Seven different ways of making music with electronics. Also two separate bands comprised of siblings.
- "20231231 145", sv1
Max/MSP is a open-ended music tool, a commercial fork of PureData. It lets you fine-control every element of making a song, from sound design to mixing, using a visual programming language or by building your own UIs. For this artist's last album, he filmed and uploaded to YouTube screencasts of him making the tracks in Max, so you can see the bespoke-UI instrument he built for himself.
In this track: Skittery beats and seductive alien echo sounds. Kinda Ryoji Ikeda ish
- "Funky Stars", Quazar
This is a poppy eurodance DOS tracker tune from 1997. Feels good, slick production, moody 80s/early 90s feel.
After 2000 the artist behind this .xm went on to have a conventional career as a producer, making club techno remixes for a bunch of hip hop artists, plus Madonna, under the name "Axwell", then cofounding Swedish House Mafia ("Don't You Worry Child"). Meanwhile (or so I was informed after posting to Mastodon) the .xm file went on to have a storied career of its own, getting ported to various chiptune platforms, showing up in Super Mario World romhacks, and serving as (in a mashup with the "Space Jam" theme) the main theme for "Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden".
This track seems to have different names depending on whether you look at the metadata or the originally uploaded filename, so it is listed on some mod archives as "Hybrid Song".
- "E370 and Fumana", Martin Rotaveria
This is an immaculate mood on a modular rack, like a dirty metallic sunrise. Generated algorithmically/generatively by a bunch of crosswired synth modules free-running without human intervention.
Confession, I think this is a little long— if this had been my track I'd have let it run to about 2:56 then switched off the drums, then stopped the recording at 4:06. But of course what probably happened here was the musician set up the equipment to do its thing autonomously, recorded 20 minutes or so and cropped out the best six minutes, an approach that doesn't lend itself to fine tuning. Anyway I suggest you just hit stop whereever feels right.
- "Can You Feel", Torchkas (Namco WSG remix by Abstract 64)
The sound chip in the "Pac Man" arcade cabinets— the "Namco WSG"— turns out to be a really fascinating piece of engineering, a 4-bit wavetable synth like the tiniest, cheapest Korg Wavestation.
Covering a vaporwave chiptune originally for SNES— itself, apparently, a cover/remix of a shockingly good Italian new wave track from 1983— Abstract 64 makes a song using only a WSG emulator and the waveforms from the original "Pac-Man" ROM, and it's so evocative. Definitely the best song I've ever heard to sample "Pac-Man". Makes me daydream of impractical projects like modding an original Pac-Man board just to play this song on.
- "XYZ", Boards of Canada
John Peel was a beloved BBC DJ on a lifelong mission to call attention to underrated music. The "Peel Sessions" were a recurring segment (about four thousand aired from 1967 until Peel's death in 2004; the final session to air was Sunn O)))) where he'd get bands to record a block of 4 songs at the BBC studios to be played on his show. These sessions often wound up getting released commercially, so bands brought their A-game, and when relatively established groups popped in they sometimes used the sessions to showcase alternate versions and oddities.
When Boards of Canada came in 1998 they dropped three alternate versions of existing tracks but then this one wild, unique, otherwise-unreleased tune pushing at their own genre boundaries. What sounds like Spanish classical guitar, and hard IDM beats (like they used on a few songs around Music Has the Right but then moved away from). Epic, hypnotic.
(This track actually wasn't on the physical release of the Peel Session due to what were apparently sample issues, but was eventually included on the Bandcamp/Bleep re-release, so that's what I'm linking, though it sounds so strange to listen without the introduction, by Peel, over the opening notes that were inevitably included in the radio-rip mp3 that was this song's only available version for years.)
⬇️ Click below for 90s vibes ⬇️
- "jan 14", Jon Coe
A short, fun track mixing some very cheesy (wait, no, let's say "retro") synth/drum sounds into an inexplicably hype beat, like uptempo vaporwave.
This was made on— I'm pretty sure, the poster doesn't explain anything— the Yamaha AW16G, a desktop "hardware DAW" from 2002; this could be used as both a mixer and a sampler, so I don't know if any additional equipment is plugged in out of frame. I also cannot explain what is happening in the final minute.
- "Not Tomorrow", COMMITTEE
In this video two women (one wearing a tracksuit embroidered "The Boys") sit on a living room carpet with a collection of synthesizers and play a dark, pounding electronic unpop song that makes me think of the style of 90s Underworld with the tone of 90s Depeche Mode. This was recorded in December 2020 and is one of a series of videos; on their YouTube page, the pair explain that they are sisters and they recorded the videos as a COVID lockdown activity.