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
What I'm listening to today: "Phuturum", Caitliff
The spaceship has these two winglike structures on the side, but it's a spaceship, you don't need wings in space. They're actually for launching smaller ships, the "wings" are hollow hangar spaces on the inside and terminate on two long launch rails. But if nothing's launching today you can grab a suit, sit at the end of the launch tunnel, stare down this tunnel open to space, see the great blue earth floating outside.
What I'm listening to today: "a m B", evadum
Slow quiet acid. Desktop performance on a Nintendo DS running Nanoloop 2 and some budget synth units from Korg and Roland. A short little bag of moods, like the soundtrack to something but I don't know what, it starts off what sounds like toy instrument sounds and then warmer more refined atmospheric stuff comes in. People walking through hallways intercut with shots of someone furtively flipping through folders in a drawer.
What I'm listening to today: "full version", Z777
A whole lot of synths at once, a kick drum being repitched for melody like the old 808 cowbells, overall a pleasantly overwhelming buzz. What I wrote in my notes was "warm all-enveloping construction sounds, like you just curled up in the middle of the cement mixer and took a nap" and I think that might make it sound white-noise-ier than it actually is but that's about how close I can get right now.
What I'm listening to today: "Handpan by Yuki Koshimoto"
The "handpan" is is a variation on the steel pan drum invented in Switzerland in 2000 and rapidly copied worldwide (the original inventors sold it as the "hang drum", but that name's trademarked; this 2011 video uses a Metalsounds Space Drum). Playing by hand rather than with sticks produces a broader range of timbres with a lot of fine control. I find this one, seemingly impromptu performance really beautiful.
What I'm listening to today: "瘋狂的陽光" / "Lunatic Sunbath", Deserts Xuan
I love this artist for a particular track named "Bao Bei" that *tore up* Chinese-language low power FM radio in the Bay Area around 2010. I would be skipping between college radio stations and be like, oh it's that song again! This is a good memory for me. Anyway here's her doing a kinda harder 90s rock thing, Lilith fair with an edge. I like the grungy bassline.
What I'm listening to today: "Atmosphere" (Jerome's Runway Dub), Kerri Chandler
French touch from New Jersey. House music the way it used to sound in 1998. When I dig a little bit I find out Kerri Chandler was a big deal in Jersey electronic music, produced over 100 records, ran a label. I had never heard of him until he came up on a playlist of vintage vinyl rips and I decided to dig a little. The world is an ocean we float atop and it just goes down and down and down
What I'm listening to today: "An Ambient Jam in 31 Tone Equal Temperament", The Creepy Silence
Western music is based on 12 tones, equally-spaced (on a logarithmic scale), which happen to come very close to "good-sounding" pitch ratios. There are some historical attempts at numbers other than 12.
Here, a launchpad rigged for 31-TET is used to perform 15 minutes of messy, engrossing, exploratory astral disembodiment music. Music for a power outage on a spaceship
What I'm listening to today: "Scandinavia", Billy Woods, ELUCID and The Alchemist
Woods and ELUCID just dropped an album under the name Armand Hammer and it's INCREDIBLE. Woods and clique have this idiom of slowed-down, format-breaking rap music and it gets better and more refined with each release. Parts of "Mercy" sound like early Portishead, other parts sound like nothing I've ever heard before. There's like 4 tracks on here I wanna link but here's some ominous piano
from the album Mercy
What I'm listening to today: "07", ebl (video by Sean Redbeard)
This guy's got a YouTube channel where he picks experimental electronic tracks (good selections too) and makes glitchy TouchDesigner animations for them.
This track's cool, a quiet but relentless onslaught of pattering percussion. Somebody left the kick drum faucet on overnight and now the floor's flooded in kick drums. Old Richard Devine/PBO kinda feel maybe? Manages to feel like an oddity in an odd genre
What I'm listening to today: "05 Feed The Fire Pt 2 Master 1", lesserbirdman
Okay so I'm … honestly not sure if you'll be able to listen to this without a Tidal account, but it worked in some tests. This is a catchy, high-energy, slightly spooky, grunge/metal track that exists *only* on Tidal. Not Spotify or any other streaming service, can't buy it from Bandcamp or Apple. No net presence, no Allmusic artist page, nothing on Google. No bio on Tidal. Hapax_legomenon.mp3
What I'm listening to today: "Fuji", Nedaj
brainfog drum & bass oversaturated clipping piano wallslam break silence
This particular cohort of zoomer musicians seems to return a lot to the suggestion of being at an electronica event but at the far end of the room, the music filtered through crappy speakers and the acoustics of a room larger than the event needed. This particular cohort of zoomer musicians makes music that seems shot through with a sense of loneliness
track by Nedaj
What I'm listening to today: "gener1", Preset Liker
Minor key air conditioner and a heartbeat. A message written in clouds on top of other clouds
from the album gener
What I'm listening to today: "cem", evadum
Astral-journey ambient on vintage 1980s 4-track pro tape recorder and Nanoloop 2 for Nintendo DS. Ocean waves made out of sawtooths and voices made of saltwater, a beat so slow it feels like something entirely other than a beat. Drags a single feel out for five minutes then abruptly stops, and it is an excellent feel
mcc
aeva