What I'm listening to today: "GRP A4 sequence 3:1", Klang Zaun
The A4, it turns out?, is a $5000 synthesizer the size of a desk, designed to be a "more affordable" version of the A8 (a $10,000 synthesizer the size of a wall).
No drums in this, just synth tones that don't feel so much retro as prehistoric, like that proto-electronic stuff from the 70s before Giorgio Moroder realized synths were for dance music. It's hypnotic and ends with you kind of wanting more.
What I'm listening to today: "Steal My Soul", Rahzel
Rahzel is a legendary beatboxer, known for his work in the Roots and various collaborations (Björk's Medulla). He released 1 solo album, "Make The Music 2000" (it's a Biz Markie reference), an odd album with less beatboxing than you'd expect. It does have an infamous live Missy Elliot cover, and this absolutely lovely, spooky, nearly-all-voice jazz track. You won't realize how much of it is voice until the 2nd listen.
What I'm listening to today: "Mea Culpa", David Bryne and Brian Eno
In 1981, between "Once in a Lifetime" and "Burning Down the House", Talking Heads frontman Bryne made an instrumental album with ambient music creator-deity Eno, built around samples from AM radio & West African music. "Mea Culpa" is a dreamy wash that feels decades ahead of its time.
The proto-music-video "short film" below is by Bruce Conner, and IMO is inseparable from the song. * Warning, flashing.
What I'm listening to today: "2 Miles", 12 Rounds
You know that Atticus Ross guy co-credited on all Trent Reznor's film scores? In the 90s he and his wife were a band called "12 Rounds" I'd describe as Portishead crossed with Vampire: The Masquerade. Almost nobody liked this album except me and Trent Reznor (who liked it enough to hire the guy to produce, like, all his albums). Every song on it has something special happening, but this understated track is my favorite.
What I'm listening to today: "Phantom Limb", Hovercraft
Hovercraft was an experimental noise-rock band from the 90s with an almost total disinterest in "notes". This album's release was dogged by confusing, inaccurate rumors Eddie Vedder secretly performed on it (he was married to the bassist at the time and may or may not have played drums in some of their live shows).
This song has a lovely dark mood; the bassline has been my go-to synthesizer test melody for years.
What I'm listening to today: "Mr. Mistake (Boards of Canada remix)", Nevermen
Okay so try to follow, this is:
- Tunde Adebimpe (previously vocalist of TV on the Radio)
- Mike Patton (aka Mr. Bungle, previously vocalist of Faith No More)
- Adam Drucker (previously vocalist in cLOUDDEAD)
- Boards of Canada (production)
…all together on one single track. And it's *incredible*. BoC at their best dispensing Feelings and the words have been circling in my head for years.
What I'm listening to today: "Divine and Bright", Earth ft. Kelly Canary and Kurt Cobain
Earth is a "doom metal"/drone band I am much enamored with, consisting of Dylan Carlson and whoever else is in the room at the moment. They have almost no songs with vocals, but one exception is this 1990 collaboration with a screaming woman and also Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who was close friends with Carlson. This might just confuse you, or maybe you'll find the mood delightful.
What I'm listening to today: "Orange Twin Field Works (Vol.I)", Jeff Mangum
Neutral Milk Hotel (Jeff) in 1998 became the biggest name in indie rock, then just… stopped. Before he went he released this one strange and amazing thirty-minute recording (there is no Vol. 2) of field recordings of Bulgarian folk music from the Koprivshtitsa festival, mixed together in a way that perfectly captures the larger-than-life feeling of live music on foot. This is game design, to me.
What I'm listening to today: "Cinematic Music | Moog Grandmother + MiniKORG700FS | A Love Letter To Synths from A Student for Life", HEYMUN
This is a dreamy piece where the musician sets a few synthesizers running on patterns and plays piano along with it. It's highly structured, but sneakily so. On surface it just feels chaotic; it feels as if two unrelated pieces of music happen to be playing at once but somehow keep converging in interesting ways.
Just float in it.
What I'm listening to today: "Perkons HD-01 Bassline and OXI ONE sequencer Jam", Mark Cee
This guy spent a couple months posting jams with this large, unusual blue drum machine and I kept watching his videos like a hawk thinking… eventually he's gonna make something awesome. Eventually he did, with this complex, clicky 6-minute dance techno bop for an entire crowd of people enjoying standing at the back of a room holding drinks and bobbing their heads but not dancing.
What I'm listening to today: "Choralberg", Alex Siebenhaar
In this video, a man wearing a bluescreen for a hat sits on a carpet and steers some racks of synths (and one analog drum machine) through a cryptic, funky melody. Just as you think you understand where it's going, it ends; you find yourself wanting more.
What I'm listening to today: "crisping.1 #lofi #ambient #chaseblissgenerationlossmk2 #glitch", [moos]
It's not very hard to reproduce Boards of Canada's style, especially not since cassette equipment became a common modular synth add-on. But this piece, based around that guitar pedal that fakes tape degradation, is special, mixing tattered synth pads with a death-march beat that refuses to find a rhythm. It's scary actually, like something's gone horribly wrong.
What I'm listening to today: "Pulsar 23 - Sounds you don't usually hear coming from it"
Occasionally in this thread I've praised songs for adapting Pulsar-23 drum channels for non-percussive purposes. This track is *only that*, the dude does not turn on the drum sequencer, clips on a device designed to turn circuit EMF leakage into sound?, and makes something approximating a jazz piano solo alternated with gunky glitch dub sounds. Very weird noises even by my standards.
What I'm listening to today: "Filthy Miksher - Demo Jam", Deaftone Audio
This pairs a Pulsar and an acid bass groovebox with some kind of noisemaker box based on a spring attached to a contact microphone. It starts as ambient noise and then grows into a bumping rhythm without ever containing… anything except noise, actually, so you've just got this gradually escalating percussive techno piece made up of different noise textures. I like it
What I'm listening to today: "pulsar 23 rhythmic explorations", clyv
This is 14 minutes of a musician fiddling with a Pulsar-23 drum machine. There are periodic cuts, so I assume this is edited down from a longer recording, leaving only the moments they found a good Beat. Not quite a song, this is like the skeletons of 20 different songs, awaiting someone to loop them and add something more than drums. Good beats tho, and good background if you let your focus wander.
What I'm listening to today: "LENTIL2C33MOD 400Hz 23", Rzeczy
This song was produced from an NES sound chip, but doesn't sound anything like an NES because:
- It's got the wavetable channel from the Famicom Disk System;
- The sound chip has been overclocked to make possible synthesis techniques (like audio-rate PWM) a normal NES could have never done
The musician uses these powers to make some sick industrial-feeling… "electro breakcore"? EDM genre names are gibberish
What I'm listening to today: "Zone J" (Rescue Rangers), Harumi Fujita (Capcom)
Do you ever think about how there's a basically finite number of possible "songs", but our attribution/copyright systems assume each piece of music is written only once? So like what if the most beautiful piano song ever got stuck in a toothpaste commercial. Or if one of the greatest electro-pop hooks ever wound up in the final level of an NES game and is now just "retro game music" forever
What I'm listening to today: "Ultraviolet", gasman
Since discovering Stardust I've been watching a lot of ZX Spectrum demos; it's a neat demo platform because it CAN do near anything, but nothing's easy. This 2017 demo is a charming mix of bracingly earnest and legitimately hype, both in the visuals (which YouTube HATES) and the chiptune.
Incidentally, if you know how the ZX works, the still images at the end of the demo are the most technically impressive thing here.
What I'm listening to today: "Ufouria" title theme (iNES 0.9 glitched version), Naoki Kodaka (Sunsoft)
iNES 0.9 for Mac OS 9 had an audio bug affecting only a few games (including "Hebereke", aka "Ufouria") causing the noise and PCM channels to be very loud and distorted. In my opinion, this improves the music *tremendously*, giving it a wild industrial/IDM flavor.
The first time I played Ufouria it sounded like this, and I didn't know it was a bug. So this is the canonical soundtrack to me.
What I'm listening to today: "Parallax" loader music, Martin Galway (Sensible Software)
This is My Other Favorite C64 Song, besides Sanxion. This track contains no percussion whatsoever and just takes you on an epic 12-minute journey of every sound possible from grinding detuned saw waveforms, ending with a single 2-minute sound I cannot describe and which sounds different in every recording, I think because it actually sounds different on different SID chip revisions.
What I'm listening to today: "真実を信頼する", Oblique Occasions
This is a track from a deeply confusing album from some sixth-generation "Vaporwave" group on Bandcamp. Like 80% of this is Signifiers and they are not Legible to me. (Sorry, I went to an academic unconference today and am still Talking Like That.)
Anyway! This one track is a really lovely fusion-jazz(?)/hip-hop/trip-hop groove of the kind I spent most of the 00s listening to. Beats and electric pianos.
from the album 原点
What I'm listening to today: "海に憎しみを叫ぶ", Oblique Occasions
This is another track from the same album I posted yesterday, but it's what I'm posting anyway, because who's going to stop me? This is one of a few tracks from this album that sound like lost music from a PS1 JRPG— and might actually be, since one of the other tracks is literally a Castlevania cover.
I like how this mimics that sound from tracker music where each violin sample starts as if in isolation.
from the album 原点
What I'm listening to today: "Hoss featuring the PERKONS HD-01", Generative Jane
This one is a wild ride, starting with a blast of strange FM noises and then immediately dropping hard into a gradually-mutating industrial dance beat. This is the kind of music you'd show opening credits to, probably over establishing shots of a futuristic city, or possibly people riding futuristic motorcycles at great speed to no particular obvious destination.
What I'm listening to today: "Puppet Master", ZyeKali
This rocking chaos-&-strings jam was made with the Pocket Operator handheld sampler and a hand-modded "Chaos NAND" (seems to be an Atari Punk Console variant). Instead of using the Pocket Operator's sequencer, the musician plays the PO and Chaos NAND by hand, then samples the sampler, layering eight performances on top of each other. I *think* the colored Launchpad grid is starting and stopping the other video clips.
What I'm listening to today: "Hardware Jam 0006 // Shared System and Friends // 162bpm atmospheric drum n' bass", kaleidasonic
This is a neat mix of a classical 90s Drum & Bass beat with modern modular-synthesizer sound design; it starts with 2 minutes of random-notes ambient, then drops an Amen and a lovely chonky bass and keeps evolving in interesting new directions for the entire 15 minute runtime. (Those without long attention spans may wanna quit around minute 7.)
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient improvisation 4 (Soma Enner + Cosmos)", Più
Cosmos is an "asymmetric looper"—a loop pedal whose loops are of varying lengths and so can drift in phase against each other. Here it's fed with tiny sound fragments (with such sources as small plastic frog, whose shape is sonified by rubbing it against the Enner's case and spring reverb) to build up an all-enveloping ambient soundscape partway between a rainpipe and a horror movie score.
What I'm listening to today: "Lysergenesis", Lauri Paisley
Paisley in the early 80s was VP of the "International Electronic Music Association", which I've never heard of; this was the final song on a cassette album, "Real-to-Reel", she released in 1983. Not so much a soundscape as an ambient ocean you plunge into and possibly drown, this is probably the most progressive electronic music you're going to find in 1983; 15 minutes of synths following a weird internal logic.
from the album Real-to-Reel
What I'm listening to today: "SOMA PULSAR 23: Live Jam with Microcosm", Among the Trees
This track is incredibly mysterious; there *is* a Pulsar drum machine in here, but it seems to only exist to agitate a chain of reverb filters rigged to produce an enormous, shimmering rushing noise with seemingly little to do with the input.
I would describe this as the music from a movie from the 60s-70s that plays while the protagonists wordlessly explore an alien spaceship.
What I'm listening to today: "lofi ambient with lubadh rings morphagene beads shallowwater and nightsky",
[moos]
A chill ambient piece where several large slabs of modular synthesizer, with help from a hand reaching in to tweak something once a minute or so, produces ten minutes of generated-melody tones and plucks and simulated tape wobble. Really good feeling to it, the kind of music you'd hear it distantly, follow it into the woods and never be seen again.
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient Improvisation Elektron digitone and Moog Mother 32", Surgeons Girl
This track gets a lot of mileage out of fairly minimal elements, synth stabs fighting to rise above the water of a ocean of sorrowful foghorn hums. Sometimes I feel like attempting to describe these pieces makes them lesser and that's definitely something I'd worry about here, this is something meant just to be felt rather than intellectualized.
What I'm listening to today: "Verbos + Mimeophon Jam", Deaftone Audio
This video is essentially a single held note and some rhythmic clicking for eight minutes, but the musician, hand-driving a complicated modular feedback machine, thoroughly explores every point in the configuration space of that constrained premise, taking you on a journey through a small universe of minimal ambient destinations. It's all very hypnotic and maybe a little sinister.
What I'm listening to today: "Drift", Lähtö
Here's what I eventually figured out: Back in 2006-2007, Lähtö made music and posted it on a Google Site alongside little blog posts. The only distribution method was mediafire links, all dead now. None of these albums are preserved anywhere on the internet. Mysteriously, this month, someone uploaded this one to YouTube.
This first track (ends at 11:00) is a feast of luscious ambient pads, like a bed made entirely of pillows.
What I'm listening to today: "Track 1", rien
Sometimes I just want to listen to a quiet crackling static noise for twenty minutes. So here's just that. This is an untitled song on an untitled album consisting of two seemingly identical tracks.
Try focusing on this sound. Really pick it apart. Try to perceive each individual microsound. You might be inclined to think of it as literally nothing, but there's gobs of complex texture in how the pops & bass rumbles cluster.
from the album untitled
What I'm listening to today: "Track 2", Impermanence
An untitled song from an album named "Even if we talk about love in our fantasy, this iron and concrete won't convey its warmth." It's 15 minutes of a loud, distorted, mostly unchanging static noise, like standing close to heavy machinery. This is the sound of being very stressed and sometimes when I'm very stressed I like to listen to this sort of sound because it externalizes the stress into something apart from me.
from the album Even if we talk about love in our fantasy, this iron and concrete won't convey its warmth.
What I'm listening to today: "Chaos Of The Galaxy / Happy Man", Sparklehorse
Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) was a beloved one-man indie rock band and multi-instrumentalist in the 00s. This version of "Happy Man" presents the song as if you're hearing it coming in and out of tune on a radio station just slightly too far away to pick up and fighting interference from some rival station. It makes the whole thing really spooky and gives the legible parts an incredible punch.
What I'm listening to today: "Moth", Burial and Four Tet
Burial and Four Tet are two of the most original electronic musicians of this century, and when they were at the height of their powers around 2010 they recorded three songs for singles together ("Moth", "Nova" and "Wolf Cub", and then some other stuff with Thom Yorke). Moth is my favorite of the three, bouncy, a killer Four Tet pop hook but muffled and blurry in Burial's style. Just some incredible sounds here.
from the album Nova/Moth
What I'm listening to today: "Deep progressive house jam with hardware synths - M:S, Model D, Skulpt, Microfreak, NTS-1, Volca FM.", Work4synths
This YouTuber posts a lot of decent improvised trance techno sets, but for this one they seem to have decided to make a Song and they absolutely killed it. This is a catchy, well-produced electronica bop with a lovely clean-feeling emotion to it, performed by a table of mid-range synths driven from a composition in Ableton DAW.
What I'm listening to today: "Down With Silent Night", Irena and Vojtech Havlovi
From 1992, a married couple playing a duet on piano and cello. Feels like a movie score both in the 10,000-foot atmospheric vibes and the weird echoey way the cello is recorded. It's gorgeous, "evocative" and *slow* in a beautifully deliberate way, with chord changes minutes apart. It's also half an hour long so sincere suggestion: Hit stop at 19:41 exactly. That's where I would have cut.
https://havlovi.bandcamp.com/track/down-with-silent-night-a-tichou-noc-snesl-sv
from the album Music of Silence / Hudba ticha
What I'm listening to today: Butt music from hell, Hieronymus Bosch
Around 1500 CE Bosch painted "The Garden of Earthly Delights", an epic triptych of surreal scenes concluding in Hell. In the hell scene, a naked man has a fragment of musical notation painted on his ass. In 2014 a blogger named Amelia Hamrick transcribed it and a YouTuber named James Spalink recorded this ghostly version on period instruments. What Hell left unfinished the Internet has completed
mcc
Everyday.Human Derek