I like limiting animations, but the reason I HAVE to disable animations is the grotesque, nauseating full screen overscroll animation in Android where everything stretches oddy. So now it's like they give me a Pavlovian punishment for doing that. Periodic bright flashes in my eyes. I'd consider this frustrating but acceptable if this happened because I used the "Developer" reduce animation options, which naturally aren't QAed, but it happens with the builtin accessibility "reduce animation" too!
It may be that after all the many gross indignities I have solemnly endured at the hands of Google, Android 13 is the thing that finally drives me to build my own rom.
The full screen flicker is enough by itself, and on top of that, the thing where it displays a mandatory popup you must swipe to clear every time you copy anything is *really* bad. I thought it was gonna be bad and it really was
Are these modern scene arrangements or were people rearranging this stuff for PC sound cards at the time? (Though I guess 97 is new enough for people to have 44.1k PCM systems.)
What I'm listening to today: "Funky Stars", Quazar
This is a poppy eurodance DOS tracker tune from 1997. Feels good, slick production, moody 80s/early 90s feel.
After 2000 the artist behind this .xm went on to have a conventional career as a producer, making club techno remixes for a bunch of hip hop artists plus Madonna under the name "Axwell", then cofounding Swedish House Mafia ("Don't You Worry Child").
This track is listed on some mod archives as "Hybrid Song".
What I'm listening to today: "Zularic Repetitor's best friend Befaco Percall Modular Techno Jam featuring Kickall & Noise Plethora", tiimoik
This is a 20 minute industrial techno performance with a really good chilled (distinct from chill) feeling to it. The rhythm is alive and constantly evolving throughout— the "repetitor" applies an algorithmic form of African music theory.
(The video confuses me—it appears to be a 4-second loop of just one part of the performance.)
What I'm listening to today: "Edelleen ja edelleen", Sleepers Tomb
Quiet, insistent drone ambient track. You're asleep, your phone's alarm keeps pushing at the barrier from some other world trying to break through and drag you out, but it's not working. A piece built up slowly on a modular suitcase that splays the track's internal process open to view like something on a dissection table. Good mood. I think the name is Finnish for "On and On"
@dosnostalgic When I started searching for it to learn more about the author I found a lot of people saying similar. Can you shed any light on what the actual name of this track is (or if it just doesn't have a specific single name)?
Vladislav Delay has been making distinctive, often cryptic glitch-adjacent electronic music since the late 90s, and is considered one of the foundational artists of dub techno. He's now releasing lots of rapid-fire EPs on a Bandcamp subscription plan. This is from this year and feels dub-like in spirit (if not in stereotypical elements), beats and isolated abstract noises floating in dark space. A zen rock garden made of sounds.
What I'm listening to today: "Comfortably Heavy", Travis Benjamin Simpson
I've featured the Lyra-8 in this thread repeatedly, but usually in aleatoric ("noise") compositions where they're just generating general drones. This musician meanwhile uses two Lyra-8s, whom he calls "The Girls", in this slow but meticulously composed piece where he plays the Lyras like strange, slow-motion pianos. It's intense and moody, ponderous, tones and pendulums and long decaying release
What I'm listening to today: "11/7/23 'Blueberry 5200'? 'Smurf'? (2x Behringer ARP 2600 clones) + Mackie Mix12FX (02: Small Room)", Cfpp0
The ARP 2600 mega-synth is most famous not for music at all, but for *sound effects*; it's the machine that provides the voice of R2D2.
This track, made on *two* unauthorized 2600 clones, is itself practically more sound effects than music; it's a meditative, hypnotic sequence of sweeps, like AC waves breaking on an electronic shore.
What I'm listening to today: "Killed By A Feedback", Dynamo
This is another track from the (Fact Magazine) "25 best dub techno tracks of all time" list I found. It's from 1996, and it's weird: The parts of a techno song as if heard from deep underwater, gradually building steam. There's a point where it flips over from confusing and abstract to extremely danceable and both sides of that flip are fun, in their way.
What I'm listening to today: "Illusory Walls", Cobra Truth
This YouTuber makes some traditional-standards dub techno with some interesting modern equipment: The Make Noise trio of noisy synths, a 303 clone, and the Digitakt drum machine (probably driving the Make Noise). Okay, so 2/3 modern. This takes a minute to get going but then it jams pretty hard, really nice bright and clean production. PS: No, the MS-20 visible in the background isn't actually used in the track.
What I'm listening to today: "Starlight", Model 500 (Moritz remix)
My posts this week in this thread wound up with a dub techno theme, so I thought for Friday I should listen to some dub techno classics and pick a really epic track to post on Friday. What I then realized is that dub techno doesn't really do "epic". "Satisfying" or "chill" is more its speed. So here's a seminal dub track from 1995 that is just really intensely satisfying. A tiny understated funk groove.
What I'm listening to today: "Machines talk about swimming - Lifeforms Sv-1 + Digitakt + Analog Four + TB03 electro rhythms", Bad_Mix
I could spend 400 chars abstractly describing the timbres of this track or I could just say "Do you like Aphex Twin? This sounds like Aphex Twin". No, that's not really fair. This is a really creative piece that feels like it starts with the vibe of very early Warp Records and flies off on some other elevated trajectory. Wonderful flavors
What I'm listening to today: "Blizno / Cinematic video nature / Elektron Analog Four MK II / Ambient Drone", Mutant Manfred
Anybody like Boards of Canada? This is a piece on one of Elektron's more advanced devices, with indistinct, wavering synths and an absolutely killer vibe. It starts off in the standard drone "one loud, very sculpted note" mode but then melody gradually takes shape from the noise, like the sun consuming a horizon. This sounds the way VHS looks.
What I'm listening to today: "Drone Music With DIY Analog Synthesizer (Hana Synth)", Jeanie
Jeanie is really unique among synth YouTubers, using her collection of (actually pretty weird) modular equipment to make polished, Kraftwerky pop music incorporating her own vocals. Here she demos an ambient noise box she designed & sells herself, singing her own backup for a short atmosphere piece I'd describe as "Yoga class music but more epic". I kinda wish it were 4x as long.
Several things define "chiptune"; an underrated one is the channel restriction. Which this track bypasses by being made on… 2 Atari POKEY chips, a configuration easy to set up in modern trackers but historically meaningless. The only way to play this song on period hardware would be to MIDI-sync two Atari 800s and have them play a duet.
A neat, melancholy glimpse at an underexplored part of musical configuration space:
SOPHIE was a beloved, influential hyperpop artist known for her delirious production and her obsession with creating entire tracks on the Elektron monomachine (which, as the name suggests, can only make one sound at a time). I'm kind of basic for "Bipp" being my favorite SOPHIE track but it just feels so wonderful. Loving 80s pop with too much candy and an entirely alien backing track that sounds normal until you concentrate on it.
What I'm listening to today: "Unreal SuperHero 3", Kenet and Rez (Game Boy conversion by Kabcorp)
Unreal Superhero 3 was a classic tracker tune from 2001 that, I'm told, gained infamy after being used in some mid-00s keygen cracktros. The original Windows version was trying to simulate a chiptune feel, so it only makes sense that recreating it for the actual Game Boy sound chip, as this YouTuber did in 2018, improves the sound considerably. A nice little bop here.