I've been doing this thing. When I find a song I really fall in love with I post it on Mastodon as a "What I'm listening to today" post, and once I've got a week's worth I collate them here on Cohost. Thing is though I started doing this about three months before Cohost existed. So there's a bunch of posts in my Mastodon thread I never mirrored here.
Here's the best seven tracks from those three months. Each is someone from YouTube's music community doing something unique with electronic music equipment.
- "Moog Subharmonicon Jump and Run Jam", Attic Audio
The Subharmonicon is Moog's generative-music machine, based on resurrecting ideas from two lost proto-synthesizers from the 1940s, the Trautonium and Leon Theremin's "Rhythmicon". The Subharmonicon generates chords and rhythms that are just musical enough to be compelling but just strange enough no human would ever design them on purpose, and the normal way to use it is to let it free-run with some echo to generate ambient music. In this track tho the musician continuously switches settings and modes to actually play it like an instrument, and the result is not just fun to watch but incredibly catchy.
In some Synth Youtube stunt casting, drums are handled by Yamaha's now-forgotten 1990 MIDI PDA, the QY10.
- "Make Noise Strega & Pianoteq Bechstein | Ambient", Akihiko Matsumoto
The Strega meanwhile is a truly remarkable piece of hardware— a collaboration between a synth company and a musician (Alessandro Cortini) that blends "musical instrument" and "toy" in the way my old art-game projects strove to. It's a delay reverb simultaneously uglified and overpowered to make the perfect drone machine. Here it is at its best, tearing apart the spectra of an iPad piano synthesizer.
- "Mutable Instruments Rings triggered by drums", David L. Fankhauser
This is a drum solo with a physical trigger on the bass drum so every time the bass drum hits it advances a sequence on a modular synthesizer. In other words the drummer controls the entire piece, the synth conforms its tempo to the drumming and when the drummer starts switching the rhythm up the music adjusts to it in a really natural way. Technically interesting, but also an incredible mood!
- "Kaleidoscope", substan
I've featured substan a few times in my Mastodon thread; they tend to make compact techno songs on Elektron grooveboxes. This song's made entirely on the Digitone, Elektron's FM box, and the youtube title claims it is "downbeat psybient". Anyway it's a lovely little piece of electronic pop, I really like the progression on this one.
- "A Synthesist's Drum Solo // Drum & Synth / Moog DFAM / Subharmonicon / Mother 32 / Elektron Digitakt", Paul-Aaron Wolf
A structurally complex six minute performance of a man very enthusiastically playing the drums accompanied by a shifting set of semi-generative synth loops. This piece is absolutely incredible but, demonstrating the cruel attention economy of YouTube, only had 367 views on YouTube when I linked it on Mastodon, at which point it was about a year old; now, six months later, it's up to 421.
BONUS AMBIENT NOISE TRACKS
- "Farsleben", Martin Lorenz
This is a weird, wild ambient soundscape, with multiple independent movements; I imagine being in some kind of dimly lit warehouse or abandoned factory, with something inscrutable and maybe slightly terrifying happening at the distant end, the buzzing of electrical transformers and the straining of machines of cryptic purpose echoing off the walls.
(In fact, it's all generated from a small box in Martin's lap.)
- "full.mp3", andi mcc
I actually made this one, for a jam on Battle of the Bits way back in 2007; they made a pack of sound samples and challenged us to make a song with it. This isn't the song I made for the jam; it's a junk file I made during testing that cut up all 25 samples into 1/10th-second chunks and sorted them per a loudness criterion. I didn't publish this one at the time but I still pull it out and listen to it sometimes. It's oddly compelling, with lots of surprising structure and melodic sections.
You can find more of my YouTube recs in the #mixtape tag, or in this post breaking down my "favorite YouTube electronica" playlist from before I started the Mastodon thread.
