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.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Live Techno mix set.", Th3Pock3tOp3rat0r
This is a shockingly sophisticated medley of dance pieces on the cheapest available hardware: two Pocket Operators and two toy Korg touch-strip synths, in a single chain of 1/8-inch cables.
The music itself is joyous & noisy distorted, 90s house with better production, or worse maybe, a single set of blown-out speakers set up at the other end of an echoey gym.
Makes me think of Axiom Verge.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Nerdseq & Assimil8or Live Mix 170823", 27 Arches
A 20-minute techno set performed on a modular rack. Acid basslines, industrial hardness and atmospherics. A really good emphasis on sound design. This is music with a viewpoint, the viewpoint is that more echo is ALWAYS better, and they do make a strong case.
The Nerdseq is in the bottom left—it's a tracker built into a eurorack module. You can see them composing the music on it as it plays.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "SNCF Lo-Fi Hip-Hop ▶ YAMAHA SU10 Unquantized Beat", Q_yr Ko
Okay, this one is a *bop*. Made on the SU10, a 1996 portable sampler resembling a much worse version of Yamaha's cult-beloved QY line, most of the appeal here is the contortions the musician had to go through to get the SU10 to do anything at all. Watch their fingers; it can't do sequencing, so they're toggling fixed-length loops made on a PO-33. Fun stuff.
Note: Yes, *that* SNCF.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Polyend Tracker // An undercover ambient machine", Dexba
This is a Selected Ambient Work made on the Polyend Tracker, but Dexba doesn't seem to be… using it correctly, or not in the normal way? This is a composition machine, but in the video he's somehow playing it live as an instrument, possibly with coordination/interference from a precomposed project.
Rain, echoing piano, skittering beats of the kind people in 2010 would call "glitchy".
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Soma Labs Lyra 8 + Hologram Microcosm Performance [No Talking]", A NEVER ENDING EXPLOSION
This video's thumbnail reads "Tuning the Lyra-8 to a Hungarian Minor Scale". The musician doesn't explain further, but the Lyra's 8 touchpad "keys" *can* be tuned to any arbitrary frequency, so it's good for tuning/scale experiments.
This piece is 16 minutes and makes every second count, a series of giant haunting tones with cryptic, intense emotions.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Boundless pad", Mike Lewis
If you want to make the kind of ambient music that sounds like just one giant chord for three minutes, the Novation Peak is a good synthesizer to go with.
This track is three minutes of stately chord progression absolutely drenched in echo. Extremely satisfying. Imagine someone in a big comfy sweater with a big cup of coffee jumping up and down in front of a sunrise yelling "Yes!! Yes!!! This is so relaxing!!!"
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Satie?", Dud Faz
Satie? Is this Satie? I don't know? This is a peppy, pleasantly sloppy jam that plausibly sounds as if it is inspired by, or possibly directly incorporates motifs from, the work of Erik Satie (1866-1925). At one point the musician is performing drums by hitting keys on a piano keyboard. How to describe this? Imagine a dance number breaking out in a 19th-century French factory.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Covenant - Live", Abre Ojos
This is the kind of music that is used for dolly shots slowly gliding down spaceship hallways when it is going to turn out later that your spaceship is haunted. Creepy indescribable atmospheric noises and big thumping beats wet with distortion.
You should watch the video if you want some nice psychedelic visualizations (or avoid watching the video if you're unusually sensitive to flashing colors).
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "I'm Afraid of Americans", David Bowie (Photek remix)
Heterodox drum & bass artist Photek leans heavily to a kind of minimalism that when it goes too far can feel sparse and strung out. Here the strung-out feel works strongly in the song's favor, as it gives us more time to luxuriate in the voice of David Bowie.
Incidentally I think this mix (from a 1997 remix EP organized by Trent Reznor) might secretly be an early draft of "Seven Samurai"
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "roland s-1 dnb drum play", alarky
It's been said the Drum & Bass genre couldn't have happened without Cubase, the software that originally let 90s artists artisanally place all those 1/16-note hi-hats on a grid. This artist on the other hand says who needs grids, and just sorta mashes the buttons on his drum machine front panel. It's messy, but sorta works! Combined with the weirdly overpowered synthesis of the S-1 it forms an intense mood.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Piece for tape recorder", Vladimir Ussachevsky
This piece was recorded in 1956 but sounds highly ahead of its time, like if the "drug freakout sequence" music from a 1970s film soundtrack were composed as intentional music, or like if the interstitial junk in a Kid A era Radiohead album were expanded to a full song. I really like this, it gets so much mileage out of tape-jank & exactly four oscillator circuits in a hand-wired configuration.
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).
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