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
What I'm listening to today: "I'm Dead", Bam Bam
I only learned about this band this week, they're like 50% punk but the other 50% was inventing "Seattle grunge" 5 years early. Matt Cameron on drums.
Here's an amazing skin-searing blast of sludge guitars and yelling. Like being air-fried. There's a guest vocalist in addition to Bam Bam's lead Tina Bell here, but I can't identify him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF3yNXzJdZI
( Mastering seems a little better on the Tidal version: https://tidal.com/track/107339796/u )
What I'm listening to today: "1920263 Meditative Ambient Guitar and Synth Soundscape Behringer Wasp Deluxe Microcosm", CJT
This dude seems to do basically daily jams on his pile of midrange synths and post them all to YouTube. I liked this one out of the pile where a wasp provides a quiet heartbeat and he improvises a guitar solo over it. 1980s dark cinematic feel, empty streets and echoes and vague menace in the form of a young Willem Dafoe, waiting for you somewhere
What I listened to today: "Zero", Lamb
Whatever "Trip-Hop" was. Was a tension between pulling ideas out of lounge-y jazz-y genres from the 30s-60s to jam them into electronica, vs pulling ideas out of electronica and jamming them into lounge-y jazz. Which was the real thing? The answer seems to come in tracks like these where the musicians just say screw it and make a song with no electronics. This track's pure voice and violin and the vibes are enormous, it's wonderful
What I listened to today: "HEEL CENA", Westside Gunn
One more from the ringleader of the Buffalo, NY "Griselda" rap clique. The last one I linked was kinda surreal avant-garde but this is good solid hip hop basics. Fantastic flow and vivid production that feels like it's picking up what trip-hop set down. He has raps about how his kids like Minecraft.
Linking the Bandcamp version which has the bowlderized no-blood cover art. Last time Bluesky actually censored the link
from the album Heels Have Eyes 2
What I'm listening to today: "Gold", Lamb (Autechre remix)
Æ used to do a lot more remixes and had this *fascinating* tendency to find a real particular vibe that resembled neither the source material nor Autechre's regular work but felt consistent with Autechre's other remixes. I really love the flip here about halfway through where the instrumentation suddenly pulls back and it's like an airplane bursting out of clouds or a train pulling out of a tunnel into the open
What I'm listening to today: "You and I are in a Dark Crypt Forever", Warlock Corpse
This somewhat defies description and it makes more sense to just watch five seconds and you'll get the idea. "Dungeon synth" music with metal drumming and 80s goth synths and a guy dressed like… some sort of troll? They went to the bother of putting fake VHS effects on it even though the equipment on the table clearly dates this performance to the 2020s. This is *really* fun actually
What I'm listening to today: "Speed Learn", Tomaga
Got lost on Bandcamp and wound up listening to sleepy jazz for tired cats. Here is a machine gradually coming online, whirring wheels over tracks and indifferent buzzing and uncorrelated electronic blorps. It has some kind of meaning, hidden from you, in the firmware of the thing that blorp is issued at some meaningful moment, in a service manual not distributed outside the manufacturer its secret truth is revealed
https://handsinthedarkrecords.bandcamp.com/track/speed-learn
from the album Sleepy Jazz For Tired Cats
What I'm listening to today: "#feedbackuary ...Crystal Cherry Blossom Caverns... [Pulsar-23] [Enner] [Blackhole]"
Slow 80s-style-industrial music based on a pile of idiosyncratic SOMA equipment and a musician playing a cracklebox like a violin. Run harsh buzzy noises into a big enough echo pedal and they take on this smooth fluid sound. The mood of a journey through a cursed, destroyed world, hunkering with your weapons in the back of a pickup truck, wind howling past
What I'm listening to today: "Up Up", Li Yilei
Li Yilei is a really interesting electronic artist from Shanghai, currently operating out of London; this is from their first release "Unabled Form". Slowly building ambient/cinematic object that is either menacing like an abandoned factory or comforting like a cold winter day, depending on your inclinations. Yilei excels at this sort of data sculpture, a space made of noises that presents a narrative as you move through it
from the album Unabled Form
What I listened to today: 2024-05-22 Mastodon post, Autechre
Sean Booth of Æ has a Fediverse account and one day last year posted this gorgeous outtake from Oversteps (which I still consider Æ's most risk-taking album). It's kind of breathtaking, utterly unlike Æ, a labyrinth of classical spanish guitar, while also quintessentially Æ and very "yeah that, that's an Oversteps track". I think of this as a cousin to known(1) but I feel shadows of other songs of that era too
https://data.runhello.com/blj/autechre_oversteps_outtake_sean_mastodon_20240522.mp3
What I'm listening to today: "Southside", Lil Keke
What if I spent this entire week linking classic "dirty south" hip-hop tracks I loved from 97.9 The Box back in the 90s (which, I am visiting Houston this week and their selection is still excellent). No one could really stop me.
Here's known DJ Screw associate Lil Keke, dropping an effortless flow that stuck in my head for 29 years and my favorite instance of slide guitar in the entire corpus of music. Sorry Beck
What I'm listening to today: "Ghetto D", Master P
Master P put No Limit Records on the map, and made New Orleans the new capital of southern hip hop, with "Ghetto Dope", an *incredibly* catchy step-by-step guide to the production, distribution, and sale of crack cocaine. This unstoppable hit could not possibly get played on the radio, leading to this *incredibly* funny radio edit which is cut up to almost near illegibility making it sound like "Ghetto D" is a rapper
What I'm listening to today: "Writtin´ Rhymes", Timbaland and Magoo
This album dropped in the aftermath of clique co-leader Missy Elliot's "The Rain" going off like a bomb, and had like three huge hits on it, but basically no track on this album misses so I want to play you one of the lesser tracks that never got radio play. Timb and Missy became such huge multidecade cultural forces it's easy to forget when they were *hungry*, just obscure kids who produced for Alliyah
What I'm listening to today: "The Party Don't Stop", Mia X
This is it: The greatest track No Limit ever created. Their in-house production shop ("Beats by the Pound") as their name implies were all about *quantity*, but when they cared they could deliver pure gold, deliciously cheesy like those cover photoshops. This track is perfect, a joyous block party. And Foxy Brown's here, because like, OK, it's 1997, something incredible is happening, of course Foxy Brown's here.
What I'm listening to today: "The Man Right Chea", Mystikal
Yes, my 90s southern hip hop mixtape is 50% No Limit by volume. Here's the thing: So was the radio in 1997. This is a loopy, hypnotic bit of experimental techno packaged as hip hop and I'm still kinda shocked radio stations played it
Beats by the Pound getting the most technique out of the cheapest synthesizers; Mystikal doing oddly experimental vocals that seem to have departed "rap" and approach skat singing
What I'm listening to today: "Distant Wilderness", Goodie Mob
To close this notional "mixtape", and for historical significance, I probably *should* link "Dirty South", the Goodie Mob song that coined the phrase. (It's a pretty good song! It even has Big Boi on it!) However, instead I am going to indulge myself and just link a track I really like, even though it's on the same album as "Black Ice".
Here: A beautiful slow acoustic-folk call to revolution
What I'm listening to today: "Dracula Flow 6", YoungArts 2026 winners' jazz ensemble
I had to do it to them, snipe. I went Judge Judy on that pussy, snipe. Blacked out on the Percocet, ordered a Desert Eagle off Amazon. I really did this. I'm really him. I keep my glock at the Vatican, I have the blueprint to the catacombs. My diamonds come from the most horrific situations possible. Movin like Dracula, we get it back in blood. This shit ain't nothin to me, man
What I'm listening to today: "Johnny Dang", That Mexican OT
Đặng Anh Tuấn, better known as Johnny Dang, is a Houston-area jeweler who various sources assure me locked *down* the client base of providing jewelry to professional rappers in the 00s and 10s through savvy networking and innovation in "grills". I did not know this. When I arrived in Houston a couple weeks ago this was the song The Box was playing at 1 AM as I left the airport. Absolutely phenomenal rap flow.
https://thatmexicanot.bandcamp.com/track/johnny-dang-feat-paul-wall-drodi
from the album Lonestar Luchador
What I'm listening to today: "Coastline #82 (Vom Melos zur Pauke) - Sonata in three movements", Karlheinz Essl
When I first discovered modular synths I'd just search directly for videos of self-playing patches on the 0-Coast: a small dense self-contained unit that can do a ton of stuff simultaneously if you understand it, and makes no sound at all if you don't. Here, a carefully composed journey into a sentient storm of madness hand-guided by an Austrian music professor
What I'm listening to today: "Phil Cirocco demonstrating the ARP 2003 synthesizer"
Alan R. Pearlman's company produced some historically good-sounding synthesizers; their first few, up to the ARP 2600 (best known as the voice of R2-D2), were decadently knob-ridden and customizable. This one's so early it's branded "Tonus" and it has some *bizarre* capabilities, here shown off as a shakedown test immediately following a restoration with some improvised space-western jazz
What I'm listening to today: "Alien Virus", The Bug
The Bug is a mysterious artist to me, they mostly make fuzzy abstract ambient dub but also one time I saw Earth in concert and it was just Dylan Carlson playing one guitar and The Bug playing another.
This is from an album that alternates live Bug tracks with someone named Ghost Dubs (apparently from the label The Bug started?). Thousands of insects are doing the Charleston while in the background, civilization burns
https://thebugvsghostdubs.bandcamp.com/track/the-bug-alien-virus-west-indian-centre-leeds
from the album Implosion
What I'm listening to today: "0:00", Li Yilei
https://liyilei.bandcamp.com/track/0-00-2
The opener to a mysterious 4-track cassette which I thiiink (per the mini-doc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9vDOiRUUyA that introduced me to Li) was Li Yilei's first release as a musician. Yilei self-describes as instrument-agnostic but this is one of their few tracks to center on guitar, a kinda pre-dusk 60s-psychadelic bootup sequence, Death in Vegas or something. Chill ambient spaceout music, a nice compact little feeling
from the album 0:00
What I'm listening to today: "First Light", Elucid ft. Sebb Bash and Mattie
From the new album by the Armand Hammer member that isn't Billy Woods. Downtempo hip hop, laid-back spoken word over laid-back jam rock, Allen Ginsberg would recognize this as "rapping". It's got this indescribable feeling.
In some way I can't explain I feel like this track, and the songs "Street Magic" and "Laraaji" from the same rap clique, are all groping toward the same idea
from the album I Guess U Had To Be There
What I'm listening to today: "Boomhauer w/ dang ol' drums", David Dockery featuring voice of Mike Judge
…
What I'm listening to today: "An Microtonal Jam (31 TET)", The Creepy Silence
Anarchic audio soup. In western music notes are assigned to 12 equally spaced points along the octave. What if it were 31? According to this guy, you unlock a bunch of new and forbidden scales, like the "C subminor", which he uses to make 90s style acid techno stuffed with ideas so strange I can't tell what's 31-TET and what's just odd decisions (⚠️ loud beep at 1:10). Baffling but never boring
@mcc seriously that's like a spa treatment for my EARS and BRAIN
also it's fun to listen to it over quiet nasa stream, it's still great without it but the quiet talking adds yet another layer
this is sooooo goooooood
mcc
Solarbird 
Man aging with madness