mcc
What I'm listening to today: "No-input mixer minimal techno", closedcircuits
You think of mixers as passive, but feedback through a bandpass filter can make tones. This leads to the idea of the "no input mixing board", most famously explored in a series of excellent ambient albums by Toshimaru Nakamura. This artist takes the idea one step further by using the technique for *rhythm*, cross-wiring two mixers into a funky drum machine in this quiet but rocking dance track.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Magritte's Dream", Yusuke Shirakawa
Music concrète on a desktop, this piece is made with tape loops and scavenged-looking cassette equipment (including one literal loop of magnetic tape which appears to have no "cassette" attached). With one four-track tape and one mono, the artist has five faders that (in a performance with no instruments) they can play like an instrument to create peaceful and only slightly creeptastic ambiance.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Battle Against Belch", Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka (Nintendo)
Earthbound is the game that famously managed to permanently change how every millennial video game hipster thinks about games, without being what Nintendo would consider a financial success. This dark jazz track from the equally influential soundtrack stitches a series of samples and ~leitmotifs~ which appear before and after it in the game, together with a grinding bass.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Flowing Water"
This is a piece of classical Chinese music, whose score was first written down around 1350 CE, though according to various sources on Google it existed in some form as far back as 500 BCE (and according to the YouTube summary here the most recent "paragraph" was added around 1850 CE). Here it's performed on the guqin with a devastating gentleness, each of the five(?) sections keeping a distinct and sharp emotional tenor.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Time Eater", Gold Panda (Ssighborggg and Luna re-cover)
Gold Panda is an electronic musician I'm fond of, one of those sample-oriented hip-hop-sorta artists on the Bonobo/Blockhead model. This is one of Gold Panda's better songs being performed, with samples replaced by a live-instruments arrangement, by an American/Korean math-rock group and a traditional Korean gayageum player. I would describe the effect as "rocking".
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Modular Notes 88 - ER301 Study I", mafmadmaf
This is a skewed-feeling but very carefully composed collection of beeps and tones over about six minutes. Not sure how to describe it. It speaks for itself.
One interesting thing about this composition is it's made on modular, but each of the four individual modules is digital and two are general-purpose computer modules. The modular rack here exists to be a tactile interface for software.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Puppygirl Forever", minasheep (Jami Lynne remix)
This is "breakcore" (is this breakcore? I think it is breakcore), cheerful happy hardcore pop, but in this remix it's going just a little too hard, the accelerator's pushed just a little too much, giddy until it gets a sort of a sinister edge, like a upbeat sugar high gone just a little too far, like… okay I guess like a puppy girl that's just a little too excited. I was trying not to say it
https://minasheep.bandcamp.com/track/puppygirl-forever-lynnedrum-puppydog-without-u-mix
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Live Tribe Tekno 147bpm with Eowave Quadrantid Swarm and more Hardware!", dReadSolJah
This is a 70-minute live set of industrial-y rave techno, based on a mix of live synthesizers (with the Swarm at the center) and pre-recorded Ableton loops. A couple different days now I've listened to this while working and both times I could not tell you what happened during that hour, I just entered this totally hypnotized trance state.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "∆°S-P-3-C-1-3-S_U-N-K-N-0-W-N°∆", Th3Pock3tOp3rat0r
One for the "doing the most with the least" category, this is Teenage Engineering's cheap toy sampler/drum machine run into Korg's cheap toy echo unit. The sound here is huge, the PO-33 is pushed to the limit of its sequencing abilities and the track is hard and driving, electro rock with a touch of 80s feel. Imagine a 00s metroidvania that the only reason you remember it is this one song.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "System Jam #3", Edd Butterworth
A lot of the live synth performance videos on YouTube are either posted by, or made possible by gear donations by, the companies that make the synth equipment, as semi-covert ads. The good news is instead of buying the equipment you can just watch the videos. This video was posted by ALM/Busy Circuits to show off their eurorack line but by itself it's a funky weird-noises rave with captivatingly screwy beats.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Modular Synth Triggered by Drum", Djo HxC
This track pairs a sick modular-synthesizer Cool Noise with the trick (there were a couple of these in my last thread) where a drum is rigged to fire a trigger on the eurorack, playing a note keyed to the synth's current pattern. So the drummer is kind of playing drums and bass synth at once. And then: *drum solo*. This is kind of short and it doesn't really go anywhere, but it's fun while it lasts.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Pop 6", Gas
This is some jangling, indistinct ambient. Sometimes it is good to listen to one meticulously-crafted sound for ten minutes. There's a bit of variation to keep things interesting but mostly this is just sort of like an atmospheric soundtrack to your life, assuming that the thing happening in your life right now is at least somewhat ominous.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Heavy Balloon", Fiona Apple
"Fetch the Boltcutters" was released 1 month into COVID. Ah!, we all went. How resonant! Everyone in lockdown can relate to this! Nobody noticed the fridge horror. She released it at the *start* of lockdown. So *before COVID started* Fiona had *already been holed up inside*, for however long, teaching herself the drums & stewing about ex-boyfriends.
Anyway here's a funk song about being depressed but also angry
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Abalone", PACKS
This is a fun, messy indie rock jam from 2022. I actually don't know much about this band! Wikipedia says they're from Toronto? The album cover has a feeling of old family vacation photos.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "He Turns Down", Cat Power
Cat Power was the queen of the 90s/00s indie/lo-fi folk-rock set. This is the song that best embodies her off-kilter style; everything feels like Take One, feels a little unstable, like the song is about to topple over and take you with it. What sticks with me here is the flute accompaniment, doing something seemingly totally unrelated to the rest of the song. I don't know what that flute means. It seems important.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Distorted Ambience - Lyra-8 / Strega Into Modular FX", Brodie Peterson
Built from two synthesizers which can both be described as "a simple tone generator bolted to a powerful drone echo", this is a sublime symphony of metal sounds, clanking and banging and grinding howls, "Industrial" in a very literal sense. I like how the synthesized moans punctuating the backing sound eventually line up in surprising melody, like a slowed-down pop song.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "verZion", Syphus
A mod tracker has a finite number of sample channels, and each is monophonic. So if you want sounds with long tails, like piano notes, you have to do tricks like alternating notes in different channels so each sound completes before the next one starts. Sometimes this gives tracker music, when viewed *in* the tracker, a fascinating two-dimensional ascii art structure, like the long diagonal chains in this banger of a song.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "far up close (live improv ambient)",
TRDRT
9 minutes of calm background-music echo shimmers and synth sparks from a modular rack (with some good stickers). The note patterns were composed in realtime on a Synthstrom Deluge, by alternately adjusting patterns on the grid view and playing notes in the isometric keyboard mode. The title calls it ambient but this is a highly structured piece. If this was made in the 90s we'd call it "New Age".
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Not Surprised", Boris and Uniform
Normally I'd say much of why I like Boris is they deliver metal without falling into a kind of squawky vocals I don't favor. Here tho they collaborate with an American group to make exactly that sort of metal, and it really works. Herein the genre of death metal is slowed down, disassembled and rebuilt wrong in a splayed-out open-skeleton structure. It reminds me of Pink Lemonade. This really did it for me!
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Jamuary 02 2022", Waveformer
A virtuoso synth performance, leading you through a series of sounds and moods. Recorded live on the standard low-end setup of a Microfreak and three separate echo pedals, it's dark and expressive. If this had been recorded in 1990 it would have been distributed accompanied by a video of a long CGI tunnel like at the end of "2001", or maybe a slowed-down VHS of a handcam walking unsteadily through some woods.
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