Chiptunes, piano, and music performed into Tascam portable recorders
- "Étude for Modular Synthesizer No. 1", Modular Beat
"Modular Beat" is a YouTube channel that posts near-daily modular synth experiments which, oddly, almost never contain beats. Here's a song that doesn't remotely sound like it was made on a modular synthesizer, an incredibly charming piano serenade backed by uncanny strings. The piano sounds incredibly human and acoustic but apparently is the result of a complex phasing algorithm (from a Norns).
- "Volca Drum Techno Pattern #9", Mateusz Wicher
A skeletal detroit techno track made entirely on a series of budget/toy devices, all visible in frame. A complicated pattern on the Volca Drum, and the Pocket Operator Arcade, which is usually used for bleepy chiptune noises but here gets filtered to produce uncharacteristic spooky pads. It's got a nice focused groove.
- "Wonder Panorama", Ippo Yamada¹ (Dual YM2612 remix by rigid_atoms)
This is emulation. But I want you to imagine a monstrosity: Someone disassembles two Sega Genesis units, removes the sound chips, wires them to a breadboard and commands them to play at once². And then arranges a song from "Mega Man ZX" for it. This arrangement has an impossible-feeling sparkle to it. The millennial brain knows, at a deep level, that a Genesis can't make this sound.
- "The Angler", Mateusz Wicher
A lo-fi, indistinctly unsettling hip hop jam getting a lot of mileage out of desktop equipment. Roland's 2021 refresh of their old 00s sampler, glitchy guitar and some noodling on the Volca Keys. The YouTube summary describes the genre as "Boom bap".
The voiceover sample is from an interview with surrealist horror artist Zdzisław Beksiński, so, extra content on this one for any Polish speakers reading this
- "4 (part 1)", MSK (Dusan Zatkovsky)³
This is a FastTracker2 (DOS) song from 1996, one of a few dozen untitled tracks this artist composed around that time. Starts with bitcrushed ambiance and then rises into epic dance beats. I feel like this track crystalizes the moment in which it was created in an amazing way. Makes me think of dark screens with glowing text and spaceships rising in low earth orbit and other things that existed in 1996.
⬇️ Click below for Mandarin rap and horror movie ambient ⬇️
- "Ghosts", 潘PAN
Taiwanese trap music. On this track Pan Wei-Ju raps in Mandarin about generational trauma and domestic violence, over booming, ominous beats produced by Clams Casino. Just a really grippingly chaotic piece of nightmare music
(It was only after I listened to this song a bunch of times I realized the official music video, linked above, has an English translation in the expanded YouTube description. It hit me really hard.)
- "deep dark places", Frederick Aloysius Palowaski
To film this video the musician seems to have stuck his phone inside a modular synthesizer, revealing a cavern-like space beneath the loops of the cables. He then plays for you the ambiance of this dark space, booming echoes of a tortured cymbal sample over meandering Karplus-Strong bass, a dream constantly on the verge of becoming a nightmare
¹ I think. Ippo Yamada was the head of sound/music for Mega Man ZX and composed most of the tracks, but fellow Inti Creates staff member Ryo Kawakami composed some of the songs for ZX and there doesn't seem to be an exact accounting anywhere, so it may have been him.
² Note however this is actually the exact configuration of both the Sega System 32 arcade board and the Twisted Electrons MegaFM (although both the System 32 and later production runs of the MegaFM used YM3438 chips; these are supposed to be identical to the YM2612, but I don't have enough information to say for sure). So in theory you could play this track on hardware, even official Sega hardware. Anybody know how to make System 32 homebrew…?
³ Not to be confused with Morten Sigaard Kristensen, who was also using the handle "MSK" in roughly the same community at roughly the same time.
