mcc
What I'm listening to today: "AMBIVALENT", Human Motives
Humming buzzing noises and bright chords like sunlight glinting off metal, this is six minutes of ambient music made on a modular pipeline that features not one but two granular sound-stretchers chained end to end. Something relaxed.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "'Convection' | Cassette Tape Generative Ambient", Not_A_Creative
The YouTube summary for this tells a story: The musician recorded a modular synthesizer piece, but they weren't really vibing with it. So they recorded it onto a cassette tape and played it back at half speed. Suddenly they loved it. This *is* good, actually. Peaceful with occasional passing tremors of creepy feeling, like glimpsing something you shouldn't through the fog.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Wail of a Decomposed Star", Hobboth Music
In this beautifully atmospheric piece the musician rigged up a modular system and then, they claim, "left this patch to record while taking [a] shower". This is surprising since the piece really does feel like it follows an arc to an energetic climax & decline over its 18 minutes, so either something acted as a very long LFO or we got lucky.
(The fittingly H.R. Geiger-y video is an autovisualizer.)
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "DarkMatter by Lefty’sSoundLab+Eventide BlackHole drone improvisation", Arkady Marto
This is a sorrowful audio inkblot made by a handmade drone synth covered in mysterious knobs. Hypnotic but constantly changing, saws like low horns over a foggy Thames at the start of a spy movie. About 12 minutes in I realized I was convinced I had been hearing a sequence of 3 bass notes for many minutes continuously, but when I concentrated they evaporated
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Empty" (YMF288 Cover), jaezu (original by 4-mat)
Yamaha FM was the sound of pop in the 80s, with the DX7 used in more hits than I can name, and then the sound of high-end computers in the 90s, with budget versions of the DX7's chip showing up in the Genesis, Neo Geo, Soundblaster etc.
This is a chiptune cover of another chiptune (originally a 512byte demo), remade on the Sharp PC-98 Yamaha chip as laid-back, vaporwavey electric-piano funk.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "morning drone", SERi
Here is the secret to drone ambient: Get some sort of oscillator with either phase or FM effects that cause transient crackling/squeaky noises, then run it through a massive reverb until you can't hear any individual element. This *always works*.
This track means being repeatedly hit by uniform walls of sound, like vertical ocean waves. It's pretty good for total mind-emptying. No emotions. No consciousness. Just sound
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Scarlet Skies", CorvusScribe
This is a chiptune piece on the 4-channel POKEY chip that handled sound and random number generation on the Atari 400 and 800 computers, plus most of Atari's 80s arcade games (Missile Command, Centipede etc).
This one's all big crashing chords, epic and dramatic. Sometimes you just want to listen to some PWMed square waves. The visualization in the video looks pretty cool.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "TD-3 // RD-6 + volca FM = f u n k", Ricardo Schnidrig
Here cheap Behringer reproductions of the Roland 303 and 606, both running at maybe half the tempo those machines are usually run at, combine with an entire garage workbench worth of guitar pedals to make some *unbelievably* laid back acid atop a foamy wall of phased FM. Cool and dreamy and a little bit hypnotic.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Oh Sheila", Ready for the World
This is from that period in the 80s I've talked about before, when hip hop, new tech and Prince were causing pop music to change quicker than musicians could keep up with. It's a beautifully rocking R&B track, with borderline-experimental staccato everything. Morse code synths.
BTW—go find the music video for this, or GIS "Ready for the World band", if you want to see an *incredible* moment in men's fashion.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Beyond your mind", Reinos
This is a eurodance DOS tracker tune from 2004, with sampled (?) acid synth noises and some fun stuttery violin sounds. Take this into a club in mid-1996 and it would have been the hypest thing.
This was posted on YouTube by the artist, and as the artist does not link the .xm file, and the website advertised in the .xm file on screen appears to be dead, this is probably the only copy of this track on the Internet.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Performance 065", Stereo Pig
This is a short, focused bedroom modular jam with dirty, way-overdriven distorted industrial beats and a good buzzing groove. Made with a couple of my favorite noise machines (the SOMA Pulsar and Lyra) and a light show made of LEDs controlled directly by the modular equipment (so warning, the video does have flashing). A good piece to play in your warehouse hideout when the rival gang shows up on hoverbikes.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "zxy", Kiyomi Tadagumi
A 60-second chiptune onslaught made by virtually overclocking the NES's 2A03 sound chip to unlock new powers. Every six seconds appears to show off a different "impossible" synthesis technique. Super cool, but frustrating!— it's incredible as flexing, but since no musical phrase repeats it can do little as "music", even though the fragments show potential to be great. I wish for a longer version with a "song structure"
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Kachina 🦄", Dochness
This would be a "lo-fi beat to study to" except for the incredibly heavy dubstep-esque synthline bearing down on you, so I guess this is a lo-fi beat to be incredibly nervous to. I think the unicorn emoji is part of the song title.
Performed live on two cheapish desktop synths (Korg's sample-based drum machine, and Roland's SH-1 emulation). It's always nice to me to see enormous sounds coming from budget gear.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "I Cannot See Them", Hitchcock Guillotine
A mix of drums and feedbacky synths through an overdrive filter, one for anyone who believes there is a venn diagram intersection between "harsh noise" and "ambient". Quiet tribal-style drums and a big wet plodding heartbeat of a kick, like the song is keeping time for a march into a sinister Zdzisław Beksiński landscape. One of those loud things that sounds better if you turn it down slightly.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Simple Stuff", Loraine James
So as far as I can tell the deal with Loraine James is that while I was in college listening to IDM music, she was a teen listening to the same music and thinking "there should be music that sounds like this, but it's laid back R&B". Then she grew up and made it.
This track… isn't IDM exactly, or R&B, it's a forest of dense, unpredictable, looming beats with Loraine cooing on top through increasing distortion.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "DUSG Harmonies", Bleep Bloop
A little abstract synth piece made of an ocean of detuned sawtooths. It's about two minutes long, beatless, and joyfully intense. One of those quiet things that sounds better if you turn it up very loud.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Devil's Advocate", DJ Shadow
DJ Shadow's pre-Endtroducing period was covered very well in major-label rereleases, but this one 🔥 track (an alternate, massively superior version of "High Noon") is actually really hard to get get hold of, I assume because of clearance problems. Alongside ultradense beats, this track weaves a pair of dueling vocal samples designed to appear indistinguishable. Pure music must give birth to orgasm and revolution
https://soundcloud.com/kayschaefer/dj-shadow-devils-advocate
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "ELOQUENCER // MEDITATIONAL APPROACH 2 // Cwejman QMMF-4 + 4 VCOs", LESINDES
This is a slow, wonderfully minimal aleatoric piece in which a sequencer controlling four synth voices starts off playing all four at once in a repeating chord then, on interference from the musician, starts allowing the four channels to desynchronize from each other, phasing the chord into lovely little chaotic arpeggio patterns. "Ambient" or maybe just Krautrock.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Tired of me", Loraine James
So I mentioned a few days ago I've been listening to Loraine James and her stuff is like IDM music as laid-back R&B? Right, so this was what I was thinking of. Dreamy swarm of distorted clicky stutter beats and echoey nonsense keys. I'm not even totally sure I understand what's happening here but I like it
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Petrified Wood"
Eyvind Kang is a violist and composer who has recorded with artists as diverse as John Zorn, Animal Collective and Sunn O)). This is a minimalist piece from Kang's own compositions in which he lays violas and reverb atop themselves over and over until any ability to identify what "note" is being played is lost, nothing left but a nameless emotion constantly growing in intensity until you feel you will burst
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