andi

If you've seen the "#mixtape" posts I make here once a week, they mirror daily posts I've been making on Mastodon for (as of Friday) two years now. I have to reboot the thread once a year to keep Mastodon from crashing, so as a recap, I've created a YouTube playlist containing every song I linked either here or on Mastodon for the last year:

(Video #1 has visuals by me, and contains flashing.)

This is completely pointless. This is the least practical way to listen to music possible. You'd be much better off browsing the Mastodon thread or my recap posts here, but even that would take about 38 hours. So on the assumption you don't have 38 hours but might have 43 minutes, here is a meta-mixtape of the seven most interesting songs, I think, from the set. Of course, all seven of these songs were previously linked on Cohost, so this too is in its way pointless. Nothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of music. Nothing is accomplished by playing a piece of music. Our ears are now in excellent condition

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70. "Melodic Techno Live Looping Roland Juno 106 analog syntheziser at Mauerpark Berlin", TribalNeed

A man lays down a rug, a looper, a vintage Juno 106 synthesizer, and various toy instruments in a public park in Berlin, and as a crowd gathers he begins playing first chill techno and then dance rave music. Dancing ensues. Every person in this video is beautiful and it makes me happy just to know that this moment in space and time existed

10. "Flowing Water", Chu-Tong Zhou

This is a piece of classical Chinese music, whose score was first written down around 1350 CE, though according to various sources on Google it existed in some form as far back as 500 BCE (and according to the YouTube summary here the most recent "paragraph" was added around 1850 CE)¹. Here it's performed on the guqin with a devastating gentleness, each of the five(?) sections keeping a distinct and sharp emotional tenor.

71. "CZ-3000.mpeg", Grégoire Blanc

For a period in the 80s Casio produced a high-end "CZ" line, which used a unique synthesis method called "phase distortion"; it's like FM, but way cooler.

Grégoire Blanc is a professional concert thereminist. The video description explains he found his old CZ-3000 in the attic and the wave of memories inspired him to compose this.

This is… beautiful, actually, and deeply enigmatic. What is the emotion of this piece?

32. "Gaia floating in me", Cube

80s samplers had inherently limited resolution— 12 bit DACs, short sample memory. Early hip hop leaned into this, finding low sample rates gave drums a pleasant crunchy feel. This 2008 jam makes great use of the similar limitations of an old MS-DOS tracker, especially at the start where the sample resolution goes so low it's like a bitcrush effect. Actually, this entire track is incredibly sick. It sounds like a rave in Donkey Kong Country.

238. "Herr Mannelig (with personal variations)", Ebanisteria Musicale C.M. Ferrari

The woman in this video runs a small woodworking studio in Sassuolo, Italy, where she handmakes musical instruments (the name is Italian for "Musical Cabinet-Making"). She has a YouTube channel where she posts examples of her work. Here she does a complete multi-instrumental performance on traditional folk instruments in which she performs, and apparently built the instruments for, each part. Really compelling stuff, makes me think of Dead Can Dance or Loreena McKennitt, a folksong with the energy of rock.

Wikipedia says the song is about a troll queen proposing marriage.

⬇️ Click below for industrial techno and David Bowie ⬇️

Unconventional time signatures, beats from Cuba, technology from the USSR.

1. "Soviet RITM-2 Synth and Loop Pedal", Slightly Nasty

This is a dark, engrossing soundscape made entirely on the РИТМ-2, a synthesizer produced in 1984 in the Soviet Union and often described as Moog-like. This specific unit has been modified for additional sound body, though the musician insists it was done with vintage germanium transistors— in other words, it's a modification that could have plausibly been done by a user in Russia in the 80s.

2. "Scratch and Frazzle", Ivar Tryti

I've featured Ivar the Elektron virtuoso in this thread before. Here he deploys an FM-synth groovebox to make a song with two rules:

1. It should evoke the soundtrack of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal
2. It should be in 5/8 time.

(Watch the sequencer lights; you'll see his measures have 20 steps.)

Result: an industrial banger with beats that hit like bombs and a rhythm that keeps you constantly off balance.

3. "Edelleen ja edelleen", Sleepers Tomb

Quiet, insistent drone ambient track. You're asleep, your phone's alarm keeps pushing at the barrier from some other world trying to break through and drag you out, but it's not working. This piece is built up slowly on a modular suitcase that splays the track's internal process open to view like something on a dissection table. It's got a good mood.

A Finnish-speaking Mastodon user translates the name as "on and on", but with a kind of a sense of "again and again", i.e., "it just won't stop".

4. "Do You Miss Boards of Canada Too? I Made This In 15 Minutes.", Dan Chippendale

A peppy mix of analog synth and clicky woodblock beats. Grows into a really nice energy. I do see the comparison to Boards of Canada but it's kinda doing its own thing.

Made on Elektron's digital synth box; Teenage Engineering's new super-Pocket-Operator; and the blur in the background is a Prophet.

5. "Odd Numbers", Shiro Fujioka

This one's something really special. This is an extended, mercurial electronic composition in the alien time signature of 7/8, made of haunting glass-harp feedback hums and IDM breakbeats. Nothing going on here is anything you could remotely predict, but in retrospect it feels like the only way it could have gone. Made/performed on Elektron gear.

Warning: The first ten seconds contain a sharp clicking noise which may be unpleasant on headphones. Metronomes :(

⬇️ Click below for beats ⬇️

1. "Cwejman, Trogotronic, Make Noise - 1st patch in the Needham Woodworks case with Eskatonic power 23", James Plotkin

An incredibly dirty modular synth jam with fast, borderline-IDM beats. Often modular synth music tends to single repeating measures in a way that doesn't lend itself to drum sounds, but this rack's so large it's able to support multiple complex parts and lots of different things going on. What do you call this? Dance industrial?

2. "metronom 23", Duality Micro

Korg, who created a lot of synths including most of the good modern budget gear, once released a DS game. "Game", that is. KORG DS-10 was a little synthesizer/sequencer on a DS cart. (It was later released for Switch and iPhone/iPad as "Korg Gadget".)

This is a 2023 track composed on the DS-10 (with some very subtle bass guitar accompaniment) with a overpowered, Kraftwerky kick drum and a bumping groove. It's fun!

3. "Emotional Noises 230527", ナカヤマコウジ

This is a short, cryptic noise electronica piece with avant-garde beats, some cool shimmery dubby noises and weird feedback. Made on the Make Noise Trio, though you can see a Korg NTS in the background doing goodness knows what.

4. "SynTesla IX DIY Synthesizer DEMO", Pj Tardiveau

This YouTuber designed and handbuilt(?) a 7-voice polysynth on the design principle of "it should look like a submarine control panel". I'm reasonably certain the unit in the video is the only one that exists. The track is a single looping chord sequence but Pierre continuously retunes the knobs to, apparently, every sound the synth can produce so there's a song structure. Also breakbeats.

5. "nebulosity 23", BrokenSines

What I'm listening to today: "nebulosity", BrokenSines

This is a complex virtual/rack modular electronic piece with slow, thumping beats and enormous, dirty sounds. It feels muggy, like swimming through molasses, or a sleep paralysis dream. Lights twinkle in the distance, but your eyelids are heavy and you cannot lift your head to see them properly.

Speed this up to 180% and you could probably dance to it.

⬇️ Click below for Triangle ⬇️

Seven electronic songs, two rough and challenging, three easy and melodic, two more rough and challenging.

1. "Lessness", Tom Djll

A mesmerizing abstract journey. If you're used to "music" this track might be a good intro to ambient sound collages. Let it guide you from point to point, a soundtrack for images in your mind maybe.

The parts this is made from are kind of interesting: An honest to goodness VCS-3— the closest thing 1971 had to desktop eurorack, famously used by Pink Floyd— mixed in with a modern desktop eurorack, mixed with an ordinary trumpet.

2. "LOST SOULS - MODBAP", leonardoworx

This is a fun, single-minute hip hop jam with an MPC drum machine, Make Noise's desktop modular synths and some Nas samples.

90s west coast hip hop always had a thing for 70s east coast synthesizers, so there's something that feels like a natural extension to try to do that style of hip hop¹ with the west-coast synth methods² used here.

¹ Except Nas is east coast.
² And Make Noise is in North Carolina.

3. "Ambient then heavy with Moog One, Subsequent 37, Hologram Microcosm, and eurorack drums", Jay Hosking

Jay runs a Patreon; the deal seems to be people crowdfund him to buy the most expensive synthesizers in existence, in exchange he makes music with them and posts it. I imagine a sort of community synth collection, with Jay as the sort of high priest who Plays With The Gear on behalf of the crowd. As such his videos have a heavy focus on process even by Synth YouTube standards, with floating captions often explaining what he's using to make the music and why he's doing what he's doing.

The captions in this song explain it as "I wanted to create something that starts dreamy and goes heavy", and he does deliver on that, using a pair of Moog keyboards for huge padscapes then dropping in dense IDM beats from a purpose-built modular skiff box.

4. "Live Techno Jam #6 - Roland TR6S - Quadrantid Swarm - Minitaur - BlueBox - Blofeld - NTS1", Spadehead

This is just a good, thoughtfully-composed basic four-on-the-floor techno track with a table of 2010s-2020s desktop synths and a really nice 90s feeling. Good background/focus music. I like the obviously-synthesized-strings voice.

One detail maybe worth going into for a moment is the "Minitaur", the little black box in the upper left. This is a 2012 desktop recreation of the gorgeous-sounding bass voice from an ancient and very weird looking Moog synth meant to be played with your feet like organ pedals (for example because your hands are occupied doing a guitar solo). Search YouTube for "Moog Taurus Rush" if you want to see what this looks like.

5. "Heavy Medicine // Make Noise Strega, 0-coast, 0-CTRL // Moog Mother, Matriarch, Elektron", Jon Gee

Jon, like Jay Hosking, is constantly pushing highly-developed synth music to his YouTube, but rather than the community/"let me show you how I made this" focus it all seems very personal. A lot of his video titles use words like "meditation".

About a year ago there was a short period Jon posted a bunch of absolute bangers all in quick succession and this was my favorite from that block, a futuristic synth-rock track based around the Moog Grandmother and the synth "trio" from Make Noise.

⬇️ Click below for west coast noise ⬇️