mcc

mcc OP , 9 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "zxy", Kiyomi Tadagumi

A 60-second chiptune onslaught made by virtually overclocking the NES's 2A03 sound chip to unlock new powers. Every six seconds appears to show off a different "impossible" synthesis technique. Super cool, but frustrating!— it's incredible as flexing, but since no musical phrase repeats it can do little as "music", even though the fragments show potential to be great. I wish for a longer version with a "song structure"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hgWYNP5Dmk

mcc OP , 9 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Performance 065", Stereo Pig

This is a short, focused bedroom modular jam with dirty, way-overdriven distorted industrial beats and a good buzzing groove. Made with a couple of my favorite noise machines (the SOMA Pulsar and Lyra) and a light show made of LEDs controlled directly by the modular equipment (so warning, the video does have flashing). A good piece to play in your warehouse hideout when the rival gang shows up on hoverbikes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cufyyLHsrY

mcc OP , 9 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Kachina 🦄", Dochness

This would be a "lo-fi beat to study to" except for the incredibly heavy dubstep-esque synthline bearing down on you, so I guess this is a lo-fi beat to be incredibly nervous to. I think the unicorn emoji is part of the song title.

Performed live on two cheapish desktop synths (Korg's sample-based drum machine, and Roland's SH-1 emulation). It's always nice to me to see enormous sounds coming from budget gear.

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

mcc OP , 9 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Simple Stuff", Loraine James

So as far as I can tell the deal with Loraine James is that while I was in college listening to IDM music, she was a teen listening to the same music and thinking "there should be music that sounds like this, but it's laid back R&B". Then she grew up and made it.

This track… isn't IDM exactly, or R&B, it's a forest of dense, unpredictable, looming beats with Loraine cooing on top through increasing distortion.

https://lorainejames.bandcamp.com/track/simple-stuff

mcc OP , 9 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "I Cannot See Them", Hitchcock Guillotine

A mix of drums and feedbacky synths through an overdrive filter, one for anyone who believes there is a venn diagram intersection between "harsh noise" and "ambient". Quiet tribal-style drums and a big wet plodding heartbeat of a kick, like the song is keeping time for a march into a sinister Zdzisław Beksiński landscape. One of those loud things that sounds better if you turn it down slightly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1CUc-yEeW0

mcc OP , 9 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Devil's Advocate", DJ Shadow

DJ Shadow's pre-Endtroducing period was covered very well in major-label rereleases, but this one 🔥 track (an alternate, massively superior version of "High Noon") is actually really hard to get get hold of, I assume because of clearance problems. Alongside ultradense beats, this track weaves a pair of dueling vocal samples designed to appear indistinguishable. Pure music must give birth to orgasm and revolution

https://soundcloud.com/kayschaefer/dj-shadow-devils-advocate

mcc OP , 9 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "DUSG Harmonies", Bleep Bloop

A little abstract synth piece made of an ocean of detuned sawtooths. It's about two minutes long, beatless, and joyfully intense. One of those quiet things that sounds better if you turn it up very loud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5U_l8-QMBw

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Tired of me", Loraine James

So I mentioned a few days ago I've been listening to Loraine James and her stuff is like IDM music as laid-back R&B? Right, so this was what I was thinking of. Dreamy swarm of distorted clicky stutter beats and echoey nonsense keys. I'm not even totally sure I understand what's happening here but I like it

https://lorainejames.bandcamp.com/track/tired-of-me

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "ELOQUENCER // MEDITATIONAL APPROACH 2 // Cwejman QMMF-4 + 4 VCOs", LESINDES

This is a slow, wonderfully minimal aleatoric piece in which a sequencer controlling four synth voices starts off playing all four at once in a repeating chord then, on interference from the musician, starts allowing the four channels to desynchronize from each other, phasing the chord into lovely little chaotic arpeggio patterns. "Ambient" or maybe just Krautrock.

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

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Petrified Wood"

Eyvind Kang is a violist and composer who has recorded with artists as diverse as John Zorn, Animal Collective and Sunn O)). This is a minimalist piece from Kang's own compositions in which he lays violas and reverb atop themselves over and over until any ability to identify what "note" is being played is lost, nothing left but a nameless emotion constantly growing in intensity until you feel you will burst

https://airtexture.bandcamp.com/track/petrified-wood

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Dawless 025 - Stuck in a loop", Stöfbug

This is some SPACE MUSIC recorded live on a grid of entry-level Roland & Korg desktop synths. Synth musicians in the 70s-80s made almost this exact music but would have needed an incredibly highend studio to make it sound this clean. Beatless but not quite ambient, intent music for scoring a craft flying silently through space, a childrens' documentary about the water cycle, a sunrise over a racetrack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbpi4kNlzHY

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Stereo Music for Yamaha Disklavier Prototype", Keith Fullerton Whitman

KFW is a composer and former drum&bass jockey with a lot of really amazing work. I've always been captivated by this piece for the Disklavier, which is Yamaha's trademark for a kind of player piano controlled via MIDI. Through some unclear computer-side technique (phasing?) a single chord is broken apart into noisy note clusters and reconstructed into heart-tugging music

https://keithfullertonwhitman.bandcamp.com/track/stereo-music-for-yamaha-disklavier-prototype-electric-guitar-and-computer

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "White Window", Stefan Torto

I've featured Stefan in this thread a couple times already. The constant attributes of his videos are (1) making complex music on unusually simple hardware setups and (2) cat.

This one's gorgeous, lush semi-ambient electronica. It's got a bit of an epic feel, bestowing a cinematic tone on this video of a cat, bathing in muted morning light, completely convinced the human arm next to her is there for her benefit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kRxnSjQ6Hs

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "VHIKK X sound demo 1", Forge TME

A medley of creepy howling drones as the creator of the VHIKK complex oscillator demonstrates playing it by hand. Most eurorack oscillators output one tone and then you run that through effects; this one has feedbacky delay and modulation built in so it outputs a finished sound. Ignore it's a product demo & you have 20 enjoyable minutes as various cool, menacing industrial noises play, shoggoths shambling by

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsm5RVInFII

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "shape of raw to come", the hatch

I saw "the hatch" live at Toronto's "Next Music from Tokyo" event. NMFT is a really great event and the hatch is incredible; mostly they alternate (and blend) dark jazz and death metal, in a way that seems like it shouldn't work but really really works. This track is more typical post-rock but still has its surprises, an ominous wailing threat over chugging guitars.

https://jusangatsu.bandcamp.com/track/shape-of-raw-to-come

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "萃点", GEZAN featuring Million Wish Collective

This is from an absolutely wonderful album Christine found. This weird, joyous mix of Taiko-style drumming, electric guitar, a room full of people yelling and chanting, oceans of echo and (not in this song) bagpipes? It makes me think of Polyphonic Spree, or J. A. Seazer's songs for Shūji Terayama and the Utena anime. The track name translates something like "point of origin" or "intersection".

https://jusangatsu.bandcamp.com/track/--69

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "生​ま​れ​る​前​の​セ​ク​シ​ー​キ​ン​グ", the hatch

I linked "the hatch" on Monday— this is from their previous album, and is a little closer to that "halfway between jazz and metal" thing I mentioned. Actually it kinda feels like if Last Days of Humanity tried to do a catchy ska kinda thing. All screaming and guitar-shredding noise. But it's catchy!

Google Translate claims this title means "The Sexy King Before Birth". Not sure how to interpret that.

https://jusangatsu.bandcamp.com/track/--6

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Melting through Midtown", The Physics House Band

The Physics House Band is a very noisy jazz ensemble. This track is not noisy at all. It is gentle and smooth and autumn-breeze cool. Saxophone and electric piano and drums. Very satisfying.

I previously posted this album in that Bandcamp recommendations thread I had on Another Site. I've been trying not to feature songs from that thread in this one, but maybe soon it won't matter anymore.

https://unearthly-vision.bandcamp.com/track/melting-through-midtown

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Gateless", Darren Korb

It's been 9 years and I'm prepared to say that "Transistor", by Supergiant Games, has the best video game OST ever. Like, the best video game soundtrack to listen to as an album. I was in indie game circles in 2014 and just every time there was a party in that scene, this album played in full at some point.

My fav track on the OST by far is "Gateless", an intense, epic guitar jam with a slight return to "The Spine".

https://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/track/gateless

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Ambient jam w/ Soma Cosmos, Take 5, Polymoon, Marantz cassette tape piano, and guitar", Jay Hosking

In this unimaginatively titled but gorgeous piece, Jay builds in a looper a bed of layers of keyboard sounds (from a 2021 descendent of the Sequential Prophet descendent, and one actual piano), then plays soulful guitar over it. Music for something cinematic to happen over, the protagonist confessing love or saying goodbye for the last time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIGcUGKiGX8

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Analogue Fields", Stefan Torto

This is a stark, moody synthwave piece by Stefan Torto (no cat this time). All sounds are produced on just the budget Volca Keys (the big keyboard is a MIDI sequencer, and the little box on the right is adding the echo). Simple but powerful, music like cold, distant wind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfDTwCR6_X8

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Radiation day", Ekzil

This is a simple but satisfying desktop synth jam with a kinda club techno feel. I feel like if I'd been played this song without context I'd have dated it to 2003. It's got a nice complex song structure and it's fun to watch the musician manage live-mixing the instruments by hand.

For some reason, this song makes me think of the Baba is You soundtrack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csDjfIP0FNM

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "SNCF Lo-Fi Hip-Hop ▶ YAMAHA SU10 Unquantized Beat", Q_yr Ko

Okay, this one is a bop. Made on the SU10, a 1996 portable sampler resembling a much worse version of Yamaha's cult-beloved QY line, most of the appeal here is the contortions the musician had to go through to get the SU10 to do anything at all. Watch their fingers; it can't do sequencing, so they're toggling fixed-length loops made on a PO-33. Fun stuff.

Note: Yes, that SNCF.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7pv8bZMTWw

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Nerdseq & Assimil8or Live Mix 170823", 27 Arches

A 20-minute techno set performed on a modular rack. Acid basslines, industrial hardness and atmospherics. A really good emphasis on sound design. This is music with a viewpoint, the viewpoint is that more echo is ALWAYS better, and they do make a strong case.

The Nerdseq is in the bottom left—it's a tracker built into a eurorack module. You can see them composing the music on it as it plays.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S1BmsjlgHA

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Live Techno mix set.", Th3Pock3tOp3rat0r

This is a shockingly sophisticated medley of dance pieces on the cheapest available hardware: two Pocket Operators and two toy Korg touch-strip synths, in a single chain of 1/8-inch cables.

The music itself is joyous & noisy distorted, 90s house with better production, or worse maybe, a single set of blown-out speakers set up at the other end of an echoey gym.

Makes me think of Axiom Verge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqQQJ2pMNGo

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Polyend Tracker // An undercover ambient machine", Dexba

This is a Selected Ambient Work made on the Polyend Tracker, but Dexba doesn't seem to be… using it correctly, or not in the normal way? This is a composition machine, but in the video he's somehow playing it live as an instrument, possibly with coordination/interference from a precomposed project.

Rain, echoing piano, skittering beats of the kind people in 2010 would call "glitchy".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su4Tdfs7deA

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "GBA + Elektron jam", Bad Diode

Elektron is the MPC of this generation. They make a range of "grooveboxes" that are ready-made for producing genres like EDM or hip-hop.

This is a short, thumping rave electronica track by @bd in which an entire rack of Elektron devices serve as backup for… a Game Boy Advance, running a sequencer BD themself created (ROM available on Itch, see YouTube comments). The rhythm, it entrances me.

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

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Everything is a synthesizer", Kurti

This musician rigs an electrical engineering learning tool (a "SystemTechnik Type 3910 Digi Board 2"— various standard chips + banana plugs) to make a repeating buzzing sound they control with switches, and combined with a Monotribe (first of the current era of desktop grooveboxes) builds a surprisingly catchy dance rhythm. They let this run for one minute, then burst out laughing and turn off the camera.

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

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Meditation In White Sound", Halim El-Dabh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzyr2lleLOo

Halim El-Dabh (see article: https://cdm.link/2023/09/halim-el-dabh/) is a fascinating figure— an Egyptian composer with a career spanning 72 years and an undefeated claim to creating the first piece of electronic music ever ("The Expression of Zaar" aka "Wire Recorder Piece", 1944).

This 1959 piece, recorded at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, is an absolutely gorgeous minimalist ambient journey.

mcc OP , 8 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Boundless pad", Mike Lewis

If you want to make the kind of ambient music that sounds like just one giant chord for three minutes, the Novation Peak is a good synthesizer to go with.

This track is three minutes of stately chord progression absolutely drenched in echo. Extremely satisfying. Imagine someone in a big comfy sweater with a big cup of coffee jumping up and down in front of a sunrise yelling "Yes!! Yes!!! This is so relaxing!!!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTIV-jYYmX4

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Soma Labs Lyra 8 + Hologram Microcosm Performance [No Talking]", A NEVER ENDING EXPLOSION

This video's thumbnail reads "Tuning the Lyra-8 to a Hungarian Minor Scale". The musician doesn't explain further, but the Lyra's 8 touchpad "keys" can be tuned to any arbitrary frequency, so it's good for tuning/scale experiments.

This piece is 16 minutes and makes every second count, a series of giant haunting tones with cryptic, intense emotions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Je3FPMGomM

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Covenant - Live", Abre Ojos

This is the kind of music that is used for dolly shots slowly gliding down spaceship hallways when it is going to turn out later that your spaceship is haunted. Creepy indescribable atmospheric noises and big thumping beats wet with distortion.

You should watch the video if you want some nice psychedelic visualizations (or avoid watching the video if you're unusually sensitive to flashing colors).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYoUOA5xCMg

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Satie?", Dud Faz

Satie? Is this Satie? I don't know? This is a peppy, pleasantly sloppy jam that plausibly sounds as if it is inspired by, or possibly directly incorporates motifs from, the work of Erik Satie (1866-1925). At one point the musician is performing drums by hitting keys on a piano keyboard. How to describe this? Imagine a dance number breaking out in a 19th-century French factory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6pVeLDoNcE

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Piece for tape recorder", Vladimir Ussachevsky

This piece was recorded in 1956 but sounds highly ahead of its time, like if the "drug freakout sequence" music from a 1970s film soundtrack were composed as intentional music, or like if the interstitial junk in a Kid A era Radiohead album were expanded to a full song. I really like this, it gets so much mileage out of tape-jank & exactly four oscillator circuits in a hand-wired configuration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E47Zk8riCO4

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "roland s-1 dnb drum play", alarky

It's been said the Drum & Bass genre couldn't have happened without Cubase, the software that originally let 90s artists artisanally place all those 1/16-note hi-hats on a grid. This artist on the other hand says who needs grids, and just sorta mashes the buttons on his drum machine front panel. It's messy, but sorta works! Combined with the weirdly overpowered synthesis of the S-1 it forms an intense mood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxUD40TENvc

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "I'm Afraid of Americans", David Bowie (Photek remix)

Heterodox drum & bass artist Photek leans heavily to a kind of minimalism that when it goes too far can feel sparse and strung out. Here the strung-out feel works strongly in the song's favor, as it gives us more time to luxuriate in the voice of David Bowie.

Incidentally I think this mix (from a 1997 remix EP organized by Trent Reznor) might secretly be an early draft of "Seven Samurai"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDeRFsHk7gs

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "YAMAHA SU10 DNB JAM", Electromachines

Armed with the terrible Yamaha portable sampler I was talking about last week, plus one of Korg's "Monotron" toys and a voice sample from a really old interview with Squarepusher, this musician goes hard on some budget-bin drum & bass. Got those kind of wobwob synths you normally associate with dubstep, but it isn't dubstep, it's drum & bass.

It really has that 1997 feel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xaLnnQPNNs

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Mood // Lyra-8 // Drums - Ambient Creation", André Davies

This is a deliriously weird video that I don't think I'd find that weird if I only had the audio. With just audio you'd think "oh, horror movie soundtrack music". With the video, you've got a man seated at a drumkit proceeding to make what seems to be every possible sound other than the sound of a man playing the drums. A step up from metal plates and contact mics maybe? Is this jazz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKoJtowx6HM

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening today: "TANMO", BENDYmusic

Two minutes of mysterious noise, recorded with mysterious electronic boxes on what appears to be a table in a cafe. The feedback wobbles and distorted kicks interweave with passing snippets of conversation from the cafe and a radio which I think is actually patched into the recording device. If you love noise as much as I do you will dig this two minutes

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

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Level Incomplete", Bas Mondblau

Bas here has a YouTube account containing hundreds of decent drum & bass jams made with Elektron's desktop grooveboxes, most of them in the style I would describe as "Dreamcast menu music". This one's the most interesting one I've found so far, on a slightly different wavelength. Chill, jazzy and LTJ-Bukem-ish, this is an airy flight through fluffy synth-pad clouds and skeletal d&b beats.

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

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Torture by Tao"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_TJVc5z_KY

Tao is an apparently legendary Atari ST chiptune/demoscene composer (http://rockabit.weebly.com/tao.html) who started in 1991 with the goal of recreating C64 SID sounds on the Atari, and wrote his own tracker synth to get more accurate sounds. This is a 1999 track made in someone else's SID-on-Atari simulator ("Sid Sound Designer"). The point of interest here though is this is just a really rocking track, with a great high-energy mood.

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Bangin' Nights", gwEm

This is some acid chiptune created in 2005 for the Atari ST with the "maxYMiser music" tracker (software written by gwEm himself). Rocks hard. Depending on how you feel about harsh sounds, you'll either be enraptured or annoyed by the production; these waveforms are positively serrated.

The YouTube uploader explains this is a Atari ST conversion of a C64 chiptune by Matt Gray (composer of 80s games like Last Ninja 2).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGirs-oEn5Q

mcc OP , 7 months ago

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3jJtVTueYQ

mcc OP , 7 months ago

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB8wf_yAD8w

mcc OP , 7 months ago

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6cMPBfqM6g

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Havoc" title screen theme

"Havoc" was a 3D "tank game" (anyone whose parents wouldn't let them play FPSes will recognize this phrase) from the 90s that history has entirely forgotten. There were two things of note about it: One, it was one of very few games to ever support Apple's "QuickDraw 3D" hardware acceleration API; two, its title screen theme was a techno banger entirely beyond all reason. This song is a secret treasure, to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1MmyEZ8ifw

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "Sommarhack 2024 Invitro", 505 & mOdmate

"Sommarhack" is an Atari demoscene party happening next year in Sweden. The event announcement came itself in the form of a short Atari ST demo, which you can find on YouTube under the name "300 Days to Go". The demo incorporated this original track, made in maxYMiser music (that's the tracker made by gwEm). It's effortlessly funky, and has absolutely the filthiest chiptune bassline I have ever heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WKg-wMTW8A

mcc OP , 7 months ago

What I'm listening to today: "ZIQAL DIMENSION + bionic lestar + Zadar", Plugman

"Plugman" is an active performing musician, but his YouTube account is used exclusively for short sound tests and module demonstrations; I've been watching the account for months waiting for him to post an actual song. Here he finally has, sort of, a short but extremely sick 2-minute jam with cool swoothy synths. This makes me think of whatever "dub" meant in the early 00s techno scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihQ3TrZHAN0