounds gradually evolves from manic solo drumming to a gentle indie guitar-pluck lullaby before dissolving completely into incoherent nervous glitches.
from the album Six Soviet Misfits
What I"m listening to today: "The Torrents of Destruction Overwhelmed Me", thoughtForm Max
Extended metal guitar solo, but with no guitar, done entirely on Roger Linn's isomorphic grid controller. Every pad on here has per-note expression via both pressure and how you wiggle your finger within the square, enabling techniques not usually possible on a keyboard synth. I imagine a lone figure playing this to a sunrise at the edge of some desert plateau in Big Bend in Texas
What I'm listening to today: "Mo Mophatt Roger", Attack Sustain
Does anyone reading this like NOISE here are three minutes of buzzsaw noises simply exploring the sounds of a newly-obtained pair of distortion pedals. Good amplifier worship audio. Would've assumed this was all guitar feedback if I didn't have the video
What I'm listening to today: "The Key" (Wubbledub Edit), Space Bunny
Does anyone like 90s EURO TECHNO. This is a vintage remix of a 1997 tech house piece, apparently recorded at the time but unreleased until a vinyl compilation in 2024. Oak aged for 27 years. Has a great bouncy energy to it and that classic electronic sound design. Really satisfying.
What I'm listening to today: "No Snakes Alive", King Geedorah
MF DOOM was a talented producer as well as a rapper, but was oddly shy about his own production work, quarantining his most significant self-produced work to side EPs and this somewhat nonobvious pseudonym. A pity because the Geedorah project has some bangers, like this one unhinged, utterly unique track with weird tempo shifts as if the song itself is staggering drunkenly. MF Grimm's on this one (it's old).
What I'm listening to today: "Generative ambient", CELUS
21 minutes of ever-changing shimmers & swells. (If your attention span is not that long maybe stop at the 5:45 mark.) This is the song you hear when it's morning and no one else on the spaceship has woken up yet and everything is pleasant and peaceful, although *definitely* when this movie reaches its second act something within the corridors will start hunting your crew
What I'm listening to today: "TR-909 & TR-727 Backyard Beat", Zap Danger
It is the 90s and there is time to roller hover cyber blade through floating freeways passing through a glowing city where the buildings seem to be made of ephemeral light. Downtempo dance music for old drum machines and modern guitar pedals. Look quickly at the start of the video to see a sweet adorable baby (Elektron Analog Drive pedal) and also a sweet adorable baby (cat).
What I'm listening to today: "Combination #7 ( • | 6 | • | 2 | 4 | 5 )", Mark Fell
Violins tuning up for five minutes. Sliding down the gullet of a giant greebly alien. We could talk about "drone" or we could talk about music for ritual purposes, it is the same thing, there is a part of us religion seeks to wake up but which music stimulates directly and so religion uses music. Drone cuts out the middleman. No spirituality just ॐ.
Jim O'Rourke is somehow involved here.
https://frozenreeds.bandcamp.com/track/combination-7-6-2-4-5
from the album Psychic Resynthesis
What I'm listening to today: "31564132452132131652131", 3121534312
The quietest of quiet drone ambient, a breath on your neck, empty room noise, except the room is an uncanny horror space. This seems to have been more an attempt to make a cool glitch video with atmospheric sound (this YouTube account has many such videos) than to make a piece of music but I like experiencing, analyzing this sort of ambiance as music. It's fun to pick apart the choices of frequencies.
What I'm listening to today: "Olson"
This is a Boards of Canada song being performed on a DEC PDP-1 from 1959. The PDP-1 doesn't have sound, but it does have front-panel light bulbs for debugging, so they tapped the voltage from four of the the light bulb on/off signals and routed them directly to speakers. They then run a program that toggles the light bulbs at audio rate to create square waves.
Arrangement by Joe Lynch, PDP-1 paper tape load operation by Peter Samson
What I'm listening to today: "Remnants", Waxlimbs
My favorite live band in Toronto doing a kind of epic prog-rock King Crimson thing. When my wife first played this I seriously assumed it was from the 70s. Sound monoliths with walls of silence in between. Live these folks wear bird masks and alternately trade vocals between the three non-drummer members and sing in three-part harmony
https://waxlimbs.bandcamp.com/track/remnants-2
…and if u r in Toronto you can see them Saturday in a tiny bar [EDIT: Too late LOL]
from the album Where Lilies Grew
What I'm listening to today: "Energizer", pOW
xm tracker file from 1999. Wonderful 1980s future feel, skittering beats that aren't jungle but which a jungle head would appreciate. Music for the hypest rave ever held in Graal Online. Some mod files try to transcend the "cheesy" medium with sample work but this just leans into it, it is going to make the best fricking piece of music it can with the timbres available to it, dancing naked in the rain like no one is watching
What I'm listening to today: "Fre", Coltren
1997 minimalist dub. As hardcore as it's possible for a thing as quiet as this to be. None of these sounds sound like "instruments"; it's all incidental line hiss and choppy cutoff noises. Makes me think of cavernous rooms full of poorly-lit machinery linked by cramped walkways, pistons casting strange shadows as they pivot. Intently pumping away to some unclear purpose
What I'm listening to today: "Big Ideas"
"Nude" was one of those songs Radiohead performed live for years before putting on an album, as if struggling to figure out the definitive version. IMO, *this* is the definitive version: James Houston "remixing" it on a collection of obsolete computer hardware. Run a motor, like the one in a scanner, at different speeds and the rotation makes different tones. Send PCM voltages to a hard drive motor and you can make scratchy voice
Video by James Houston [email protected] www.1030.co.uk www.twitter.com/1030 -------- Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhythm & lead) Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer…
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