mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Bangin' Nights", gwEm
This is some acid chiptune created in 2005 for the Atari ST with the "maxYMiser music" tracker (software written by gwEm himself). Rocks hard. Depending on how you feel about harsh sounds, you'll either be enraptured or annoyed by the production; these waveforms are positively serrated.
The YouTube uploader explains this is a Atari ST conversion of a C64 chiptune by Matt Gray (composer of 80s games like Last Ninja 2).
Anatoly Shashkin💾
@mcc What's really cool about all these is that Atari ST's CPU was fast enough to get SID-like music out of a simple AY.
Dancer, your Space Dad 🐝🐝🐝
@dosnostalgic @mcc That series of CPU was really something. The m68k family could match the performance of then-Intel CPUs clocked 4 times faster. Later chips in the series were hard to match for raw power for quite a while.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Taxi", Pole
In 1996, a DJ named Stefan Betke dropped his Waldorf "4-Pole" filter and broke it. The "broken" filter turned out to make strange, unique crackly noises that Betke loved so much he recorded 3 entire albums of minimalist, borderline-ambient "dub" techno based around the filter's new sounds. This is my favorite track from the set, a tense, hypnotic descent into a single hissing loop disrupted by sketchy reggae instrumentation.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "10 minutes of DUB TECHNO on the korg VOLCA bass/FM/Sample"
"Dub" emerged in the early 70s as a minimal, bass-focused, echo-drenched variant of reggae.
Then "Dub" emerged in the late 90s as a techno genre aping dub reggae style, generally with no lyrics and often with minimal/microhouse beats.
This YouTube dub techno set was made on Korg's quartet of cheap desktop synths, and it's good. Actually, it's *very* good. Cocooned in floaty vibes
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "ZIQAL DIMENSION + bionic lestar + Zadar", Plugman
"Plugman" is an active performing musician, but his YouTube account is used exclusively for short sound tests and module demonstrations; I've been watching the account for months waiting for him to post an actual *song*. Here he finally has, sort of, a short but extremely sick 2-minute jam with cool swoothy synths. This makes me think of whatever "dub" meant in the early 00s techno scene.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Sommarhack 2024 Invitro", 505 & mOdmate
"Sommarhack" is an Atari demoscene party happening next year in Sweden. The event announcement came itself in the form of a short Atari ST demo, which you can find on YouTube under the name "300 Days to Go". The demo incorporated this original track, made in maxYMiser music (that's the tracker made by gwEm). It's effortlessly funky, and has absolutely the filthiest chiptune bassline I have ever heard.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Havoc" title screen theme
"Havoc" was a 3D "tank game" (anyone whose parents wouldn't let them play FPSes will recognize this phrase) from the 90s that history has entirely forgotten. There were two things of note about it: One, it was one of *very* few games to ever support Apple's "QuickDraw 3D" hardware acceleration API; two, its title screen theme was a techno banger entirely beyond all reason. This song is a secret treasure, to me.
mcc
What I'm listening today: "Z-ZONE", BeaT
This is a tracker .mod file based around some Neo Geo-feeling FM bass samples. I don't know for a fact when this was recorded but it was uploaded to themodarchive in 2007. The kind of music you'd hear early in a video game where you are rescuing your girlfriend, presumably from some sort of crime lord. Low-key but has a good feeling to it, I like the early-hip-hop drums. Allow yourself to be filled with the spirit of the 1980s
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Unreal SuperHero 3", Kenet and Rez (Game Boy conversion by Kabcorp)
Unreal Superhero 3 was a classic tracker tune from 2001 that, I'm told, gained infamy after being used in some mid-00s keygen cracktros. The original Windows version was trying to simulate a chiptune feel, so it only makes sense that recreating it for the actual Game Boy sound chip, as this YouTuber did in 2018, improves the sound considerably. A nice little bop here.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Atari", HyphenPixel
Several things define "chiptune"; an underrated one is the channel restriction. Which this track bypasses by being made on… 2 Atari POKEY chips, a configuration easy to set up in modern trackers but historically meaningless. The only way to play this song on period hardware would be to MIDI-sync two Atari 800s and have them play a duet.
A neat, melancholy glimpse at an underexplored part of musical configuration space:
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