mcc
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
mcc
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.
mcc
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.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Grone - 2nd Exploration", Somnambule
One day in high school, my friend Joe AIMed my friend JZ: "Say the first thing that comes into your mind. No thinking."
"Grone is coming now", JZ replied, then recoiled in horror. JZ feared he'd freed Grone from the collective subconscious with his careless words.
Then in 2020 Maneco Labs released "Grone", a synth module from which an ominous face stares. Is that Grone? Is he here? How long do we have?
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Atari", HyphenPixel
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:
mcc
What I'm listening to: "Bipp", SOPHIE
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.
mcc
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.
mcc
What I'm listening today: "Z-ZONE", BeaT
This is a tracker .mod file based around some Neo Geo-feeling FM bass samples. I don't know for a fact when this was recorded but it was uploaded to themodarchive in 2007. The kind of music you'd hear early in a video game where you are rescuing your girlfriend, presumably from some sort of crime lord. Low-key but has a good feeling to it, I like the early-hip-hop drums. Allow yourself to be filled with the spirit of the 1980s
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Prophecy" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
SoM has multiple "airship" themes and this is the final one, when you enter the endgame, the sky is darkened and the Earth itself has changed. It is *super* dramatic. Again amazing use of the sample synth, in its context it really doesn't sound like something a Super Nintendo should be capable of.
(Missing from this recording: The crackles of thunder indicating the movements of the Mana Fortress.)
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Ceremony" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
One of the places Kikuta brings traditional Asian music forms into his game work and one of my favorite pieces of video game music ever, this chaotic gamelan fugue plays as our heroes descend into the nightmarish inner sanctum of a sinister cult. The low-res samples really sell the feeling here; it makes me imagine music playing from an old, crackly loudspeaker bolted to the side of a public shrine.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Mystic Invasion" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
So in the first mana temple the peaceful-if-spooky "Whisper and Mantra" plays. Then you reach the second mana temple, which has been overrun by surreal monsters, and this dark, fusion-jazz variation on the temple theme plays instead.
Secret of Mana has kind of a nothing plot but it's really emotionally memorable!— In part because the soundtrack does so much of the heavy narrative lifting.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Whisper and Mantra" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
I've mentioned before the SNES sound chip was a beast. Secret of Mana uses that chip to the fullest, leveraging its strengths *and* weaknesses. Consider this song that plays in mana temples, how the vocal sample starts & stops so abruptly. Technically that's a limitation of sample synthesizers but it feels right— "diegetic", like inhuman, supernatural voices are leaking from another world.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "I Don't Give A Fuck", DJ Rashad
DJ Rashad was a wildly inventive instrumental hip-hop producer working in a Chicago-local microgenre ("Footwork") he himself co-created; his stuff sounds kind of like trap music from another universe (the universe is Chicago). This song, from an album released one year before Rashad died, is an unpredictable, unsettling, avant-garde descent into darkness. It goes real hard.
This recording contains Cuss Words
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Havoc" title screen theme
"Havoc" was a 3D "tank game" (anyone whose parents wouldn't let them play FPSes will recognize this phrase) from the 90s that history has entirely forgotten. There were two things of note about it: One, it was one of *very* few games to ever support Apple's "QuickDraw 3D" hardware acceleration API; two, its title screen theme was a techno banger entirely beyond all reason. This song is a secret treasure, to me.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Pish", The Brian Jonestown Massacre
The Brian Jonestown Massacre can probably be described as the less commercial Dandy Warhols, and are one of a few modern-ish bands, along with the Warhols and I guess the Beta Band, who decided there was something worth resurrecting in that pre-prog rock era I'd call "psychadelic" for lack of a better word. They released this dreamy, echo-drenched song in 2015 and I think it just feels great to swim in.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "The Porpoise Song", The Monkees
It's 1968. The actors who play the Monkees are tired of being actors. They want to record their own music, be taken seriously. So they make "Head", a surreal movie with songs by Carole King (!) a script by Jack Nicholson (‽) and a plot about the fictional Monkees struggling to become real. The movie doesn't… seem very good, but the songs are lush and gorgeous. An overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Bushmills", Yppah
From 2015, this is a banging, echoey jam by psychedelic electronica musician Yppah, mixing drums from the DJ Shadow school of hip hop with rock guitars. It's got a really good clean feeling to it and a flowing structure that slips away from you when your mind tries to get a grip on it. The feeling is not so much nostalgic as just remembering what it was to live in a time when it still seemed like there was a future
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Sommarhack 2024 Invitro", 505 & mOdmate
"Sommarhack" is an Atari demoscene party happening next year in Sweden. The event announcement came itself in the form of a short Atari ST demo, which you can find on YouTube under the name "300 Days to Go". The demo incorporated this original track, made in maxYMiser music (that's the tracker made by gwEm). It's effortlessly funky, and has absolutely the filthiest chiptune bassline I have ever heard.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Anemone", The Brian Jonestown Massacre
This is a slow jam from the BJM's second album in 1996 and probably the closest thing the band has to a breakout hit. Lovely chill feelings, tambourines and bongos and one single held sustained organ note.
Anthony Bourdain once said in an interview that this was his favorite song; there's an episode of "Parts Unknown" that is just Anton Newcombe, BJM's front guy, doing home cooking for Bourdain.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Gumball Machine Weekend", Yppah
This is another Yppah song, this one from 2009, with sugary tv-commercial xylophones and grooving rock guitars. I really "dig" the bassline here (I would describe it as "hip").
I cannot actually identify what element of the presentation here causes me to mentally classify this as "electronica" or "hip-hop" instead of just being an instrumental rock song, but it's there somehow.
https://yppahmusic.bandcamp.com/track/gumball-machine-weekend-1
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