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1. "SOMA PULSAR 23: Live Jam with Microcosm", Among the Trees

This track is incredibly mysterious; there is a Pulsar drum machine in here, but it seems to only exist to agitate a chain of reverb filters rigged to produce an enormous, shimmering rushing noise with seemingly little to do with the input.

I would describe this as the music from a movie from the 60s-70s that plays while the protagonists wordlessly explore an alien spaceship.

2. "lofi ambient with lubadh rings morphagene beads shallowwater and nightsky", [moos]

A chill ambient piece where several large slabs of modular synthesizer, with help from a hand reaching in to tweak something once a minute or so, produces ten minutes of generated-melody tones and plucks and simulated tape wobble. Really good feeling to it. It's the kind of music you'd hear it distantly, follow it into the woods and never be seen again.

3. "Ambient Improvisation Elektron digitone and Moog Mother 32", Surgeons Girl

Sometimes I feel like attempting to describe these pieces makes them lesser and that's definitely something I'd worry about here; this is something meant just to be felt rather than intellectualized, it's good when you let it sneak up on you. Anyway, this track gets a lot of mileage out of fairly minimal elements, synth stabs fighting to rise above the water of a ocean of sorrowful foghorn hums.

4. "Verbos + Mimeophon Jam", Deaftone Audio

This video is essentially a single held note and some rhythmic clicking for eight minutes, but the musician, hand-driving a complicated modular feedback machine, thoroughly explores every point in the configuration space of that constrained premise, taking you on a journey through a small universe of minimal ambient destinations. It's quiet, but seductively absorbing and calmly intense.

5. "Drift", Lähtö

This turned up as a YouTube recommendation, and here's what I eventually figured out: Sometime in 2006, a dude named Tyke Chandler started making music under the name Lähtö and posting it on a Google Site alongside little blog posts. The only distribution method was mediafire links, all of which are dead now. None of these albums seem to be preserved anywhere on the internet. There's three tracks still on a MySpace page, but none of them will play for me. In 2007 the Lähtö page stopped updating. And then out of the blue, this month, someone uploaded this album to YouTube. And it's gorgeous.

This first track (ends at 11:00) is a feast of luscious ambient pads, like a bed made entirely of pillows.

⬇️ Click below for pure noise ⬇️

Here are seven songs. The first four are creamy electronic pop and the last four are avant-garde electronic noise. The one in the middle is both.

1. "Cinematic Music | Moog Grandmother + MiniKORG700FS | A Love Letter To Synths from A Student for Life", HEYMUN

This is a dreamy piece where the musician sets a few synthesizers running on patterns and plays piano along with it. It's highly structured, but sneakily so. On surface it just feels chaotic; it feels as if two unrelated pieces of music happen to be playing at once but somehow keep converging in interesting ways.

Just float in it.

2. "Perkons HD-01 Bassline and OXI ONE sequencer Jam", Mark Cee

This guy spent a couple months posting jams with this large, unusual blue drum machine and I kept watching his videos like a hawk thinking… eventually he's gonna make something awesome. Eventually he did, with this complex, clicky 6-minute dance techno bop for an entire crowd of people enjoying standing at the back of a room holding drinks and bobbing their heads but not dancing.

3. "Choralberg", Alex Siebenhaar

In this video, a man wearing a bluescreen for a hat sits on a carpet and steers some racks of synths (and one analog drum machine) through a cryptic, funky melody. Just as you think you understand where it's going, it ends; you find yourself wanting more.

4. "crisping.1 #‍lofi #‍ambient #‍chaseblissgenerationlossmk2 #‍glitch", [moos]

It's actually not very hard to reproduce Boards of Canada's style, especially not since cassette equipment became a common modular synth accessory. But this piece, based around that guitar pedal that fakes tape degradation, is special, mixing tattered synth pads with a death-march beat that refuses to find a rhythm. It's scary actually, like something's gone horribly wrong.

5. "Pulsar 23 - Sounds you don't usually hear coming from it", Sonic Junkie

Occasionally in these posts I've praised songs for adapting Pulsar-23 drum channels for non-percussive purposes. This track is only that, the dude leaves the drum sequencer off, hooks up a CV keyboard (and… a device designed to convert EMF leakage from the Pulsar's circuitry into sound?!) and makes something approximating a jazz piano solo alternated with gunky glitch dub sounds. Very weird noises even by my standards.

⬇️ Two more

1. "Push for Woogies", tvvt

This is an acid techno jam posted directly to the synthesizer subreddit by its creator this Monday. It's based around what I think is a Moog Sub37, and a bunch of Electron boxes. It's messy but very fun; I like how the first 20 seconds or so sound like just random noises until the bass drum drops and suddenly everything snaps into place.

2. "Techno jam / polyend tracker,tr-6s,j-6", Takashi Kusano

This is a desk jam using some boxes from Roland's recent attempt to approximate the Volca line, specifically the "It's like a TR-606 with sliders? Sort of?" box and the "It's like a Jupiter-08 with a chord sequencer? Sort of?" box.

The opening just-drums part goes on maybe a little longer than I would have let it, but once the j-6 comes in it gets "hype". Overall enjoyably dirty techno.

3. "Laidback Dub session # DubTechno studio Jam (Tempest SpaceEcho Prophet6 Perfourmer Strymon..)", VØSNE

VØSNE has a bunch of good videos of live sets doing laid-back dub. (In this context, "Dub" means "instrumental reggae for nerds".) This is… a live set of laid-back dub. This one's forty minutes long and starts as a few minutes of just ambient echoes, but the drive keeps building the entire time and once it's built it's got a great goove.

4. "Soma Pulsar 23 - Dark Minimal performance", Deaftone Audio

A small, hissy percussion piece ("microhouse"? Is this what "microhouse" is? Maybe nanohouse?) with some really good sounds, including an acid bassline rigged out of a Pulsar drum channel. In my opinion a good way to spend four minutes.

5. "Particle Hands", HELL F.O

HELL F.O has a bunch of fun stuff posted— they've appeared in these posts before— and it's practically all abstract, ambient noise music. So this track is an interesting surprise just by being a completely listenable, borderline-pop dance techno piece. Still some interesting sound design, mind you! But drop this into a club set with some bass EQ and I think the crowd would eat it up.

Two more ⬇️