Notices by mcc (mcc@mastodon.social), page 2

@dosnostalgic people can still make isometric art today but only at this brief moment in the 90s could anyone at all use colors quite this way

For the last two years I've been semi-daily posting "What I'm Listening to Today" links here. Mastodon has some problems with threads containing hundreds of posts, so I re-create the thread once a year.

If you'd like to see, here's my "year two" thread: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/110266770603341546

Or, alternately, every song from year two in the least practical format possible: A 301-song, 38-hour YouTube playlist (note: video #1 contains flashing):

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLIjft6ja7DM_kacOW8zo2vtr-aWpTNX6

And here's the thread for "year three":

What I'm listening to today: "8888 + ParipiDestroyer + POLYS", Freaky Tweaky

This is a fun, satisfying acid jam on three small devices by different small-batch designers in Japan.

The devices are all little handheld things based on trim pots and breadboard buttons, sized like business cards and Altoids tins; one is a gorgeous reproduction of the 808, another a gorgeous reproduction of the 303, and the third an odd Roland J8-like prototype. The Pocket Operator is reborn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDSO_KzSaQ8

What I'm listening to today: "/", Second Woman

You've heard of the "Shepard Tone", right? That's a sound design trick where a sound appears to continuously increase in pitch without ever retreating back down to give itself space. There's a variant of that for drum beats called a "Risset Rhythm".

This song, from a Telafon Tel Aviv/Belong collaboration, uses the Risset trick plus some seriously weird production to make a dreamy, alien, not-quite-danceable dance track:

https://spectrumspools.bandcamp.com/track/-

What I'm listening to today: "greim93", AGF / @poemproducer

AGF does poetry, VJing, noise music and Theory (so if you are looking for eastern European left feminism she is very worth a follow).

This is a immaculately sculpted noise collage wherein hisses and thumps stalk you through a fog of microsounds, constantly threatening to congeal into a beat but then instead doggedly remaining just outside the edge of your perception

https://agf-poemproducer.bandcamp.com/track/greim93

What I'm listening to today: "extinct bird gathering", Luna SC

From this musician's "tmod" series of songs performed live on a wall-sized modular synthesizer rack, this is a fresh-feeling electronic composition with gorgeous sound design. Crunchy beats and warm metallic everything else. I'm not going to say this is dance music exactly but it is definitely music to bob your head to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvPOkVla6Tg

What I'm listening to today: "Spit", Kittie

I love metal but I don't think I am a very sophisticated listener of it. I struggle with the squawky vocals and the occasional long samey stretches. Kittie delights me by bringing aggressive variety to their presentation, especially in this one old, unusually compact track that rapidly switches registers from death-metal screams to intelligible English as if tracking manic mood swings. You think dick is the answer but it's not

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=184fj8XPbhE

What I'm listening to: "Nightmare", KNOWER

KNOWER is an incredible, funky, YouTube-bait band consisting of "The Bank Account Song Guy", Genevieve Artadi, and literally whoever else is in the building. They have a channel full of sessions live-recorded in a generic suburban house with noise foam taped to the wall and the band all wearing gimmick t-shirts. You should listen to them. As an intro, here's some funk featuring the bass stylings of Daphnycore artist MonoNeon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERCkf0j8pPM

What I'm listening to today: "wierdness", recordingtruck

I love noise! I really do! The Bastl Kastle is a chaotic "modular" system with two of Atmel's tiniest, weakest chips in each unit, & little wires instead of plug cables. All it does is scream. This musician has cross-wired three of these to make a wonderfully amusical sequence of moaning bleeps interrupting each other. It has its own internal machine logic. Your human brain can't make sense of it. Just float in it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRjsYsw22gM

What I'm listening to today: "【Moog DFAM Jam】", Sakai Meno

Noisy, scrungly fast industrial beats on some modular equipment. There's a slower, spread-out elbow-room version of this track on the same YouTube channel (id MT13WMugmmA) but I like this compact 2-minute version. It sounds very determined.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyZe3xc267I

What I'm listening to today: "So close", Floppi

This is a soft, seductive DOS tracker track. It appears to use one single sample, so it's basically like a 2 minute electric piano solo, if the electric piano had infinite sustain. Sometimes with tracker tunes I can find a *little* history, but all I find googling is a forum post claiming the track was first released in 1997; and that the author is Finnish, and died in 2022.

Scenestream tags: "Calm keygen" "Sad sinewave"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzOmJ__yI84

What I'm listening to today: "The River - 3 guitar ambient jam with drones and synths in the forest w/Sam Bell and Pete Ferguson"

The YouTube channel "drone-in-the-woods" is truth in naming. This is some gentle ambient post-rock and it is, indeed, performed live in the woods by three guitarists. I'm not usually one for "happy music" but I dig this. It's like if Godspeed You Black Emperor had worked their issues out and got real into Boards of Canada.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pFB2cicKoE

What I'm listening to today: "Musica Ricercata no.7", György Ligeti as performed by Grégoire Blanc

This is from a set of twelve piano pieces composed in 1953 by Hungarian composer György Ligeti, as arranged for analog synthesizer and dual theremins in December 2023 by Blanc. (The mood is enormous, the future that 1981 promised us.) Ligeti would go on to write the "Monolith music" from 2001. Grégoire Blanc would go on to do his laundry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRQiiPDXTGo

Hard to imagine a signal that a website is a rugpull more intense than banning users for trying to delete their own posts

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt

Like just incredible "burning the future to power the present" energy here

@dosnostalgic oh hype

@dosnostalgic We gotta figure out how to embed a wasm mod/xm player in a web player like Jason Scott does with DOS games

@dosnostalgic oh, ok. the crushiness is actually my favorite thing about it lol

@dosnostalgic @Ertain that'll be phase shift coding tho which is much less interesting to a human ear

@jbo ever since the update where they made the notifications display taller than the status bar I have liked each version less than the one before i

As you may remember from me talking about it once a week, the three things I most want out of a cell phone are

1. RECTANGULAR screen with NO HOLES OR ROUNDED EDGES ON THE DISPLAY CANVAS

2. Big bezel/bevel/whatever it's called so I can hold it without activating the touch screen

3. Headphone jack

I search and search and even for high prices I usually cannot get these things

But the $35 carrier branded temp replacement phone I bought at the Wal-Mart by the airport?

All three