mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Buchla 200 at the Evergreen State College.", Giselle Garcia
Some drums-not-needed analog synth music on a vintage unit at a college in Olympia, Washington. Chill but with a distinctly sharp energy. What I used to think of as "Space Mountain Music".
There's a gap of about two minutes halfway through this video as the musician configures the unit for her second song so you may want to stop the video at 2:40, but I do like the closeout track.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Testing stereo field", Fantastic Dan
I was watching through this musician's videos on YouTube and my favorite wound up being their very first. It's clearly a test video (it cuts off suddenly at the end), and it's got unusual binaural audio that pans as the cellphone moves. But I really just love the groove!
This video is 4 years old, and in all this time it's only got 18 views. The Internet is full of beautiful and secret things.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Joyous", 12 Rounds
I was one of 12 Rounds [ft Atticus Ross]'s very few devoted fans in the 90s, but I didn't even know until recently about their first, pre-Nothing album, which apparently got so buried CDNow never listed it. "Jitter Juice" is 1/3 tripe, 1/3 tracks that later appeared on My Big Hero, and 1/3 solid gold, ending with this lovely little, fully-orchestrated, goth/trip-hop kiss-off. The lyrics have deep personal resonance to me.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Morning Practice", Todd Barton
Made on a modern reissue of one of Buchla's "Easel" style suitcase units, this is an improvised performance of strange, quietly unnerving alien sounds. You may not recognize this as "music". It's basically the noises you'd hear in the background in some sort of science lab or alien spacecraft in a 60s movie (probably because those sounds, in those movies, were in fact made on Buchlas). It's definitely intense.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Cottonwool", Lamb
In the golden age of trip-hop, Lamb was known for two things: A really good Kruder & Dorfmeister remix; and an undignified incident where one of their albums got widely distributed on Napster/Gnutella after someone relabeled it as an "unreleased" Portishead album. Unfortunate: Lamb deserves to stand alone. I like this track for its layers of lounge jazz and breakbeats, satisfyingly distinct and unmixing like oil and water.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Estuary", nk
This week I've been posting tracks in which a modular synthesizer makes many short, fast notes in a random-feeling way. This is… that again, to start, but it quickly changes, dropping in a skittering, jazzy-erratic beat and droning bassline. Once it gets going the mood of the piece is really interesting, very determined, like something large and heavy in dogged motion.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "The Day Of Opening The Tomb", Aural Holograms
This is a 23-minute recording of atmospheric drone ambient, from 2008 and a genre somewhere adjacent to black metal. Metal sounds and distant clanking, sounds that could be wailing or maybe just wind. The YouTube thumbnail actually summarizes this track better than I could. As a connoisseur of structured humming noises, the 23 minutes I spent listening to this were very high-quality ones.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Neutral Labs Elmyra DIY drone synthesizer & friends", nyppy
The Elmyra was a DIY/"Open Hardware" clone of the SOMA LYRA-8, with 3 operators instead of 8. A drone box, basically. In this video the box's designer demos the Elmyra with a variety of other equipment (including, in some clips, a LYRA-8). A buffet of atmospheric booming sounds.
I try to limit this thread to single tracks but frankly, all 22 of these pieces are really compelling.
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"
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