This week here is a bit of a random walk¹.
- "Onweer", Deidream
This is a duet between an original brick Game Boy² running LSDJ³ and a PO-12 Rhythm⁴. The GB delivers its most classic and Aesthetic tones while the PO-12 delivers the most complicated, dense beats it's capable of. An excellent groove.
A Dutch person on Mastodon said the title translates as "Thunderstorm".
² "Play it loud" edition
³ A music tracker that runs directly on the Game Boy; heir to Nanoloop
⁴ The first, but still one of the best, of Teenage Engineering's handheld Pocket Operator line
- "Dubslide", Covox
Covox is a classic early chiptune artist, like early as in the era when the "chips" the tunes are made on were still being sold commercially⁵. This is from a super old album "Handheld Electropop" that was originally sold on CD-Rs, and is no longer available anywhere. I downloaded this mp3 off Covox's personal website sometime in 2002 and have treasured it ever since.
This might be my favorite chiptune song ever. Bizarre verve
⁵ The Game Boy Color was discontinued on March 31, 2003.
- "Our Song", Ultraísta
From the circa 2012 mini golden age of progressive electronic pop. If you want to dig in on this band there's some amazing remixes by Four Tet and, uh, David Lynch, but this is my favorite standalone song by them. Lazily drifting vocals and dreamlike synths, a good song to kinda zone out and half-pay-attention to while it does saw-wave ASMR on you.
I also especially love this video.
- "sound of are-bure-boke", wildchurch
This poster makes their own musical instruments, with Arduinos inside and 1950s mad-scientist control panels outside. Most of their videos show creations off one at a time but here they bring it all together for a cool, spacey song. Watch careful at the beginning where they create a drum loop with a beige box making just kicks and a cyan box making just snares. The drum boxes have a really unusual and interesting control scheme, the sort of thing you can do when you make your own gear.
"Are-bure-boke" means blurry photographs.
- "RTRT", Mili
Mili is a really fun, really nerdy band where most of their songs tell tiny self-contained sci fi/fantasy stories (in any of five languages). This one's weird and cute and tells the story of a self-proclaimed "mad scientist" who domesticates a Chinese hopping vampire through the scientific application of cooking and fabric arts.
Link is a fanvideo, animated based on character designs from the official Mili art for this song.
⬇️ Click below for electronic music that feels like abstractly moving through a space and also Frank Sinatra ⬇️
- "Toive", Vladislav Delay
This is an epic glitch-borderlands track from 2009 with a structure I love. Alien high-pitched sounds give way to air conditioning give way to beats like railroad tracks or falling corpses. One of those pieces of electronic music that if you close your eyes you can imagine you're hearing the sound of a journey into another universe, and then you open your eyes and the music video seems to be representing exactly that.
I spend a lot of time plumbing the depths of YouTube and it's all for the moments I find a gem like this one. On a desk holding basically a small museum of 21st-century Korg gear, this musician creates a lovely 15-minute sonic journey with a cool slow-building structure. One of those songs that seem to exhibit video-game-style level design, as if the music is a space you move through.
¹ I put these mixtapes together over the course of a week, as I post them on Mastodon and Bluesky. I usually plan them out partially or completely ahead of time, but this week I got diverted from my plan as (1) a different Mili song than I meant to post got stuck in my head Friday morning and (2) the video I'd intended to post for Saturday got suddenly deleted off YouTube sometime during the week. Here is a cover of "Fly me to the Moon" by Frank Sinatra performed by Ari O'Neal (a member of Beyonce's backing band who you may have seen last week at the Democratic National Convention performing an inexplicably sick guitar solo during John Legend's prince cover) in her bedroom.. In the video notes she says she doesn't usually sing and the cover has an interesting vulnerable quality as her voice wavers and cracks while simultaneously she absolutely kills it at the guitar
