andi

1. Unlabeled CD-R track 17, The Mathletes

I think I've mentioned Joe Mathlete who I went to high school with, who made music on four-track tapes. Most of his music was earnest indie folk-pop but he had this one song I loved that was a deafening blast of exuberant, overdistorted emotional noise. This was given to me directly by Joe on an CD-R with no track list, so I always thought of this song as "17". I think the actual name was something like "illegal ghost bikes".

2. Untitled 7, Oval

Markus Popp did this thing in the 90s of scratching CDs by hand and sampling the glitches to make ambient music. Later he contracted someone to condense his artistic process into a computer program¹, so he could set it up in art galleries. Let random gallery-goers Be Oval. He made an album ("ovalprocess") with this program; it was (maybe is?) the most alien music I'd ever heard. This is my fave track from it, the one that best rides the line between something musical and legible and something with no human-graspable logic beyond the algorithm that created it. As a song it is harsh (no really, it's pretty shrill) and beautiful.

3. "Remotely", Coil

My favoritest ambient album ever is a 1992 album of "remixes and re-recordings" of Coil's 1984 debut single "How to Destroy Angels" (subtitle: "Ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy")². "Remixes" seems to mean "we recorded some new music with the same instruments". This song's the standout (other than the title track), a growling noise symphony that gives me stark images of looming forms gyrating in darkness.

4. "CT-0W0 Computer Cowbell", emma essex aka Comet's Tail aka Halley Labs aka @Heckscaper

The beloved Roland 808 drum machine had a… let's say less-beloved "cowbell" channel. The 808 cowbell is hyper-distinctive but frankly cheesy; people tend to only use it if they intentionally want to evoke an "80s sound". But this one brave VST author not only made a hyper-advanced 808 cowbell synth, with dozens of controls and modular patching capability, but recorded this entire fascinating EP-length demo video using only the synth. It starts off as recognizable techno, ranges into mysterious sounds and ends as terrifying, abstract dark ambient. My favorite part is "The World's Maw".

5. "Ecnalubma", awk

I made this (me). It's loud.

I recorded a lot of music between 2001 and like 2006. This was my favorite song I ever made, sometime in the summer of 2001. It was made via about five lines of C and Perl mashed together on a Linux command line, piped directly into /dev/audio. I used slightly different code on the left and right stereo channels. I wasn't trying to make "music". I was trying to make a byte pattern so complex I no longer understood it, to see what it sounded like. I thought of myself less as a musician and more as a photographer, exploring the infinite configuration space of music and taking snapshots of the most beautiful structures. When I landed on this particular byte pattern I was completely shocked by the level of complexity and musicality. And structure— it undergoes multiple cryptic phase changes over 20 minutes³.

⬇️ Click below for Einstürzende Neubauten ⬇️

6. Die genaue Zeit, Einstürzende Neubauten

Einstürzende Neubauten (German for "Collapsing New Buildings"), were early industrial-music luminaries who used handmade instruments, concrete & metal reclaimed from demolition sites, and screaming to evoke landscapes of urban desolation. This song from 1983, when translated, describes a sort of Muzak apocalypse, with all art replaced with elevator music and all speech replaced with a voice endlessly intoning the accurate time.

1. Unlabeled CD-R track 17, The Mathletes

So if you struggled with this the first time I linked it above: Go back and listen to it again, now that you've listened to all that other weird shit. This time it'll seem normal by comparison!

¹ I guess it could simulate CIRC errors? I never got the chance to use it.

³ I have spent the last twenty years wondering what exactly is happening at 4:20 when the song changes completely. I think that one of the C programs in the chain overflowed an integer variable from positive to negative, but that change by itself sounds like the output of a completely different algorithm.