Here are five songs made with simple electronics and one song made with no electronics.
- "No-input mixer minimal techno", closedcircuits
Consider the mixer. It's supposed to be a passive thing, but it has bandpass, which combined with feedback can do simple but interesting synthesis. It often has a compressor and sometimes sidechains, which means dynamics are an option. And it's got a lot of controls. So this leads to the idea of the "no input mixing board" (most famously explored in a series of excellent 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.
This is a short trip-hop jam on a portable hardware tracker. (Like, the kind of tracker one would normally associate with text-mode DOS or the Atari ST. There have been a couple attempts recently to put one in a standalone hardware device.) Skittering, glitchy beats and a kind of mysterious air.
- "Battle Against Belch" (EarthBound), Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka (Nintendo)¹
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 (one of only a few from the SNES to realize that the SNES sound chip is basically an EMU SP-1200) stitches a series of samples and ~leitmotifs~ which appear both before and after it in the game together with a grinding bass.
- "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.
- "Flowing Water", Chu-Tong Zhou
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)². Here it's performed on the guqin with a devastating gentleness, each of the five(?) sections keeping a distinct and sharp emotional tenor.
⬇️ Click below for beeps ⬇️
- "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. Good chill mood, I'm 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.
It's stereo.
¹ This wound up on this week's list due to a meandering train of thought that came from me thinking about how the zero-input techno track at the top kind of sounds like the "Belch's Factory" music. By the way, please don't ask me to clarify "in North America" in the song summary there. You know what I meant.
² This appears to be a legitimately historically significant piece of music (it was on the Voyager golden record!) and I'm frustrated I can't find more information about its composition history on the English Internet. It was originally (like, BCE timeframe) the second part of a longer piece called "High Mountain and Flowing Water", and even now that the two pieces have been separated they're usually performed together. There's a version of High Mountain here along with performances of Flowing Water and a third performance of the two pieces together, and the "High Mountain" in that video is very good, although I like Chu-Tong Zhou's version of "Flowing Water" much better. The translation of the "Flowing Water" video's YouTube summary describes how different recorded versions of the piece over the last thousand years have been considered to have different numbers of sub-movements, and I wish I understood whether it was explaining the different ways that different theorists divided up a single finished composition or actually describing new movements being gradually added to the piece over time.
