mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Extent", Abre Ojos
From a live set performed somewhere in New South Wales. Crashing waves of static over a lovely burbling ocean of indistinct echoes, and a creepy pounding heartbeat of a beat. Made on a packed table of modular gear connected by an absolute spaghetti mess of wires (I guess there's a VHIKK in there somewhere?), all obscured by the video's (pretty good) psychedelic visuals. The artist describes this as "drone doom ambient".
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "manecolabs eurorack system experimental", Maneco Labs
Chill lo-fi noise to relax/astral project to, this is somebody from the company that made the "Grone" synth module making a track that's about halfway between trip-hop and an FM radio wedged in the static between two stations. It's got a really good vibe to it as long as (as previously mentioned) you are indifferent as to whether or not your soul remains tethered to your body.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Detroit Techno 100% Vinyl Mix", Gregor Soundhome
This is that vintage mm tss mm tss old-style techno, mixed on a vinyl deck in 2014 and containing a lot of music from the 2010s but with that kind of amorphous, timeless quality that could've been recorded anytime in the last 40 years. This mix is two hours long (!), and the account has dozens of multi-hour mixes like this. "Detroit" is an ocean. Leave this on the background, and swim a while
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "WARP CORE", Infrasonic Audio
This person designed a eurorack module based on the "phase distortion" technique used by the Casio CZ, and then made this video to demonstrate it. And the demo track is really good! Classic acid-tinged techno with some hype 808y drums. All the synth sounds are coming from the Warp Core; if you pay close attention the melody is syncopated slightly so it doesn't ever have to play at the same time as the bass.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Purchaser", Fat Warrior
A really fun vintage ProTracker .mod file from 1993. Dancey with some really great sounds and focused on rapidly switching between different timbres (The Mod Archive documents some text from inside the .mod file and the author implies it was made out of leftover samples from other projects). I think this might be "Complextro". I'm not sure. I've spent the last decade+ trying to avoid finding out what "Complextro" is.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Machinedrum Analog Heat +FX Session | No Talking", Shiro Fujioka
A medley of fun IDM beats on the machinedrum (precursor to SOPHIE's beloved monomachine). I think this is supposed to be a series of first drafts for the artist's hip-hop production work, and it's easy to imagine the songs these seeds would grow into. But also laid out like this the beats seem mostly to flow together, like one long track with dramatic pauses between verses.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "A Bell is Tolling", Christopher Hernacki (orig Hiroki Kikuta)
In this video, a guy* multitracks himself a whole bunch of times to perform the "Ice Palace" music from Secret of Mana on trombones and tubas. While closely following the original score he slowly veers from soft melancholy to 70s movie-theme funk and just basically all the feelings in this arrangement are real good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzNg16we74g
* Okay, a professional concert trombonist and college professor
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Secret of Mana +"
In 1993 Hiroki Kikuta, composer of Secret of Mana and its Japan-only sequel Seiken Densetsu 3 released a single-track CD containing a fluid, album-length rearrangement of music selections from those two games, featuring stadium rock, acoustic versions transposed into classical Japanese tunings, and ambient sounds seemingly recorded around Kikuta's home. If you like these game scores, this is *definitely* worth a listen.
mcc
Note: Because nobody can really stop me, for the next week in place of my usual "listening to" thread I am going to be one-song-per-day posting a YouTube mixtape I made in 2020, titled "In The Future It Is The 1960s". ( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLIjft6ja7DP31gmCfPqxQO-I67dp_uza )
The concept of this playlist is a mix of songs from the 1960s that sound like they are from many decades later, and songs from the present that sound like they could have been recorded in the 1960s.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Prophecy", Julien Jacquart (orig. Hiroki Kikuta)
Ahh, *there's* the Flammie intro.
This is an arrangement of "Prophecy" (from Secret of Mana) by a French gamedev and progressive-metal guitarist, performed on guitar and piano. It's charmingly homemade in places but does a great job of capturing the enormous, epic feel that the original, for all of its mastery of the SNES S-SMP chip, strained to capture in its 64 KB of sample memory.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Minimoog and Rhodes Chillout Track", Kurti
In this charmingly guileless video a dude smiles at the camera and then proceeds to perform a song which is pure distilled 1985. Simultaneous solos on a minimoog and a gorgeous-sounding Rhodes electric piano (not a synth), with rhythm provided by an actual one-piece Macintosh Plus DAW hooked up to some MIDI modules. It's at times like this I understand why people liked "smooth jazz".
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Ventlaris", Ceephax Acid Crew
Ceephax is (in real life) Squarepusher's little brother. Last night he posted on YouTube this 26-minute live techno performance that apparently shows up in edited form on one of his albums. The jam is accompanied by a lovely video that appears to have been created on an Amiga Video Toaster. He's making basically the same music he's been making since the 90s, but now it's retro which means it sounds futuristic.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Mixtur Trautonium (exercise #4)" LudoWic
The Trautonium is an early electronic instrument from the 1930s. Instead of a "keyboard" like a post-1965 synthesizer would use players make contact between a resistive wire and a metal plate, allowing fine control more akin to a violin than a piano. In this piece, the musician works the plate (and the pedals?) for a complex and stunning tremolo effect, like a guitar pedal under direct human control.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Distances", Fontaine Burnett
Mr. Burnett is a session musician; he's performed with Chaka Khan, the Temptations, the Weather Girls and a dozen other artists, meaning millions have heard him play without ever learning his name. During early COVID he started uploading home performances to YouTube, among them this absolutely lovely jazz piano solo on Roger Linn's "isomorphic" MIDI controller (a piano splattered onto a grid). Watch the fingers.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Mixtur Trautonium (exercise #11)", LudoWic
I linked one of LudoWic's Trautonium pieces on Wednesday; here's a more complex one, probably the most complex of these "exercises" he's uploaded, with a soothing, rhythmic clicking (which I can't even figure out where it's coming from) providing percussion. Watch during the little violin-like pitch vibratos throughout; that's not an instrument "effect", he's wiggling his finger on the touch plate.
mcc
What I listened to today: "The industries of the unused mind.", Soaring Tortoise Orchestra
In this video a man in a basement appears to be mastering an ambient track on tape, tweaking the mixing board. But if you watch carefully he's actually just picking up various objects on his desk and staring at them as if he does not recognize them. What is happening here? The music is cryptic, striding a line between epic and creepy, like a guitar solo is being haunted by ghosts.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Concept 1 96:01 01:00", Richie Hawtin
Under the name "Plastikman", Hawtin achieved fame as a "minimalist composer" who repurposed dance-techno techniques to sculpt stark sound landscapes. This bumping downtempo is from a previously *very* rare, self-published one-track-a-month limited-vinyl series he did while developing the sound of the Plastikman "trilogy"; now it's on Bandcamp.
Hawtin says he recorded this track on January 1, 1996.
https://richiehawtin.bandcamp.com/track/richie-hawtin-concept-1-96-01-01-00
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Mixtur Trautonium (exercise #6)", LudoWic
One last Trautonium piece, this one run through two (!) Space Echos and demonstrating one of the most interesting things to me about the device, that it's capable of Theremin-like trembles and slides but unlike Theremins can do hard edges and discrete jumps. Again, like an electronic violin.
Short and low and has a captivating, melancholy emotion, this just really grabs your heartstrings and yanks.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Dirtknock", Madlib
Madlib is the hip-hop instrumentalist who provides the voice of Lord Quasimodo and the beats on MF Doom's MADVILLAIN. His deal is pretty much "he samples jazz, but like, in a different way than other people do it". Here's a lovely snack of a track from 2021, with various lounge vibes jostling against each other, starting and stopping like thoughts in a distracted mind. I think this is what "Jigsaw Jazz" was supposed to be
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Get Your Snack On", Amon Tobin
Consider pre-"ISAM" Amon Tobin, who was on something incredibly unique. No one else has ever thought about drums the way Tobin did during those years. Back then we lumped him in with "drum & bass", but he didn't follow any of D&B's rules. He built something new from sampling the already frenetic energy of jazz drumming and somehow doubling it.
Here's my favorite track from that era. It plays like a manifesto.
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