mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Universal Consciousness", Alice Coltrane
Last week I saw a bumper sticker saying: "Keep Honking! I'm Listening to Alice Coltranes 1971 Meteoric Sensation 'Universal Consciousness'". So I went to look that up—
When you listen to this, one of two things will happen: Either you'll go "uh…okay?", or your consciousness will physically leave your body. When I first listened, for six minutes I was unable to move or think. Free jazz psychic attack
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Soviet RITM-2 Synth and Loop Pedal", Slightly Nasty
This is a dark, engrossing soundscape made entirely on the РИТМ-2, a synthesizer produced in 1984 in the Soviet Union and often described as Moog-like. This specific unit has been modified for additional sound body, but the musician insists it was done with vintage germanium transistors— in other words, it's a modification that could have plausibly been done by a user in Russia in the 80s.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Chino", Madlib
This track, also from 2021, is two minutes long and like some sort of platonic form of effortless cool; there's something primal in its funky simplicity. Other than the professional snap on the EQ it feels like literally anytime in the last 80 years you could imagine there's a room in the world you could walk into and there'd be a piano, and people clapping, and you'd hear exactly this sound. There is rhythm, and also blues
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "20231231 145", sv1
Max/MSP is a open-ended music tool, a commercial fork of PureData. It lets you fine-control every element of making a song, from sound design to mixing, using a visual programming language or by building your own UIs.
For this artist's last album, he YouTubed himself making the tracks in Max, so you can see the bespoke-UI instrument he built for himself. Skittery beats & seductive alien echo sounds. Kinda Ryoji Ikeda ish
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Destiny+ Entanglement Space 4xDSP with Czochralski Cells and Prism Circuits panels", James Plotkin
An exercise in bizarre sound design on two of Destiny+'s strange, extremely large (Plotkin can't fit them both in frame) synth units, this is made of big swoopy kick drum sounds that fall so slowly they cross the border and become bass notes. I'm… not sure if you're going to love how this sounds or it will just really annoy you. One of the two
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "I LEARNED THIS BEAT IN CUBA.... THEN ADDED SOME DISTORTION 😊", Max Sansalone
Waveforms do weird things when you clip or distort them. Harmonics burst into being, pitches mysteriously double.
In this track, a drummer performing alone alternates rhythmic sections with sections where he hits the stompbox and suddenly his drumkit bursts into melody as every sound transforms. Cool demonstration, nice drumline, stands well on its own as a song.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Odd Numbers", Shiro Fujioka
This one's something really special. This is an extended, mercurial electronic composition in the alien time signature of 7/8, made of haunting glass-harp feedback hums and IDM breakbeats. Nothing going on here is anything you could remotely predict, but in retrospect it feels like the only way it could have gone. Made/performed on Elektron gear.
Warning: The first ten seconds contain a sharp clicking noise.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Do You Miss Boards of Canada Too? I Made This In 15 Minutes.", Dan Chippendale
A peppy mix of analog synth and clicky woodblock beats. Grows into a really nice energy. I do see the comparison to Boards of Canada but it's kinda doing its own thing.
Made on Elektron's digital synth box; Teenage Engineering's new super-Pocket-Operator; and the blur in the background is a Prophet.
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.
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