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.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Level Incomplete", Bas Mondblau
Bas here has a YouTube account containing hundreds of decent drum & bass jams made with Elektron's desktop grooveboxes, most of them in the style I would describe as "Dreamcast menu music". This one's the most interesting one I've found so far, on a slightly different wavelength. Chill, jazzy and LTJ-Bukem-ish, this is an airy flight through fluffy synth-pad clouds and skeletal d&b beats.
mcc
What I'm listening today: "TANMO", BENDYmusic
Two minutes of mysterious noise, recorded with mysterious electronic boxes on what appears to be a table in a cafe. The feedback wobbles and distorted kicks interweave with passing snippets of conversation from the cafe and a radio which I think is actually patched into the recording device. If you love noise as much as I do you will dig this two minutes
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Mood // Lyra-8 // Drums - Ambient Creation", André Davies
This is a deliriously weird video that I don't think I'd find that weird if I only had the audio. With just audio you'd think "oh, horror movie soundtrack music". With the video, you've got a man seated at a drumkit proceeding to make what seems to be every possible sound other than the sound of a man playing the drums. A step up from metal plates and contact mics maybe? Is this jazz
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "YAMAHA SU10 DNB JAM", Electromachines
Armed with the terrible Yamaha portable sampler I was talking about last week, plus one of Korg's "Monotron" toys and a voice sample from a really old interview with Squarepusher, this musician goes hard on some budget-bin drum & bass. Got those kind of wobwob synths you normally associate with dubstep, but it isn't dubstep, it's drum & bass.
It really has that 1997 feel
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Torture by Tao"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_TJVc5z_KY
Tao is an apparently legendary Atari ST chiptune/demoscene composer (http://rockabit.weebly.com/tao.html) who started in 1991 with the goal of recreating C64 SID sounds on the Atari, and wrote his own tracker synth to get more accurate sounds. This is a 1999 track made in someone else's SID-on-Atari simulator ("Sid Sound Designer"). The point of interest here though is this is just a really rocking track, with a great high-energy mood.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Ambient jam w/ Soma Cosmos, Take 5, Polymoon, Marantz cassette tape piano, and guitar", Jay Hosking
In this unimaginatively titled but gorgeous piece, Jay builds in a looper a bed of layers of keyboard sounds (from a 2021 descendent of the Sequential Prophet descendent, and one actual piano), then plays soulful guitar over it. Music for something cinematic to happen over, the protagonist confessing love or saying goodbye for the last time.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Radiation day", Ekzil
This is a simple but satisfying desktop synth jam with a kinda club techno feel. I feel like if I'd been played this song without context I'd have dated it to 2003. It's got a nice complex song structure and it's fun to watch the musician manage live-mixing the instruments by hand.
For some reason, this song makes me think of the Baba is You soundtrack.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Analogue Fields", Stefan Torto
This is a stark, moody synthwave piece by Stefan Torto (no cat this time). All sounds are produced on just the budget Volca Keys (the big keyboard is a MIDI sequencer, and the little box on the right is adding the echo). Simple but powerful, music like cold, distant wind.
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