Notices by mcc (mcc@mastodon.social), page 9

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8whTAkkBv6U

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.

https://packstheband.bandcamp.com/track/abalone

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzXkea6gmPY

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWy3g9J6a78

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKhUB7baGoU

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".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7bc4CAW6Fs

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!

https://boris.bandcamp.com/track/not-surprised

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHmkErVcDdc

What I'm listening to today: "Rossum Panharmonium + Instruo Lubadh + Plaits + Rings", Sascha Neudeck

This is an intense, fascinating ambient journey through a series of sounds and textures, with sparky serrated-edge waves cycling in and out of your perception. Intermittent scrolling subtitles at the bottom of the video explain, in an entirely unhelpful level of detail, how the modular patch driving the track was created.

Stereo or headphones recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej0NGboMlPw

What I'm listening to today: "MESS MOOG SYSTEM 55 WAVEFORM", Christian Hogue

Five minutes of sinewaves composed on the legendary and extremely rare Moog 1973 modular analog system, illustrated on an analog oscilloscope. Starts with a simple line of tones and evolves into menacing, increasingly overdriven multipart antiharmony. Makes a really intense mood. Warning, parts are a bit high pitched.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJLIXJu30GQ

What I'm listening to today: "live @ Red Ink, Providence 5/6/23", Cryptwarblr

If I told you to trust me— would you take my hand and take a step with me off the edge, into the abyss? This is what I now ask of you. This is a ten-minute performance on a card table at a leftist community bookstore. The noises here alternate quiet and violence— sharp, intense, unpredictable. There's a structure to it, I think. There's a meaning in here somewhere. I can't see it but I feel it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eyr363zg_70

What I'm listening to today: "found a hatch", riueru

This one's simple but strange, a randomly lurching tourgroup of synth lines driven by a randomness source and an irrationally-phased LFO. It starts suddenly and cuts off suddenly and in between shows a thoughtful, incredibly human degree of subtlety and emotional variation. But there's no human in the loop. It's beautiful and a little unsettling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Dv--lI3z0

What I'm listening to today: "Cruel like Flint", Amon Tobin

So after "Foley Room", drum&bass-adjacent jazz god Amon Tobin went in a *very* odd direction, focusing on complex live shows and ever-more-fine-tuned monophonic sounds. His newer stuff's pretty challenging even for me…!

But this one track from a sampler album of the label he founded really does it for me. Mind-expanding timbres and a quirky rhythm, a cool mix of his old and new sounds. Like feedback dubstep.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqNAxl1PiVo

What I'm listening to today: "Quick Jam with the Moog Mavis", HeadyBeatShell

This is a fun dance techno duet between a simple analog synth and some complex digital synths. Good robot noises and some really effective production for a desktop jam. The Mavis doesn't have a sequencer hooked up so the musician has to play the little toy frontplate keyboard all the way through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PNdt_zG6lM

What I'm listening to today: "Luxe", Holy F*** + Alexis Taylor

This is one of my most-listened tracks on Tidal; I think of it as a pandemic classic. It's Rapture-y synthrock, one of those songs that lays out a series of elements then lets them all converge at once like a magic eye becoming an image.

There's a ("Mea Culpa" inspired?) music video that comes close to meeting the song's surging energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6gP4IijTCM but warning, flashing. Or listen on Bandcamp:

https://holyfuck.bandcamp.com/track/luxe-ft-alexis-taylor

What I'm listening to today: "Gaia floating in me", Cube

80s samplers had limited resolution— 12 bit DACs, limited sample memory. Early hip hop leaned into this, finding low sample rates gave drums a pleasant crunchy feel. This 2008 MS-DOS tracker jam makes great use of similar limitations, especially at the start where the resolution goes so low it's like a bitcrush effect. Actually, this entire track is incredibly sick. It sounds like a rave in Donkey Kong Country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzRuea5ViEk

What I'm listening to today: "Tangie 1hr+ improvised modular techno (live)", Tangie

An unseen person with a modular rack and an octotrack delivering a good 80 minutes of driving, industrial-flavored rave techno. The sound design is consistently full of pleasant surprises and I'm not sure how they keep the energy level up this long while improvising but they somehow do. I would describe this set as "hott" with two Ts. Hott like homotopy type theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8TKE1xk84

What I'm listening to today: "Dirge", Tragic Laurel

https://tragiclaurel.bandcamp.com/track/dirge

I get a lot of these synth videos I post from Reddit /r/synthesizers, which went down last week for the Reddit protests. At the start of the strike the community (or part of it) started a treehouse Lemmy instance named https://waveform.social; this was the first piece of music posted there, last Monday. Nice little jam! Spooky drunk-feeling vaporwave with slow quirky beats. I didn't post it then but I'm posting it now.

What I'm listening to today: "pikocore", infinitedigits

This is a very short drum & bass / breakcore freakout performed on the most minimal hardware available: a tiny shield/hat for the Raspberry Pi Pico with four buttons and four potentiometer knobs. (The device, an "open hardware" sample mangler apparently created and sold by the musician/YouTuber, is linked in the YouTube description.) Goes hard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB3kc5KxCLs

What I'm listening to today: "Vallentin Rd", kirkis

While trying to learn more about "Czochralski Cells" I found this artist's baffling YouTube page, which hosts:

- All the official videos for the "Destiny+" handmade synthesizer company
- Several breakcore albums
- A standalone video for this one terrifying moth song, with no information attached except a URL shortener link which currently appears to be redirecting to malware.

The song is a Tiger Electronics onslaught

https://kirkismoded.bandcamp.com/track/vallentin-rd