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
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "White Window", Stefan Torto
I've featured Stefan in this thread a couple times already. The constant attributes of his videos are (1) making complex music on unusually simple hardware setups and (2) cat.
This one's gorgeous, lush semi-ambient electronica. It's got a bit of an epic feel, bestowing a cinematic tone on this video of a cat, bathing in muted morning light, completely convinced the human arm next to her is there for her benefit.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Dawless 025 - Stuck in a loop", Stöfbug
This is some SPACE MUSIC recorded live on a grid of entry-level Roland & Korg desktop synths. Synth musicians in the 70s-80s made almost this exact music but would have needed an incredibly highend studio to make it sound this clean. Beatless but not quite ambient, intent music for scoring a craft flying silently through space, a childrens' documentary about the water cycle, a sunrise over a racetrack
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Melting through Midtown", The Physics House Band
The Physics House Band is a very noisy jazz ensemble. This track is not noisy at all. It is gentle and smooth and autumn-breeze cool. Saxophone and electric piano and drums. Very satisfying.
I previously posted this album in that Bandcamp recommendations thread I had on Another Site. I've been trying not to feature songs from that thread in this one, but maybe soon it won't matter anymore.
https://unearthly-vision.bandcamp.com/track/melting-through-midtown
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "生まれる前のセクシーキング", the hatch
I linked "the hatch" on Monday— this is from their previous album, and is a little closer to that "halfway between jazz and metal" thing I mentioned. Actually it kinda feels like if Last Days of Humanity tried to do a catchy ska kinda thing. All screaming and guitar-shredding noise. But it's catchy!
Google Translate claims this title means "The Sexy King Before Birth". Not sure how to interpret that.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "萃点", GEZAN featuring Million Wish Collective
This is from an absolutely wonderful album Christine found. This weird, joyous mix of Taiko-style drumming, electric guitar, a room full of people yelling and chanting, oceans of echo and (not in this song) bagpipes? It makes me think of Polyphonic Spree, or J. A. Seazer's songs for Shūji Terayama and the Utena anime. The track name translates something like "point of origin" or "intersection".
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Stereo Music for Yamaha Disklavier Prototype", Keith Fullerton Whitman
KFW is a composer and former drum&bass jockey with a lot of really amazing work. I've always been captivated by this piece for the Disklavier, which is Yamaha's trademark for a kind of player piano controlled via MIDI. Through some unclear computer-side technique (phasing?) a single chord is broken apart into noisy note clusters and reconstructed into heart-tugging music
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Gateless", Darren Korb
It's been 9 years and I'm prepared to say that "Transistor", by Supergiant Games, has the best video game OST ever. Like, the best video game soundtrack to listen to as an album. I was in indie game circles in 2014 and just every time there was a party in that scene, this album played in full at some point.
My fav track on the OST by far is "Gateless", an intense, epic guitar jam with a slight return to "The Spine".
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "GBA + Elektron jam", Bad Diode
Elektron is the MPC of this generation. They make a range of "grooveboxes" that are ready-made for producing genres like EDM or hip-hop.
This is a short, thumping rave electronica track by @bd in which an entire rack of Elektron devices serve as backup for… a Game Boy Advance, running a sequencer BD themself created (ROM available on Itch, see YouTube comments). The rhythm, it entrances me.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "VHIKK X sound demo 1", Forge TME
A medley of creepy howling drones as the creator of the VHIKK complex oscillator demonstrates playing it by hand. Most eurorack oscillators output one tone and then you run that through effects; this one has feedbacky delay and modulation built in so it outputs a finished sound. Ignore it's a product demo & you have 20 enjoyable minutes as various cool, menacing industrial noises play, shoggoths shambling by
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Meditation In White Sound", Halim El-Dabh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzyr2lleLOo
Halim El-Dabh (see article: https://cdm.link/2023/09/halim-el-dabh/) is a fascinating figure— an Egyptian composer with a career spanning 72 years and an undefeated claim to creating the first piece of electronic music ever ("The Expression of Zaar" aka "Wire Recorder Piece", 1944).
This 1959 piece, recorded at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, is an absolutely gorgeous minimalist ambient journey.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Everything is a synthesizer", Kurti
This musician rigs an electrical engineering learning tool (a "SystemTechnik Type 3910 Digi Board 2"— various standard chips + banana plugs) to make a repeating buzzing sound they control with switches, and combined with a Monotribe (first of the current era of desktop grooveboxes) builds a surprisingly catchy dance rhythm. They let this run for one minute, then burst out laughing and turn off the camera.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "shape of raw to come", the hatch
I saw "the hatch" live at Toronto's "Next Music from Tokyo" event. NMFT is a really great event and the hatch is *incredible*; mostly they alternate (and blend) dark jazz and death metal, in a way that seems like it shouldn't work but really *really* works. This track is more typical post-rock but still has its surprises, an ominous wailing threat over chugging guitars.
Bobinas P4G is a social network. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.1-beta0, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All Bobinas P4G content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
