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 ⬇️

1. "roland s-1 dnb drum play", alarky

It's been said the Drum & Bass genre couldn't have happened without Cubase, the software that originally let 90s artists artisanally place all those 1/16-note hi-hats on a grid. This artist on the other hand says who needs grids, and just sorta mashes the buttons on his drum machine front panel. It's messy, but sorta works! Combined with the weirdly overpowered synthesis of the S-1 it forms an intense mood.

2. "I'm Afraid of Americans", David Bowie (Photek remix)

Heterodox drum & bass artist Photek leans heavily to a kind of minimalism that when it goes too far can feel sparse and strung out. Here the strung-out feel works strongly in the song's favor, as it gives us more time to luxuriate in the voice of David Bowie.

Incidentally I think this mix (from a 1997 remix EP organized by Trent Reznor) might secretly be an early draft of "Seven Samurai"

3. "YAMAHA SU10 DNB JAM", Electromachines

Armed with the terrible Yamaha portable sampler I was talking about before, plus one of Korg's "Monotron" toys and a voice sample from a really old interview with Squarepusher (Do you know Squarepusher?), this musician goes hard on some budget-bin drum & bass. Got those kind of wobwob synths you normally associate with dubstep, but it isn't dubstep, it's drum & bass. It really has that 1997 feel

4. "Mood // Lyra-8 // Drums - Ambient Creation", André Davies

This is a deliriously weird video that I don't think I'd find that weird if I only had the audio. With just audio you'd think "oh, horror movie soundtrack music". With the video, you've got a man seated at a drumkit proceeding to make what seems to be every possible sound other than the sound of a man playing the drums. A step up from metal plates and contact mics maybe? Is this jazz

5. "TANMO", BENDYmusic

YouTube description: "there are no mistakes orchestra, made for interaction, as presented to, you."

Two minutes of mysterious noise, recorded with mysterious electronic boxes on what appears to be a table in a cafe. The feedback wobbles and distorted kicks interweave with passing snippets of conversation from the cafe and a radio which I think is actually patched into the recording device. If you love noise as much as I do you will dig this two minutes. (This post got zero likes on Mastodon).

⬇️ Click below for Dreamcast Drum & Bass ⬇️

Let me tell you about what might still be my favorite genre of music.

1. "Law – Unreleased Jungle Selection"

Jungle is the older, rawer, more chaotic older brother of "Drum & Bass". This YouTube video is a fluid mix of 17 songs by 10 artists recorded in jungle's initial flowering between 1993 and 1995, clocking in at exactly the length of a CD-R. When I linked this video on Mastodon I only had a poorly attributed YouTube repost and I found it very mysterious— who is Law? What does "unreleased" mean? (Some of the songs seemed to have been previously released, but often those were only released in the late 10s, or the Discogs entry for the "release" turned out to refer to a never-distributed test press; other songs or artists from the mix I found no hits for on Google at all.)

"Law" turns out to be the operator of the Drumtrip blog, and this turns out to be a mixtape he posted in 2014, along with a track list and explanations of about half the tracks. Anyway it's a very good mix, dark, driving and grimy.

2. "Digital", Roni Size Reprazent

So "Jungle" lands in the UK underground around 1992 as an ill-defined genre of rave techno with dark chaotic rhythms, dub reggae influences and, often, complex explorations of the Amen Break. Within a few years this is being refined into "Drum & Bass", a narrower genre even more focused on the Amen. This then finally grabbed the attention of the international music press, and the Mercury Prize committee, and me as a techno-obsessed teen in Texas, when Roni Size and his clique released "New Forms", a D&B position paper that definitely feels like the apex of the genre to me (but of course I'm biased— how can you objectively judge something that changed your life?).

Besides being a genre product demo tho this particular album has an amazing, incredibly unique, self-confident tone that nothing else has ever replicated exactly. "Digital" isn't the most avant-garde track on there but it's maybe the stickiest, building an incredible groove out of soul-flavored vocals and an approachable skeleton of D&B.

3. "Threat Actor", Jamie Myerson

What I'm listening to today: "Threat Actor", Jamie Myerson

I have post of recommendations for Bandcamp Friday here on Cohost that I update once a month, and so I have a Simplenote file where I stash a reminders list of bands to add to it. When I came back to look at it this month, I found the last line was

"threat actors?"

What… was this? I had no idea. Searching Bandcamp found only this one song, which I had never heard before. Actually it fuckin rules

(Then when I posted this on Mastodon I actually did get a reply from the composer of the "Threat Actors" I was originally thinking of. It was this.)

4. "7:10", Plug

Luke Vibert is a man of many names and many styles. This is the first track on Plug EP 1, which was released as "Visible Crater Funk" in Europe in 1995 or mashed into CD 2 of "Drum & Bass for Papa" in the US a few years later.

This is D&B (Jungle?) by the basics but the basics are pushed to a point of total chaos. Amen break in a blender to create a maelstrom of drums, and discomfiting, minimal synth tones. It grabs you really well.

5. "Brown Paper Bag (Nobukazu Takemura remix)", Roni Size Reprazent

Okay so back to Roni Size. "Brown Paper Bag" was the album-seller track on New Forms, mostly due to the incredibly sick timewarping music video which had a different, punchier, vocal mix not on the album. The album mix does have some virtue for being one of the best showcases of the lumpy timbres of the double bass ever committed to vinyl. But my favorite version of "Brown Paper Bag" remains this rare remix by Nobukazu Takemura, an excellent Japanese glitch musician I once saw live by accident.

(You might find the first two minutes here offputting. Give it a chance.)

⬇️ Click below for LTJ Bukem doing jazz ⬇️