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…
What I'm listening to today: "Abandon", Tristan Baldi
Super weird electronic downtempo on the Dirtywave M8 handheld tracker. Starts with huge creepy FM swells, and beats that sound as if they were dropped from a great height, and then just sorta goofs around with giant looming cyberpunk vibes for a few minutes. Guitars that sound like something Id Software would have shipped in 1992. I'd use the term "playful" if this didn't all feel so sinister
What I'm listening to today: "Xenomorpher Gets Its Groove On", James Collins
One thing I love about this particular type of modular synth jam is you can repeat a single sequence of like 5 or 8 notes indefinitely and as long as you screw with the timbres enough it seems to be continuously changing. Here a constrained eurorack repeats a single note sequence with a non-repeating, chaos-driven LFO used to pulp the sound in different mysterious ways. It is a good groove
What I'm listening to today: "THESE STATIC TRANSMISSIONS", AMULETS
This is an ambient tape artist I rather like, recording a submission for the NPR "Tiny Desk Concert" open call in 2017. He did not get in¹ but the YouTube submission endures. Drone piece in a suitcase setup containing two tape machines and a series of mysterious metal boxes, one of which appears to be handbuilt into an Altoids tin. Sound of a forgetting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNq0ApV_trM
¹ "Tank and the Bangas" won. They're pretty good.
What I'm listening to today: "Pep Talk", Bahamadia
I know Bahamadia from her work with Roni Size, but then Machinegirl linked this track on Bluesky and like geez, I guess should have been paying more attention to Bahamadia's solo work! This is from her album "BB Queen". Y2K jungle, dense wordplay, an exercise in the tightest syllable packing possible, immaculate vibes like crisp autumn wind.
What I'm listening to today: "Feelings", Fluxus MT
What if you just turned on all of the sounds at once
What I'm listening to today: "Augmatic Disport", Autechre
"Untilted" is the album that fits most strangely into the arc of Autechre's discography. It's pretty much a 70-minute onslaught of dense, ever shifting robot breakbeats. It does have rewards within and I like this one track that has a little narrative arc. These robots are up to something. They are acting with purpose. What are these robots doing
Woke up today thinking about this album because of a reason.
from the album Untilted
What I'm listening to today: "Dark Space", Mr. Nogatco (Kool Keith)
Did Dr. Octagon really die in 1999? A man appeared in Nashville in 2006 claiming to be him, who was generally acknowledged to be a fraud; but there is another theory, that Octagon survived, his body rebuilt, and afterward lived in hiding in Phoenix, performing experiments on alien bodies recovered from spaceships crashed in the Arizona desert.
A dark hypnotic groove I was thinking about this morning:
What I'm listening to today: "CSIRAC" / "Delete", Ninajirachi
CSIRAC was Australia's first computer, and the first known computer to ever play music. Ninajirachi is an Australian EDM producer who voices her own songs and has a really messy room. Can I double dip today? I just really like this two song sequence of her going completely to the wall with chopped up experimental production followed by this second song that's just hyper hyper hyper pop
https://ninajirachi.bandcamp.com/track/csirac
https://ninajirachi.bandcamp.com/track/delete
from the album I Love My Computer
What I'm listening to today: "idontloveyouanymore", puhf
Breakcore/jungle for waking up. Nice synths. ⚠️Photosensitivity warning⚠️ on the video. Punk was the music of youth because the barriers to entry were so low, anybody could get a guitar and learn some chords. Now guitars and drumsets are kinda expensive and gen Z is downloading DAWs and turning out this incredibly satisfying breakcore in enormous quantities and posting it on YouTube accounts with their Mii as avatar
What I'm listening to today: "Continuum 1" Nala Sinephro
Mind-expanding jazz and floaty beep sounds. Chill but pressured, a dream coming over your consciousness like a cloud covering the landscape. What I really like in music is semi-non-repeating beats and the genres that give me that are (1) the thing I've been trying not to call "IDM", and (2) this type of jazz
I got this from an Algorithm and don't know this musician. Apparently she scored Benny Safdie's UFC movie?
from the album Endlessness
What I'm listening to today: "I have found her...", Some1
1998 sample tracker tune so laid back it's practically an OSHA hazard. Eleven minutes long but uses the entire runtime, you just kinda let it run in the background and it surprises you every so often. You kinda get the sense you're listening to a jam session, one person fiddling with a keyboard and looper & someone else with an MPC. Lo-fi hip hop to sit by the side of the road in a stalled-out car in the rain to.
What I'm listening to today: "jazz jungle mix at Japanese rice field", Takuya Nakamura
Nakamura is the composer of Sega's Virtua Fighter, the original Lumines and four of its sequels, and Meteos (though Meteos and some of the Lumines sequels with collaborators). In this video he goes out in an literal rice field with a Pioneer deck and a literal trumpet, and spins drum & bass with occasional trumpet solos. Unbelievably charming
Environmental cameos around: 24:51, 28:49
What I'm listening to today: "Gar Tīgh Bārad", Avin Ahmadi
Iranian traditional guitar piece originally by Siamak Aghaei. Slow and soft and sad, or not exactly slow, just unhurried, performed with expert control and incredible, overwhelming emotion. Usually in these posts I'm trying to figure out how to evoke in text the feeling of some strange timbre the musician has rigged but here all the feeling is in the performance
Music starts at 0:35.
What I'm listening to today: "【KORG】volca drum & Kaoss Pad ＆ NTS-1", Takeo Watanabe
Improvised alien skittering out behind a shed somewhere, while neighborhood birds try to outyell the whole production. It's interesting to try to reverse engineer where the sounds come from: The Tascam box is a portable recorder, the box in the center is generating sounds, the boxes on the right and left are effects but the left one has a touchscreen so he can play it like an instrument.
What I'm listening to today: "Junior Kickstart", The Go! Team
This is my favorite video on YouTube. The Go Team in their Gleeful Copyright Infringement Era doing a lovesong to 70s funk with a music video that's a love letter to 70s film, reverse-engineering the soundtrack to the most iconic New York story ever told. Everything you could ask for is here, suspense, tranquility, triumph— and horror.
2007
What I'm listening to today: "the TV show", Kosuke Sugimoto and Takayuki Manabe
No no wait, THIS is my favorite video on YouTube. A beautifully plotted 2009 independent animation with an incredibly catchy, pseudo-chiptune original score that stands out by itself as a classic of circa-2010 glitchy "electro"¹.
This is the kind of thing you'll get the premise immediately but need to watch at least three times to fully Get it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ9YtJC-Kd8
¹ This genre name lasted for about three weeks
@mcc Oho, yes! That one is *so good* - I posted enthusiastically about it to Metafilter when I first saw it in 2009, the only post I ever made there (I was just a lowly commenter).
I still rewatch it every now and again.
His other two I really like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vDqXf5PumU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig9j5GaIVXo
mcc
Michael Roberts