andi

Would you like to hear some noises

1. "Prague", David Prescott

This was recorded in Boston in 1987 and distributed exclusively on cassette tape (by an experimental music label in Germany named "Prion Tapes"). A symphony of noise, too loud to really be "ambient", this is an hour* of feedback and mysterious unknown electronics. Coil fans take note

* What I'm really trying to call your attention to here is "Side A" (the first 28 minutes) but side B does have its own nice prog vibe

2. "Cristal Baschet- Bass Euphone Song", yatsoosh

This dude built, from raw metal, an all-acoustic unamplified instrument based on the "Cristal Baschet" designed by the Baschet brothers in the 50s. The idea is you glide wet fingers on glass rods, and the vibrations are amplified by those giant metal plates. Having built the instrument the guy composed a song for it, which he also sings accompanying lyrics to, in Latin.

It's… incredible.

3. "Upside- Down VHS III", A Beautiful Burning World ft. FERRIFET

So if I understand this correctly, this is VHS footage where the tape's been removed from the cassette & re-inserted upside down, causing it to play back backward and all messed up. The artist sets this video to some noise ambiance from a previous collaboration and it hits the tone perfectly and even kind of syncs up, a little.

I think I might describe a lot of music as "ominous" but oh my god, this is super ominous.

4. "LYRA-8 + Modular Synth // Experimental Drone", Sakai Meno

I've featured the SOMA LYRA-8 so many times in these mixtapes that I had to kind of introduce a moratorium on it for a while, but this track makes the LYRA exciting to me again by using it as a kind of base oscillator and processing its boomy sounds through several (out-of-focus in the video) racks of modular synth, adding texture and structure. Imagine a sunrise being eaten by happy robot alligators

5. "4-23-24A Bastl Generative Patch", Edwin Perry Manchester

Gosh, I love Bastl. Bastl makes DIY-flavored sound machines with quirky behavior. Here five of their boxes (four of them from their cheap "Kastle" line, each device powered by two AA batteries and two ATTiny microcontrollers) are cross-wired to create an indescribable madness, new waves of noise cresting every few seconds.

AI is not necessary for a machine to have unknowable complexity, or for that matter personality

⬇️ Click below for shoegaze and some kind of tree ritual ⬇️

Six songs with some jaunts into early electroacoustic music

1. "Meditation In White Sound", Halim El-Dabh

Halim El-Dabh (see article) is a fascinating figure— an Egyptian composer with a career spanning 72 years and an undefeated claim to creating the first piece of electronic music ever ("The Expression of Zaar" aka "Wire Recorder Piece", 1944).

This 1959 piece, recorded at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, is an absolutely gorgeous minimalist ambient journey.

2. "Boundless pad", Mike Lewis

If you want to make the kind of ambient music that sounds like just one giant chord for three minutes, the Novation Peak is a good synthesizer to go with.

This track is three minutes of stately chord progression absolutely drenched in echo. Extremely satisfying. Imagine someone in a big comfy sweater with a big cup of coffee jumping up and down in front of a sunrise yelling "Yes!! Yes!!! This is so relaxing!!!"

3. "Soma Labs Lyra 8 + Hologram Microcosm Performance [No Talking]", A NEVER ENDING EXPLOSION

This video's thumbnail reads "Tuning the Lyra-8 to a Hungarian Minor Scale". The musician doesn't explain further, but the Lyra's 8 touchpad "keys" can be tuned to any arbitrary frequency, so it's good for tuning/scale experiments of that type.

This piece is 16 minutes and makes every second count, a series of giant haunting tones with cryptic, intense emotions.

4. "Covenant - Live", Abre Ojos

This is the kind of music that is used for dolly shots slowly gliding down spaceship hallways when it is going to turn out later that your spaceship is haunted. Creepy indescribable atmospheric noises and big thumping beats wet with distortion.

You should watch the video if you want some nice psychedelic visualizations (or avoid watching the video if you're unusually sensitive to flashing colors).

5. "Satie?", Dud Faz

Satie? Is this Satie? I don't know? This is a peppy, pleasantly sloppy jam that plausibly sounds as if it is inspired by, or possibly might even directly incorporate motifs from, the work of Erik Satie (1866-1925). At one point the musician is performing drums by hitting keys on a piano keyboard. How to describe this? Imagine a dance number breaking out in a 19th-century French factory.

⬇️ Click below for more electroacoustic music from 1956 ⬇️

Here are six songs

1. "Heavy Balloon", Fiona Apple

"Fetch the Boltcutters" was released one month into COVID. Ah!, culture responded. How resonant! Everyone in lockdown can relate to this! Nobody noticed the fridge horror. She released it at the start of lockdown. For months or years before COVID started Fiona had already been holed up inside, teaching herself the drums and stewing about ex-boyfriends. Anyway, good album. Here's a funk song about being depressed but also angry.

2. "Pop 6", Gas

This is some jangling, indistinct ambient. Sometimes it is good to listen to one meticulously-crafted sound for ten minutes. There's a bit of variation to keep things interesting but mostly this is just sort of like an atmospheric soundtrack to your life, assuming that the thing happening in your life right now is at least somewhat ominous.

3. "He Turns Down", Cat Power

Cat Power was the queen of the 90s/00s indie/lo-fi "evocative" folk-rock set. This is from my fave album of hers (Moon Pix) and is actually not my fave song on Moon Pix, but it's the song that best embodies the off-kilter, off-center style of her early albums; everything feels like Take One, everything feels spontaneous and a little unstable, like the song is about to topple over and take you with it. This song's memorable for the flute accompaniment, which seems to be doing something totally unrelated to the rest of the song. I don't know what that flute means. It seems important.

4. "Abalone", PACKS

This is a fun, messy indie rock jam from 2022. I actually don't know much about this band! Wikipedia says they're from Toronto? The album cover gives me a feeling of old family vacation photos.

5. "verZion", Syphus AKA silo7

A mod-style tracker has a finite number of channels, and each is fundamentally monophonic; a channel could play a sample containing a chord, but could only play one such sample at once. This means if you want sounds with long tails, like piano sounds, you have to do tricks like alternating each note in a different channel so each sound gets a chance to complete before the next one starts. Sometimes this gives tracker music, when viewed in the tracker, a fascinating two-dimensional ascii art structure, like the long diagonal chains in this banger of a track.

⬇️ Click below for ominous industrial noise ambient like I normally post ⬇️

1. "Make Noise Strega, Korg nu Tekt nts-1", grumpfigrumpf

This is a lovely, brain-stem-grabbing ambient jam I discovered a while back and return to sometimes. It's basically the epitome of drone music, because it consists entirely of an echo filter run into a second echo filter. (The Strega does have a VCO, but it isn't on at the start of the video; instead they initially seed the feedback loop by turning the delay speed down until the bbd resolution is so low it introduces crackling.)

2. "Cartographer - Eurorack Drone", Michael Furtak

This is a slow, threatening ambient piece. It's the length and shape of a "song" but it is definitely all about the sounds. Metal-y FM noises, shimmering sweeps, gradually introduced deathmarch beats. And of course the standard drone moan. It feels like standing on a hill and watching something indescribably enormous passing far overhead.

3. "Make Noise Shared System Jamuary 11.2023", Lukas Hermann

A minimal synth noodle with some note sequencers and the Shared System (Make Noise's standard eurorack module bundle). Not very complicated but I like it. There's some interesting implicit clicky percussion when the echo gets its teeth into some of the notes' attacks. Goes through an interesting change partway through.

4. "Ambient improvisation 7 (Soma Enner + Cosmos)", Più

Made on SOMA's touchplate crackly sounds box combined with their irrational-phase looper pedal. I've linked this same artist using this same equipment before but this piece comprises totally different sounds than the last one, starting with gentle buzzy hums and escalating to ominous swarmscapes and rocking thumps (if you pay attention, caused by physically smacking the device). I find this one very emotionally intense; it definitely shows the expressiveness of the Enner as a performance instrument.

5. "Bombora || Sequential Prophet Rev2", Pat Carroll

A peaceful low-key keyboard solo. A lot of the synth music I link in these posts the focus is on the technical shock of the instrument capabilities, so I'm not sure how to express the idea a synth piece is just about the synth player's performance. Like, linguistically. You say something is "a piano performance" and everyone understands you're calling attention to the piano playing, but you say "a synth performance" and it's not clear if you're praising the keyboardist or the keyboard. Actually this song possibly could have been performed on a piano, though the Prophet voice's LFO does add some nice subtle rhythmic elements.

Anyway. Feels good

⬇️ Click below for Squarepusher and my favorite CD "hidden track" ever ⬇️