mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Modular Notes 88 - ER301 Study I", mafmadmaf
This is a skewed-feeling but very carefully composed collection of beeps and tones over about six minutes. Not sure how to describe it. It speaks for itself.
One interesting thing about this composition is it's made on modular, but each of the four individual modules is digital and two are general-purpose computer modules. The modular rack here exists to be a tactile interface for software.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Flowing Water"
This is a piece of classical Chinese music, whose score was first written down around 1350 CE, though according to various sources on Google it existed in some form as far back as 500 BCE (and according to the YouTube summary here the most recent "paragraph" was added around 1850 CE). Here it's performed on the guqin with a devastating gentleness, each of the five(?) sections keeping a distinct and sharp emotional tenor.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Battle Against Belch", Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka (Nintendo)
Earthbound is the game that famously managed to permanently change how every millennial video game hipster thinks about games, without being what Nintendo would consider a financial success. This dark jazz track from the equally influential soundtrack stitches a series of samples and ~leitmotifs~ which appear before and after it in the game, together with a grinding bass.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Magritte's Dream", Yusuke Shirakawa
Music concrète on a desktop, this piece is made with tape loops and scavenged-looking cassette equipment (including one literal loop of magnetic tape which appears to have no "cassette" attached). With one four-track tape and one mono, the artist has five faders that (in a performance with no instruments) they can play like an instrument to create peaceful and only slightly creeptastic ambiance.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "No-input mixer minimal techno", closedcircuits
You think of mixers as passive, but feedback through a bandpass filter can make tones. This leads to the idea of the "no input mixing board", most famously explored in a series of excellent ambient albums by Toshimaru Nakamura. This artist takes the idea one step further by using the technique for *rhythm*, cross-wiring two mixers into a funky drum machine in this quiet but rocking dance track.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Polyend Tracker Untitled Electronics Jam", Risa T
This is a short trip-hop jam on a portable hardware tracker. (Like, the kind of tracker one would normally associate with text-mode DOS or the Atari ST. There have been a couple attempts recently to put one in a standalone hardware device.) Skittering, glitchy beats and a kind of mysterious air.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "ecnalubma", awk
I made this song, in 2001, via about 5 lines of C and Perl mashed together on a Linux command line and piped directly into /dev/audio. I used slightly different code on the left and right channels. I wasn't trying to make "music", just a byte pattern so complex I no longer understood it, to see what it sounded like. The result was shockingly structured and undergoes multiple cryptic phase changes over 20 minutes.
It's loud.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Die genaue Zeit", Einstürzende Neubauten
…German for "Collapsing New Buildings", were early industrial-music luminaries who used handmade instruments, concrete & metal reclaimed from demolition sites, and screaming to evoke landscapes of urban desolation. This song from 1983, translated, describes a sort of Muzak apocalypse, with all art replaced with elevator music and all speech replaced with a voice endlessly intoning the accurate time.
mcc
What I listened to today: "CT-0W0 Computer Cowbell", emma essex
This brave VST author made a whole synth based on a hyper-advanced version of the old (distinctive, but little-loved) Roland 808 "cowbell" drum voice, with dozens of controls and modular patchpoints, then recorded this fascinating EP-length demo video for it. It starts as recognizable techno, ranges into mysterious sounds and ends as terrifying, abstract dark ambient. My favorite part is "The World's Maw".
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Remotely", Coil
My favoritest ambient album ever is a 1992 album of "remixes and re-recordings" of Coil's 1984 debut single "How to Destroy Angels" (subtitle: "Ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy"). "Remixes" seems to mean "we recorded some new music with the same instruments". This one's the standout (other than the title track), a growling noise symphony that gives me stark images of looming forms gyrating in darkness.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Untitled 7", Oval
Markus Popp did this thing in the 90s of scratching CDs by hand and sampling the glitches to make ambient music. Later he contracted someone to condense his artistic process into a computer program, so he could set it up in art galleries. Be Oval. He made an album ("ovalprocess") with this; it was the most alien music I'd ever heard. This is my fave track from it. It is harsh (no really, it's pretty shrill) and beautiful.
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