mcc
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"
mcc
@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)?
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Wallfacer"
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.
mcc
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
mcc
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.
mcc
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.
mcc
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.
mcc
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.
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.
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