Do you know "Bandcamp Friday"? On the first friday of the month intermittently (closest thing to a schedule is this website) Bandcamp does an event where their "cut" of music sales goes to 0%. All money goes to the artist (except the cut for the the credit card company) (and except the cut for the label) (except also some labels, like Sargent House, set their cut to 0% on Bandcamp Fridays also?).
Whatever, TLDR buy music on Bandcamp Friday, the artist gets more money. I like this so I spent three years making a thread of Bandcamp music recommendations on a now-dead website, and now I'm moving it here. It is long.
⬇️⬇️ more below ⬇️⬇️
⬇️⬇️ click to make Iframely cry ⬇️⬇️
Here's my favorite music on Bandcamp.
Hella
Their thing is they play the guitar very fast and also the drums very fast. Their drummer was later in a band called the "Death Grips".
Recommended track: Headless
Also recommended: Acoustics EP, track "Biblical Violence"
erngyi (aka Nyarluu)
Nyarluu was an indie gamedev in the dawn of time (2010) and makes experimental electronic music. Here's a gorgeous spaced-out album of writhing irregular 15-minute synth pieces to get lost in.
Recommended track: BOM128
Tera Melos
This is another band that plays guitar and drums very fast. I like that OK? It's like Hella but with more weird-time-signature-jazz influence in.
Recommended track: New Chlorine
Also recommended: "40 Rods to the Hogs Head" from Drugs/Complex
Chance McDaniel
I found this person through the reddit synths community and found myself listening A LOT to tracks from this EP of boppy electronic music.
Recommended Track: With Ink, Under the Belly
Oval (aka Markus Popp)
Oval is the godfather of glitch music, I could go on for hours. But here's an album he recorded with a Japanese folk musician
Also: "Textuell" from Systemisch; and "Ovalprocess", Popp's most alien album, which the Bandcamp version of includes the absolutely excellent Japan exclusive tracks
Fahmi Mursyid (aka ideologikal)
Also from Reddit/Youtube synths community, he has a lot of good stuff and he's good about making it "visible" the process he used for each piece. Here's an album of gorgeous ambient made using, literally, a Casio calculator.
Also: His PureData album, No Input Mixer
Keith Fullerton Whitman
Electronic composer whose work often explores generative music and phasing techniques. Also did drum&bass as "Hrvatski"
Recommended track: Stereo Music for Yamaha Disklavier Prototype
Also recommended: "Lisbon" live album, "Generator"
Vapor Lanes (AKA Naxuu)
Naxuu's work floats somewhere between drone-ambient and pop.
Recommended track: "A Thin Film"
Also?: "Now That's What I Call Drone", a series of reconstructions of pop music from 2012 Naxuu organized on a joke on Twitter
Behold The Arctopus
BEHOLD THE ARCTOPUS is some kind of post-metal post-rock noneuclidean death metal. "Horrorscension" is— I do NOT say this lightly— my favorite metal album ever.
Recommended track: Annihilvore
Charlene Maximum
Charlene does indie games and metal and I've never been able to get this album, of instrumental metal and machine blastbeats driven to the point it becomes a swimming borderline ambient soup, out of my head
Recommended track: Berserker Generator
Laurie Spiegel
Laurie Spiegel is a legend of electronic music, way back at Bell Labs in the 1970s. She made early Mac generative MIDI software (is this URL dead? Try here). She's ON THE VOYAGER GOLDEN RECORD. She's STILL MAKING MUSIC. The release above is from 2018.
Also on Bandcamp: "The Expanding Universe" from 1980
Liz Ryerson (on Cohost at @ellaguro)
Liz makes game soundtracks, visual art & techno with a meticulously crafted sonic feel. Recommended track: Village Theme
Also recommended??: Listen to these 2 songs at once and recreate the soundtrack of a game Liz and I made in 2012?
Tim Hecker
Tim Hecker has a great discography of gentle harsh noise. For "Konoyo" and "Anoyo", a paired poem of albums and the live shows associated with both, he collaborated with Tokyo Gakuso, a traditional Japanese music ensemble, whom he otherworldly electronically garbled.
Recommended track: This Life
Also recommended: His album "Virgins"
Not on Bandcamp: Hecker did the score for Brandon Cronenberg's movie "Infinity Pool"?! Brandon Cronenberg is amazing and I cannot wait to see this
Earth
Doom metal/noise metal/sprawling SLOW landscapes/guitars in pain. Earth's discography is a sprawling mess (my fav track of theirs, "Dissolution III", is impossible to find) (if you find a place to legally purchase a digital copy of "Dissolution III", let me know) but a fair chunk of it is on Bandcamp. See also A Bureaucratic Desire For Extra Capsular Extraction.
Chipzel
Chipzel is a chiptune artist you may have heard of from the soundtracks (incidentally also on Bandcamp, see links) to @terrycavanagh's games Super Hexagon and Dicey Dungeons, but her album Spectra is a true classic of the Game Boy "LSDJ" software. This album has 3 tracks that are visible only on purchase.
Brother Android
Brother Android makes chiptunes (and, under his full name, apparently Christian folk music?) and in 2011 happened to make my favorite chiptune album ever, the soundtrack to Daniel Remar's "Hero Core".
Recommended track: Natural Caves
INTERLUDE: POEMPRODUCER'S LIST
Here is an entirely separate list of recommendations by feminist anarchist glitch musician and VJ AGF/poemproducer
Vladislav Delay
Hardcore ambient/glitch artist, 90s-present
Rec'd tracks: Toive, Musta Planeetta
See also Hide Behind the Silence which was released like, two weeks ago as I type this
We™
"We" in 1999 made one of my favorite electronica albums ever, "√-1". The album is a sort of musical palindrome. For years this was one of the hardest albums to find or even look up ever— how on earth do you Google for an album named "√-1" by an artist named "We™"?— but it's on Bandcamp!
Rec'd track: 12 Diablos
Boris
Boris is a Japan metal band with a range going from noise-metal to pure pop. Bandcamp has albums at both ends but also has "Pink", their greatest work, exactly on the border between the two. Track 1 thru "Just Abandoned Myself" here is the original album. Note: Some streaming services have the American version of this album, which sadly cuts "Just Abandoned Myself", the album's climax and high point, in half. Bandcamp has the real version. Accept no substitutes: The length of "Just Abandoned Myself" should be 18:15.
See also: Akuma no Uta, Riot Sugar, and you can't listen to it without buying it, but Bandcamp has my favorite Boris deep cut, "Rainbow", most notably heard on the soundtrack of the 2010 Japanese film "Confessions".
Ultraísta is a synth pop band whose music videos (CW: flashing), I can't really explain this, helped me get through one of the hardest weeks of my life.
Recommended tracks: Our Song, Smalltalk (Four Tet remix)
Black MIDI
Post-rock on some baffling alien frequency. I made it through the early months of COVID lockdown (when this list was originally compiled) basically by listening to "schlagenheim" several times a day. You'll have to buy this album to get most of the tracks. Trust me, it's worth it.
Black Midi's music does not at any point contain actual black midi.
Recommended track: "bmbmbm".
See also: I hear their live albums are amazing; the one on Bandcamp has "Sweater", which is my favorite non-album track by them.
Atariame
Stumbled across this EP of totally hypnotic, dreamy folk pop of echoey electronic guitar & indistinct synths, it's kind of like early Múm (…also on Bandcamp) Worth listening to in full. Looking now I see she's got two new albums since I originally compiled this list; I guess I should go listen.
R Beny
R Beny is my favorite "Synth Youtube" artist (as you may know if you've been listening to my Synth YouTube roundup posts here on Cohost; my original reaction to this post was "why did my heart just stop") but he has several albums of ambient on Bandcamp entirely separate from his YouTube tracks. The bundle linked here includes 4 albums (incl. my fav, "Eistla")
Múm
Earlier in this post I described an album as "like early Múm". Turns out early Múm is on Bandcamp too! Chill glitch beats.
Recommended track: Smell Memory
Four Tet
Four Tet is a legendary chaotic-jazz dance electronica artist and one of the greatest remixers of the last two decades. He's got a bunch of stuff on Bandcamp including one of his two early sample-based masterpiece albums.
Recommended tracks: "Love Cry" and "Sing" from the above album, but you have to pay to listen
See also: Nova/Moth (his collaboration with Burial)
James Holden and the Animal Spirits
Back when I used Spotify, "Every Moment Like the First" was basically Spotify's "Plastic Love". Every auto playlist seemed to include it. But instead of paying for Spotify and funding right-wing talk radio you can just buy that album on Bandcamp!
Pleasure
One day I found a tab open on my laptop containing the Bandcamp page for "The Drums Through" by Pleasure. I never figured out where where it came from or how that tab got opened. It's some kind of Australian post-rock band making garage jams. It's good!
Rec'd track: The Drums Through
Manuel Knapp
I found Manuel Knapp thru his experimental films while plumbing the depths of Letterboxd. I turned out to like his music better. Here's 36 minutes of noise, and I DO MEAN NOISE.
One time I listened to this album at the same time as "Sea Change" by Beck once by accident; it paired well.
Kool Keith
Kool Keith AKA Dr. Octagon AKA Dr. DOOOM AKA Keith Korg AKA Black Elvis AKA I lose count is an indie rap legend with a sprawling discography on tons of labels of which his Bandcamp has a random sampling, spread across at least three Bandcamp pages, with a couple of his greats, in particular the DR. DOOOM album linked above.
Recommended tracks: "No Chorus" from Dr. DOOOM, "Talk to the Romans on Project Polaroid, Supa Supreme (Larry Hutch rmx) from the Tashan Dorrsett album, "Poppa Large" from the "Official Space Tape".
Bandcamp also has the "The Return of Dr. Octagon" album but don't listen to that one, it's an unauthorized release by a country music label based on stolen demo tapes (?) and mostly sucks anyway. Long story.
DOOM
MF DOOM, who was one of the nerdier rappers out there, is a similar story—multiple names, huge discography of which Bandcamp captures parts. BUT Bandcamp does have the truly excellent JJ DOOM album, recorded while the man was locked out of the US by CBP (JJ is Jneiro Jarel who has his own Bandcamp)
Recommended tracks: "Banished"
See also: "Pause Tape from JJ DOOM, "The Mouse and the Mask recorded with Danger Mouse, Madvillain recorded with Madlib, this completely mindblowing set of Four Tet remixes of Madvillain tracks.
Marnie Stern
I mentioned Hella before; Marnie Stern, a guitarist from the same Sacramento post-rock scene as Tera Melos, collaborates with Hella drummer Zach Hill on 2 incredible albums, both on Bandcamp, where she amends the Sacramento "play guitar real fast" formula w/ vocals and pop song structures.
Recommended track: "Cinco De Mayo"
Also: "Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling. I recommend listening to this song laying on the floor with your eyes closed or the lights off.
Noname
Noname is an incredible recent-breakout rapper, she has a unique laid-back flow and does jazzy live instrumentation that makes me think of Georgia Anne Muldrow. I suggest just listening to her albums in order but "Self" and "Blaxploitation" from Room 25 are standouts.
Georgia Anne Muldrow
Oh did I mention Georgia Anne Muldrow? She's on Bandcamp too. Muldrow's prolific and her Bandcamp only captures some of her work but the first 2 tracks on this album (and "Canadian Hillbilly") should give you a sense of what she's about. Muldrow makes R&B infused with jazz and her own otherworldly offkilter groove.
Björk
Björk Guðmundsdóttir is an electronic/pop legend I absolutely cannot begin to say everything there is to say about in this space. I'm gonna have to just link my favorite albums:
- Post: General mid-90s europop, multiple tracks by Tricky
- Homogenic: Violins and overdriven drum machines
- Medulla: Concept album based entirely around voice and beatboxing
I'm actually like, several albums behind on Bjork albums. Apparently Vulnicura is a totally devastating breakup album and Utopia is her "I'm getting laid again" album.
Oh, and the band she was in before going solo, The Sugarcubes, are on Bandcamp also.
Little Dragon
I loved this band in 2007 and they've since moved to Bandcamp; they do electronic pop and basically every track on this album is in some way a banger, but recommended tracks: "No Love", "Twice", "Constant Surprises"
Ada Odomo
Ada is an Internet artist with various projects, but my favorite is this album of lovely, haunting minimalist/modern piano pieces. I don't really know how to categorize modern classical/piano; basically if you share John Cage's taste in music or like those NIN tracks that are just piano, listen to this.
Sewerslvt
Sewerslvt makes melancholy, spacey electronic music and has a YouTube following that has repeatedly created mixtapes around her (actually quite large) discography around the conceit she is the DJ at Club Cyberia from Serial Experiments Lain.
Recommended tracks: Cyberia lyr1 + lyr2 from Drowning in the Sewer (and also lyr3 which is only on this compilation here) are beautifully nostalgic if you lived thru the drum & bass era.
default genders
"default genders" makes abstracted pop music, every dance techno song from the early 90s in a blender with indecipherable distorted rap on top.
Recommended: The first 3 tracks from this album; #2 pulls off the impossible task of making a Zelda "LISTEN!" sample endearing.
Liars
"Liars" in 2006 recorded this strange unforgettable album, "Drum's Not Dead", forever on my "everyone should hear this" shortlist. It's a noise opera, screaming and ambient guitar noises telling a story about two men named Drum and "Mt. Heart Attack". The track titles are important.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
…are the phantom lords of post rock, with a 25-year discography in which every album is the best album. Recommended tracks: "Moya" from Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada, "Their Helicopters Sing" from ALLELUJAH! DON'T BEND! ASCEND!, and "Welcome to Arco AM/PM" from Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven except you're not going to be able to find anything in that album without the physical liner notes and Bandcamp won't help you there.
Squid
Squid was a band I only discovered in year two of making this list, flavors of Black Midi and Slint with surprisingly funky grooves. Recommended Track: "Pamphlets"
Every time I mention this band, someone asks me if I've heard of Black Country, New Road, and yeah, they're pretty good too I guess
Howard Hello
"Howard Hello" released a self-titled EP in 2002 that never left my head; "America" has been haunting me ever since. Kinda Fennesz-y, granular glitching and acoustic guitar. Please listen to "America".
Also: recommended: "Television", "Follow from the EP "EP".
Lauren Bousfield (AKA "Nero's Day at Disneyland")
Lauren makes beautifully terrifying pop, acidly melodic music your brain can't quite get a handle on, like you're trying to read a book in a dream but the words won't hold still.
Recommendations: All of the album "Palimpsest", esp "Adraft"; "riverrun humbling allegory linked above.
Couch Slut
Black metal all sounds the same to me but I like it, I just let it wash over me in waves. Anyway here's a best-in-class black metal group called COUCH SLUT with relentless energy and a female vocalist and they have a song called FUNERAL DYKE and it rules
Also: When I posted this list originally, the vocalist of Couch Slut replied by telling me I should listen to the trumpet solo at the end of "I'm 14". Pretty good trumpet solo.
Alessandro Cortini
Cortini— I've mentioned him in my "listening to today" posts— used to do the analog synths for Nine Inch Nails, may be personally responsible for a Buchla revival, and might have been semi-personally responsible for the modular revival of the 2010s entire. He makes sorta synthesizer classical music and he has some WEIRD stuff on Bandcamp. Recs: The FORSE albums (there are 3 of them); this Mogwai remix linked above which I am totally obsessed with.
The Physics House Band
Here's a post-rock-flavored jazz album I was listening to a lot in 2022. Recommended track Melting through Midtown. If you know who the Bad Plus are you would probably enjoy this album. (And if you don't know who the Bad Plus are: listen to this song).
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Boards of Canada
Boards of Canada's "Music Has the Right to Children" changed music (something else I talked about in that Alessandro Cortini link above). The whole modern analog-synth scene exists in this one album's wake. This is sold through Warp, so BoC probably? doesn't get paid more here than buying from Bleep.
See also: "Sixtyniner, New Seeds, XYZ
Warp Records (collectively)
Speaking of which, not only does Warp Records have a LOT of stuff on Bandcamp—
- Practically the entire enormous discography of Autechre, my favorite band in the world
- A bunch of Squarepusher
- A bunch of Flying Lotus
- A bunch of Plaid
—they have their own store Bleep containing everything they publish. It doesn't let you listen to full tracks free, and it doesn't do "Bandcamp Friday", but it DOES sell FLACs, and there is SO much electronic music history on there, including (curiously enough) Autechre's bugfuck pre-Warp 1991 debut release on Skam:
So just like… FYI.
Billy Nomates
And now we come to the present; the above was the state of this thread when I quit the website it was hosted on about a year ago. So here's a few last things I've listened to in the last year, like here's an album of a British woman doing beat-poetry rap about late capitalism over funky live instrumentation. Recommended track: No (No. No.)
SOPHIE
I only learned about Sophie the month she died, and holy crud was I missing out. Sophie invented her own entire idiosyncratic world of electronic music and was a global innovator in making pop songs about translesbian threesomes. She was so much on her own level that she considered music made with polyphonic synthesizers cheating, as in, she insisted on every instrument in many of her songs being produced by a single monophonic synth. No, you will never understand this.
Most of SOPHIE's tracks on bandcamp are on the "nmbrs" page. Recommended tracks: BIPP, the Autechre remix of BIPP, and UNISIL, a totally bizarre b-side from the single for that Autechre remix.
Golden Boy
Golden Boy is another artist I discovered last year only just after she was no longer with us; she leaves four or so albums scattered across Bandcamp. This one, "I NEVER MEANT FOR THIS TO HAPPEN", is a frantic, overdriven explosion of energy, like an attempt to play every single dance genre of the last 30 years at this same time. Recommended tracks: Limited Access, Jet Set Whatever
Golden Boy was a close friend and musical-style kindred spirit of Machine Girl, also on Bandcamp. Play Neon White.
Oblique Occasions
I have no idea what's going on with this band or on this album. A mix of trip-hoppy fusion jazz, and music that sounds like it's ripped from the scene in any given PlayStation JRPG where you go to a casino or a modern-looking hotel and suddenly the music sounds very modern and poppy. (And maybe some of these tracks literally are JRPG tracks I haven't identified; track 5 is just a Castlevania cover.) Every track name is in Japanese and the band says they're from Baltimore.
Maybe a bit of a goofy inclusion, but I do find myself listening this month over and over to track 4, 真実を信頼する and track 7, 海に憎しみを叫ぶ.
زن، زندگی، آزادی [WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM]
Closing out with another Poemproducer rec; a compilation album of electronic music by Iranian women released this past month and dedicated to the protest movement that has arisen there in the last six months following the state murder of Mahsa Amini. As a compilation this covers a wide range but it hits some incredible points along the way. Tracks 2 and 3 ("Raven" and Be Mahsa Be Nika" are great modern-electronic pop, tracks 7 and 9 ("Freedom and "Dream in a Dream are good fun dance techno, tracks 11 and 12 ("Sarnevesht and "Emanation") are lovely ambient.
Added 2023 March 3
Tsrono
I follow tsrono on Mastodon and last month they released this absolutely lovely album of alternating atmospheric ambient and chirpy, punchy IDM. This particular genre space has been really well mined in the last two decades but this album still finds a way to improve on the formula with really thoughtful textures and songwriting.
There's a lot of other material on Tsrono's bandcamp I've only scratched the surface of; I liked "endless nothingness".
Recommended track: iyrin
Ischemic folks
I found this CD for like a dollar in a discount bin at a record store in Ireland sometime around the year 2000. I was never totally certain what it was; it seemed to be a mixtape of mostly Phoenicia, Push Button Objects and Richard Devine tracks. I think they'd bound together and started a record label ("Schematic Music"?), and released this CD as a promotional item? Most of the tracks don't even have names. Anyway this CD wound up being foundational for me, as it's the best snapshot I've ever found of that one particular microgenre I've never known how to describe except "it sounds kind of like Push Button Objects", but also was always sort of a mysterious artifact. I never encountered anyone else who'd heard of this collection and, after it got stolen from my car a few years later, I basically had no evidence it had ever even existed. It turns out it's on Bandcamp! It was real! You can now be haunted by the strange clicky sounds that once haunted me.
Recommended track: "METIC - Tape Birth (JESWA'S WET MAJESTIC RMX)" It's so subtle! That little chirping sound that seems to take the entire song to finish descending! Those little electric piano noises! I've been thinking about this song for two decades straight now! If you can listen to this on large speakers do so.
Added 2023 April 7
kendall :3
"kendall :3" aka Barroo makes pop music with surprising sounds and absolutely enormous emotions. She has a very cute Neocities site. You get the feeling that anything is on the table with kendall, pop tracks could drop into breathtakingly progressive electronic production or hard electronica tracks could dissolve into soft rock and the simplest things here feel epic and spooky and bittersweet.
Recommended tracks: "waves", "string lights", I… okay actually just this entire album is pretty much an entire wash of recommends all the way through.
Added 2023 June 19
Éliane Radigue
You may not have heard Radigue's name before but if you look into the history of electronic music you find she's a giant there, a contemporary of Delia Derbyshire and Wendy Carlos but making strange, enigmatic, experimental music that still stands out as shocking and alien today, even now that "Drone" is an entire recognized music genre. Radigue excelled at hypnotic soundscapes, long, very slow pieces often consisting of one single electronic sound building and receding. Her bandcamp features a cross-section of her career, with the earliest music here recorded in 1969 and the most recent in the year 2000. The Bandcamp page does not include her entire (huge) discography but ambient fans could still keep themselves happily busy here for weeks.
Recommended: "N°17" from "Opus 17", the album Feedback Works 1969-1970
Plastikman
Plastikman aka Richie Hawtin managed to earn the title "minimalist composer" for a body of work made almost entirely on the Roland 808 and 303 dancehall techno boxes, finding an entirely unique way to apply these instruments that still respected the techno roots. This bandcamp stretches 1990 to 2021 and does include as far as I can tell Hawtin's entire discography, including the F.U.S.E. albums that were, as part of the "Artificial Intelligence" series, among the earliest releases on Warp Records, and a previously difficult-to-find record-collector-white-whale album named "Concept 1", which I hadn't even heard of before finding his bandcamp but is absolutely incredible.
The highlight here tho IMO is the period of the quartet of albums (Sheet One, Musik, Artifakts (bc) and Consumed) he released in the mid-90s as Plastikman. I cannot urge you to do this one thing enough: Listen to the 1998 album "Consumed", read the track listing before you listen, and listen to it in a single sitting. The Plastikman albums were conceived of as an intentional trilogy, an interlinked set of compositions where leitmotifs, sounds and themes tie each album to the one before and after it in the trilogy. But then the United States government struck, deporting Hawtin over (depending on which version of the story you read) either unpermitted raves or just some sort of weird government spasm in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing (?), cutting him off from his musical community and making the completion of the third album impossible. In a very dark place, Hawtin recorded "Consumed". So we wound up with "Artifakts (bc)" (linked above), a semi-unfinished reconstruction that plays like a brighter alternate-universe version of Consumed, and Consumed, Hawtin's greatest work, less an 11-track album as a single 70-minute musical composition with eleven movements that starts as unfriendly repetitive sounds and slowly seduces and devours its listener as Hawtin constructs an electronic musical world around you like a cage.
