I'm on three and a half years now of ~daily music recommendation posts here. For reasons that seem less defensible all the time, I chose to organize them as a thread instead of via hashtags. Threads tend to break completely after a year of posts, so I make a new thread once a year, but even THAT kinda breaks Mastodon, so I'm thinking, I'm gonna start refreshing the thread on a six month schedule.
Previous posts: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114536097208424007
Year 3.5 in the thread below:
What I'm listening to today: "mode 4", StereoMan
Light, airy "intelligent jungle" from 1997, in sample-based Impulse Tracker. There's a whole hidden history behind this inaccessible to me, this musician broke out of a modscene group called N.O.I.S.E. to become Bulgaria's most successful electronic musician, this is from a collection of "mode" tracks (1 through 5) that may or may not have been released under the name "j0r0". All I know is this has irrepressible energy
What I'm listening to today: "the 3rd experience", Merr0w
Behold the unbelievable versatility of the Roland TB-303, released in 1981 as a bass accompaniment device for guitarists, failed rapidly as it doesn't actually work for this, postmortem birthed multiple genres of music and decades later there's a whole micro-industry of clone devices and folks are still creating fun unique-feeling music with them. Here's some acid trance (is this "goa"?). This is the sound. This
What I'm listening to today: "Live Ambient vermona perFOURma with Digitone and Blofeld.", Surgeons Girl
Pleasantly meandering ambient, like someone tried to freeze the idea of "distraction" into a song. All little fluttery subtractive analog synth bubbles.
Minimal, but on second listen it's more substantial than it felt at first.
What I'm listening to today: "mode 1", StereoMan
Some more 1997 sample tracker music. A lot going on in this and just a lot of satisfying sounds. A kind of crashing silverware-on-glassware percussion, beats like some 90s dance act I can't place, and a bunch of synth sounds that give me a feeling like the composer listened to Incunabula/Amber-era Autechre and was like "what if I tried to make something sounding like this but more dance-y?".
What I'm listening to today: "Fusion", mon0
Hum hiss drone dub. Drinking television static in enormous quantities, pattering hints of dub. Is this "elegiac"
Really good unofficial glitch video by Sean Redbeard, of a texture that's almost improved by the YouTube compression artifacts (almost).
Feels triumphant somehow.
What I'm listening to today: "Minkara", Adrian Portia
This is an old favorite of mine. I think I mentioned the "hang drum" in a post before? The modern steel drum / bongo drum fusion. This is an "AsaChan" hang drum by Echo Sound Sculpture being played at the limit of the art, just really wringing every timbre this physically simple but mechanically complex object can make. Good calm background audio, the feeling of laying on your back and floating on the tops of clouds.
What I'm listening to today: "n2o (slices) by dominator"
Creepy, mind-bending, atonal-sounding Amiga tracker music. Breakbeats and fell summonings. Hard techno soundtrack to something horrible which you are powerless to stop. Your limbs move unbidden, your sight reduces to a single point. The dead speak in languages of Juno hoovers and overdriven gabber kicks
2001
What I'm listening to today: "Raised by Dope", Bruiser Wolf
Bruiser Wolf, sometime billy woods collaborator, is probs the most unique rapper I know of operating today, with a crafted, incredibly distinct flow I literally don't know how to describe except "AM Radio". Not sure if that makes sense. It's ike if Juvenile's weird cadence on "Ha" were an entire career. Here, lush hip-hop crafted from a sadly-long-lost form of 80s R&B. Birthed a style that you couldn't conceive
What I'm listening to today: "Drummertime and Brainstep Jam 1", Tubbutec
YouTube account for a modular synth company posts a demo of their modules. Process-wise the most interesting thing here is a 808/Volca style performance sequencer/drum machine made with computer-keyboard keycaps and fit to the 1U space on an Intellijel. Musically the standout is some *really* freaky glide that turns some competent but standard acid into something really odd sounding.
What I'm listening to today: "Njalo Njalo", Nomisupasta featuring Rapsody and Madlib
Johannesburg singer makes some deeply satisfying funk in collaboration with diaspora members from LA and North Carolina, styles seamlessly integrated like hip hop is leaking backward into the 1970s. Immaculate scrongly bassline. "Njalo" is Zulu for "always" and "Njalo njalo" appears to mean "and so on…"
I believe this is an early release from an album landing early next year.
What I'm listening to today: "RK 5000 bucket chain excavator - timelapse"
Why does this go so hard
RK 5000.0/R10 bucket chain excavator leaving the CSA lignite strip mine to a parking site above the mine after mining has ceased100x to 300x time-lapse Jan/F...
What I'm listening to today: "dronetober2025... First deception approaches... first test of trust... [CPM-DS-2] [NTS-1] [Cetus]", dubsbox [dot] algo
Lovely if slightly unnerving ambient performance. Feral disintegration loop in its natural environment. A distant light seen from an abandoned pier, a thing slowly approaching, a train under maintenance being moved not of itself, a moment when waking up you realize you are waking up though you did not realize you had slept
What I'm listening to today: "Ha", Juvenile
This one's a classic of Dirty South hip-hop, a truly foundational work. If you feel this you will Feel it and I won't need to explain it to you. If you don't feel it, try to think of this as a *historical document*. Here is a narration of being a drug dealer in the late 90s (what is a "triple beam", and what is it for?) and a video which is basically a documentary time capsule of pre-Katrina New Orleans. Entirely unreplicable.
What I'm listening to today: "Two riders down", caroline
I love electronic music because there is so much attention to timbre. I love "indie rock" for the same reason, indie rockers love sounds, they just focus on the sounds of strings and cassette tape and echoey rooms instead of circuitry.
This is that *good* Athens, Georgia sound, which is weird since it's from the UK. A room full of sad, angry folk musicians hitting their instruments and crying with joy. Sprawling
What I'm listening to today: "Technocratic Manipulators", Voivod
I was gonna post some more acid today but then I was in a bad mood. Have you heard this album? "Dimension Hatröss". It's wild, sounds like heavy metal cliche until you realize it's from 1988 and it was *inventing* some cliches. Good and hard and angry at stuff we're still angry at 17yrs later.
Couldn't decide whether to post "Tribal Convictions" or this track, went with this. Whole album's worth it honest
What I'm listening to today: "Углами (лайв в коридоре)", Рушана
["Corners (Live in the hallway)", Rushana]
I know nothing about this band; YouTube says they're from St. Petersberg and it appears Rushana is a woman's name from down Uzbek way. Music is what I'd recognize as a early-90s alternative-rock tone with modern indie production, liquid feeling, refreshing like a chill shower right after waking up. They are in fact performing live in an apartment-block hallway.
What I'm listening to today: "313", evadum
Percussive minimal acid house. Got an actual original 303 in the mix but it's there to do (satisfyingly subtle) support work and the focus here is on the beats. Skeleton of 80s-flavored 90s dance music, constantly shifting 808-soundy drums*. Focus on the fundamentals. Sometimes that just feels good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xATA9VNDQwY
* I think every sound that isn't the 303 is just Ableton lol. 50% vintage 50% software reproduction
What I'm listening to today: "Massive Cure", Smoosh
At some point around 2000 the drummer for Death Cab for Cutie started teaching the drums to a local six year old, setting off a series of events leading to this album recorded when the drummer was 10 and her sister, on keyboards, was 12. They play with the exuberance of 10-year-olds and it really works. I love the casual, effortless poetry of this one track. Electric piano through an overdrive pedal just always works.
What I'm listening to today: "thought u might like this.", hijaq
Chill, homey performance on some misfit toys. The thing on the left is the minichord, a modern, DIY-optimized (it's powered by a Teensy and you can solder the PCB and 3D print the casing yourself if you want) modern remake of the Suzuki Omnichord, which is an unusual instrument from 1981. This musician is just absolutely going to town on that qchord. They are shredding. Dreamcast jungle beats on the PO33
What I'm listening to today: "Displacement", Dleo
Dark shimmer poem, afterglow with no inciting event, the rushing wind howling through the maintenance tunnels bolted to the underside of the concept of math. Ambient made almost completely of reverb, a dark ocean with things moving under the surface that are imperceptible except for the fact of their motion. Something is rising toward you
What I'm listening to today: "Autumn Leaf II. Instruō Scion, VS mini, Roland s1 Evening Jam. Experimental Sound", Project Kachimizu
Weird brainjam ambient. Objects floating enigmatically in space amidst a miasma of jittery pads. Volca-format desktop synths from two different non-Korg companies plus a Korg effects unit. The "Pocket Scion" in the upper left is somehow harvesting electrical control signals out of that leaf and I don't understand how that works.
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient Soundscape with the Bastl MicroGranny", Bleep Bloop Music
4 minutes of soothing angle grinder noises. It hurts, Ness, it hurts
What I'm listening to today: "Quad Creek + Double Knot v2", Dylan B.
Short performances on two enigmatic generative-algorithm-via-voltage devices. These kinds of devices are intended to be kind of art objects unto themselves, they have "opinions" and their oblique interfaces are supposed to guide you in surprising directions. In practice they're incredibly hard to get any coherent sound out of at all so I was happy to find a video of FIVE satisfying, distinctive grooves
What I'm listening to today: "Butter the Soul", Cornershop
If you remember this band at all it's probably for their pop-rock tribute to Bollywood singer Asha Bhosle (the track Norman Cook really liked). Did you ever listen to the album? It's almost entirely instrumental funk with sitars and it kind of rules. This track mixes in some turntablism in a way which feels very "UK band in 1997" but works. Is this lo-fi hip hop
What I'm listening to: "Dark Blue Room"
DOS tracker tune via @leona. modarchive.org has no information about this track except an upload date of 1996, no listed creator, no embedded text. Off-kilter & jazzy, smooth euro techno piano with a lot of style provided by some *decadently* large drum samples. Clocks in at 1MB (A running theme is mods designed for scene distribution rather than embedding in games tend to be suspiciously sized as if to fill a single floppy disk.)
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=135673
@mcc Oh, I had forgotten about Smoosh! Thanks!
I saw smoosh play at an 826 Seattle fundraiser show that also featured Dave Eggers, Sarah Vowell, John Hodgman, and other folks. It was EXTREMELY 2006, and I remember it very fondly. https://www.thestranger.com/extras/2006/08/24/57037/a-primer-to-the-pre-event
Before all the other human beings you will see at Bumbershoot this year—before Kanye West, before Debbie Harry, before those teenagers who break cinderblocks on their backs while laying on nails and screaming—a group of civilized and famous writers, musicians, and TV personalities is putting on a show in the powerfully air-conditioned McCaw Hall. This event is called People Talking & Singing. It happens on the eve of Bumbershoot (Friday night), it requires a separate...
@mcc I feel old, the vid is super cool, but the delivery is too "modern" for me. I prefer this (also references triple beams): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhG8xoFqYz8
Fun fact: Triple beams are called "tanitas" in Spain because of the dominance of a single brand in the 90's: https://tanita.eu/consumer-scales
Now THAT is old school!
@jandi gorgeous production.
Remember, "Ha" is 1998!! So I know what you mean by the "modern" distinction but the Ice T stuff is closer to "before my time" whereas southern bounce sounds to me more like "ah yes this is what the radio played when I was a teenager"
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