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
What I'm listening to today: "Tonverk 1.1.0 - Mas Grainer / Boom Bap + Granular Synthesis", SNDCTRL
Elektron are the kings of DAWless/desktop sequencing, but they've never made a polyphonic unit until the Tonverk this year. If the YouTube synth community is any guide this landed with a wet thud, until they added a granular synth in an update and now everybody loves it. Here a net producer tries the new mode on some experimental hip hop and hits gold on the first try
What I'm listening to today: "Untitled", Berlin Dub Sessions
Dub techno uses the sonic palette of dub reggae to make something different, and this uses the sonic palette of dub techno to make something… surprising, a series of musical riddles, dense rhythms that overtake and trip over themselves. One for the crowd that likes minimal techno and listening to dance music on headphones. Turn up the bass.
From 2003.
What I'm listening to today: "friendly compounds", Lime68k
From a collection of unreleased tracks @Lime dropped this month. Barrage of nonstandard scattershot beats and mysterious metal FM sounds. On this I imagine like you gave a bunch of four year olds instruments and they're just kind of going to town making joyful noise but the four year olds are all robots so all they can make is industrial space future sounds
from the album debris 02
What I'm listening to today: "Ondes Martenot + Montreal Assembly's Count to Five pedal", Light
Cross-century ambient music (or we're closer to Satie than Eno here, so "furniture music"?). A 1930s proto-synthesizer¹ arranged via the thing "guitar pedal" means in the 2020s (a microcontroller/computer in a small box with a foot interface). Slow cinematic score for establishing shots, sunbeams, people in dim cafes waiting for something
¹ 2010s reproduction, search "Ondomo"
What I'm listening to today: "MICHIGAN SYNTH WORKS Bella Analog Mono Synth", Gianfranco Carone
It is the end of the year and I am too tired to write a good summary for this track. So I am just going to say:
This video contains BEEP and BANGING NOISE
What I'm listening to today: "The Puny Humans at Hammy Wammy 2 of 3"
What if I took a break from the music recs thread but I kept posting recs I just stopped researching or making any effort to explain them. What is this video? What is happening here, who are these people, why is the guitarist wearing that mask? I don't know. I actually don't know.
What I'm listening to today: "Playing with live ideas", Fluxus MT
here is something very very loud
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient textures with Serge Modular Medusa", Laurent Hilairet
Beautiful, peaceful little "west coast" electronic piece. Makes me think of like early 20th century piano compositions.
Gently floating on a bed of clouds made of supersaws, the structure of a dream, coming on slow, evaporating like mist
What I'm listening to today: "Amen Break Jungle on Tonverk - MIDI Controlled Elektron Tonverk & Cyclone Analogic TT-303", Slots
Experimental attempt to use Elektron's new multiphonic sampler for drums. Loads in some classic jungle samples & runs an acid synth on top. Starts with a fresh jungle feeling which increasingly fights with something manic and maybe a bit grim. Really raw, goes maybe actually too hard in an interesting way. It's loud and it's hot and it's close.
What I'm listening to today: "War"
Sinead O'Connor covering Bob Marley stripped down, sharpened, into something like a weapon, piercing into your head. This ran live on TV and nobody noticed how haunting it was because all anyone paid attention to was the career-ending final seconds. No one understood why she did it. The idea of child abuse in the Catholic church was treated as so absurd it couldn't actually be the real explanation. Everyone concluded she was "crazy".
What I'm listening to today: "18 12 2025 Techno jam", RM1_music
One Syntakt sequencer, one Microfreak synthesizer, one phone camera and an immaculate live techno set spanning 3 or 4 distinct "songs" over 12 minutes. The world is full of people who can just sit down with two plastic boxes and dash off a performance like this. I have listened to this like 4 or 5 times since it was posted, which makes me like 10-15% of its 41 views on Youtube
Excellent "background music".
What I'm listening to today: "Untitled", Korea Undok Group
Mysterious music embedded in a mysterious artifact: a 1982 cassette tape from a Winnipeg experimental music label, meaning, one musician in Winnipeg selling their own cassettes mail order. In 2025 this was re-released on Bandcamp, then de-re-released. Primitive, distant, seductive, calling to you like the fair folk singing in the woods. Click "Stop" at 4:28 or you may find yourself permanently stuck in the 1980s
What I'm listening to today: "First Encounter", Dissonant Witchcraft
A video showing off the "Antilope", a cryptic sound-making artifact by Manifold Research Centre (trade name for a designer formerly of Instruo, who before that… made wine? In transalpine Italy?).
Still Arctic landscapes, a stark sound collage in the shape of an industrial downtempo piece, clicky FM drums and metallic swells, standing on the freeway median as insectoid Things rush by. A loss of balance
What I'm listening to today: "SNWthr", Isobutane
Isobutane is known as "that guy who uses the Yamaha RS7000" and the Yamaha RS7000, honestly, is probably primarily known as "that weird old synth Isobutane uses". Here a series of cryptic machine noises sculpted into a techno piece, the way you imagine a computer from the 1940s would sound while operating, except the computer is sincerely attempting to make you dance. Scrunchy
What I'm listening to today: "FREE ROLEYS", Westside Gunn feat. Benny The Butcher
I've been listening a lot to Griselda, a hip hop clique/record label in Buffalo founded by Gunn here. On this track Griselda's distinctive house style (oldschool lofi beats with an uncanny gloss) gets pushed to an almost surreal level, like you're listening to a horror movie soundtrack or a live field recording from Hell. Blood in your mouth taste delicious, stay vicious
What I'm listening to today: "TD_B4", Sun of a Pitch
I imagine like, a cat doing a big yawn and stretchy, but in music form. Lordosis. Seductive illogic, a big spaghetti desk panel of modular synths making big spaghetti sounds. Strange unfolding crystal structures made of FM shines, hum and hiss, drums so soft and erratic they sound like another ambient element instead of beats. My suggestion is you do not "listen" to this instead just try to feel the big stretchy
What I'm listening to today: "Singularity 157", Echovocation
Long but satisfying Space Music saga. Watch carefully at the bottom and you'll see that what sounds like the lead synth is actually a kalimba (simplified Zimbabwean finger harp). You're basically listening to a long kalimba performance fed into a long chain of modular equipment that filters the sounds into aftershocks and echoes far larger than its input. Interplanetary craft approaching space dock.
What I'm listening to today: "It’s techno time", Marie Ann Hedonia
It's techno time!!!!!!!!!
What I'm listening to today: "Sarah Belle Reid plays the Buchla Touché"
I think of myself as pretty informed on "weird" synths and this one is, to me, REALLY WEIRD.
This is a hyper-rare (they made four. ever) synth, one of the earliest computer-controlled synths, you could reprogram its behaviour using a one-off Forth-like developed just for this device and for this track they made it… not… act like… a piano.
It's… otherworldly. IMO remove all distractions to watch it
What I'm listening to today: "Teletext Rhythms"
This YouTuber's bio: "I am a terrible but ambitious programmer and procrastinating musician.
In order to avoid finishing music, I decided to write a sequencer for the Nintendo 3DS to keep myself busy."
But I dunno, I think they're doing pretty well. Here's a 20-minute live set (in the sense a DJ set is live) in the Noise Commander prototype running on a 2DS. Good hiphop-aware grooves and some lovely electronic production
What I'm listening to today: "Kraftwerk"
Kraftwerk is known for a Specific Sound, their genre-defining electronic work. Did you know before they acquired/learned the electronics they just made prog music? Really good prog music? Florian Schneider's main instrument was the flute? Their first¹ album from 1970 has all the attention to feeling and timbre of electronic music but it's all Instruments and tape. If it sounds like Can that's because they used the same producer.
What I'm listening to today: "Falling In Love", Surface
This 1983 track is a wonderful-feeling midpoint between the last days of disco and 80s pop. I want to gush about each little production choice, every sound feels crafted. That primal synth bass.
I guess this is technically the extended club mix but it's the version that was on Tidal, and the longer runtime matches the song's unhurried, laid-back feel so well.
What I listened to today: "Prelude to Fear" / "Creating, Example 1", Primus
Primus is known for a Specific Sound, confident, idiosyncratic, grounded in Les Claypool's virtuoso bass. So it's SUPER interesting to listen to this early, pre-Tim-Alexander demo, where the sound isn't…quite…what it became. Intense funk vibes, just a touch of prog, and Claypool does Voices but doesn't seem to have solidly chosen steampunk yet. At one point he seems to be describing an OODA loop
What I listened to today: "Show Me What You Got", Busta Rhymes
Busta Rhymes sampling my favorite Stereolab song ("Come And Play in The Milky Night"). J Dilla beat! Kinda archetypical for Busta, near-miss brilliance, great production, incredible rap flow… & an overlong chorus that drags the whole thing down (the chorus *really* needed a professional singer for guest vocals).
Listen careful on verse 1 for the rap equivalent of a oner. Rhyme scheme is AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
What I'm listening to today: "Eutow" (live at Flex/Vienna 1996), Autechre
These days each Autechre tour is like a unique album, but their live sets have always been full of unreleased tracks, alternate versions, mashups¹. Here's a completely screwed version of the danciest track from Tri Repetae++, feeling way slower without changing the tempo, something mesmerizing, a decaying orbit around a black hole, spiraling inexorably inward
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZGBMpXgnaU
¹ Listen here for Basscadet fragments
What I listened to today: "BASTL🏰CITADEL｜#4 - Crushed strings ( 🧙♂️FX WIZARD, nRings, uO_C, little nerd )", boop _e_
One of my fav things in modern music tech is Bastl's nano-modular "Kastle"—recently rebooted as the "Kastle 2/Citadel" series, available as either a eurorack module or the Kastle patchwire format & reprogrammable as any of 3 different devices. Here, the FX WIZARD mode glitches the venerable "Rings" Karplus-Strong module. Have I lost you? It's crunchy sounds
What I listened to today: "Secuencia Techno con Syntakt y Microfreak", RM1_music
Super satisfying techno set on two desktop devices. Hard driving thumps, surreal whooshing. At some point I have to face the fact I never actually learned the names of EDM subgenres I just like, listen to everything, and that makes writing these descriptions hard some days. Someone who did the research could probably identify the 3 microgenres here. All I can say is it's highly raveworthy
What I'm listening to today: "BASTL WAVE🐦⬛BARD｜#14 - DRONE", boop _e_
A couple days ago I posted this artist using the Citadel, a eurorack module reprogrammable as any of Bastl's "Kastle 2" devices. Here's the equivalent desktop/handheld device, this time programmed as a "Wavebard", with the eurorack cables replaced with little wires.
Track is a soulful, disorienting dream about being lost in fog while giant glowing blobs of color pass by you, paintsplotches in the mist
What I'm listening to today: "(Untitled1)", TAKAAT
Picked this up on Bandcamp Friday. "Is Noise". This band are somehow connected to Tinariwen, the group from 1979 called the grandfathers of Tuareg (Saharan) rock music. Here's an epic lo-fi rock album intro, "unedited jam… recorded live to tape in Washington D.C", made in the modern era but coming off plausibly like it could have opened the rawest rock album of 1982. Shredding
from the album TAKAAT - Is Noise, Vol. 2
What I'm listening to today: "You Don't Know My Name", Alicia Keys
Keys off her 2003 album doing an effortless, irony-free resurrection of soul-flavored musical styles at least 23 years older than that. Finessed to feel like the kind of thing hip hop samples moreso than hip hop.
I love this song, it's just so guilelessly sweet. This is the kind of aw-shucks just-a-girl romance song Taylor Swift keeps trying to record, but for T it always kinda falls flat. Keys nails it
RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116059452504562223
What I'm listening to today: "Sex", the Necks
This is an Australian jazz trio whose "albums" all seem to be very long single pieces. This is their first release, and it hits a satisfying loungy groove in second one then digs in for *an hour*, constantly shifting the whole time, like a knob is being very slowly turned up on a single emotion. If you like electronic music with very long track lengths this basically is jazz custom made for you. Like, Plastikman fans attn
RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116065097826262688
What I'm listening to today: "To Day Interval", Autechre
One of two remixes Æ did of "Ten Day Interval" by math-rock/post-rock/progressive-jazz group Tortoise. The other remix is straightforward if Autechre-y but *this* one, this one's a minimal obsessive dissection of a single piano track and I love it—one of my fav points in Æ's whole discography. It's like a meditation, emptying your mind except for a single image which you focus on until you understand it Completely
mcc
Owen Nelson