- "Self", Noname
Noname is a socialist, a rapper and a true Poster. The best way I know to introduce you to her whole Thing is to play you this two-minute soft funk explosion that opened her 2018 album. This song contains my favorite single line from any rap song ever.
This track is mixed a bit quiet, so maybe turn up your speaker volume before listening so it sounds regular.
This dude sells homemade and circuitbent instruments on the Internet. In this video he covers a table with a giant pile of Kalimbas and guitar pedals and runs around hitting things with hammers. Looks goofy, but produces a cool serene distant-bells-and-drums chorus.
- "Synth, Drum machine, Yamaha QY70, Live", I go REC
A live-guided performance on the QY70, Yamaha's incredible 1990s proto-groovebox/MIDI PDA. A tiny skranky groove with good 80s-flavored sounds and composition (an 808 cowbell plays exactly twice). This would fit really well in an 80s movie, 1/3-way through the narrative, in the background of a scene where they establish that stakes are escalating. A car slowly glides up to the front door of an office building. A man in sunglasses lurks around a corner.
- "Tidal Plant Zone", Yayoi Fujimori (16-bit re-arrange by rigid_atoms)
"Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble" was a Game Gear exclusive from 1994 (the Game Gear actually got a lot of original Sonic games). In 2022, the Sonic fangame community produced Sonic Triple Trouble 16-Bit, a PC (GameMaker) remake to Genesis specifications. The YM2612 arrangement really opens up Fujimori's composition and lets the dark, funky lounge jazz piece inside crawl out.
- "Untitled", D'Angelo
From the year 2000, this is an incredibly charming crooner soul track with a casual, almost sloppy unpredictable flow that belies the incredible precision of the songwriting and performance here. This track understands jazz. Meanwhile the end feels like Angelo has convinced the entire bar to drunkenly sing along with him, how does it feel? How does it feeeeel
I love how this song starts and ends.
⬇️ Click below for Ultraísta remixes ⬇️
- "Strange Formula", Ultraísta (David Lynch remix)
I alluded to this last week, but did you know David Lynch records music? Like, albums. He's been doing this for like 25 years.
This is him doing a remix of an electropop band I like. It sounds… well, very much like a song recorded by David Lynch. Plodding guitar that sounds like it's playing off a 78, muffled industrial beats, echo like the alley out back a concert. Four people stand smoking in silence; one has no face.
- "Smalltalk", Ultraísta (Four Tet remix)
The week I left her I sat in a friend's back room on a mattress on the floor and I listened to this song again, and again, and again, and I thought with awe about how that place was apparently affecting me more than I'd thought because I was literally breathing easier, now that I was out of it, and did not realize that what I'd actually just discovered, after living with them for 13 years, was I was allergic to cats
