Here are six songs for you
- "I'm Out", Tom Ehrlich
Four minutes of lovely blasting industrial noise, evolving from the drone of evil bagpipes to drunkenly staggering almost-melodic cinematic synthwave.
- "Off The Wall", Kurena Ishikawa
Live jazz performance of a woman playing a standup bass and singing to her own accompaniment. A really compelling piece, and the groove feels so naturally jazzy I didn't realize until after I'd posted this to Mastodon that this is actually a Michael Jackson cover (a really early one, from the first Quincy Jones collaborations).
I really like the sound of analog bass! Most recorded music with bass guitar pushes the bass into the back to support other sounds, but occasionally jazz will let its bass solo or at least bring it forward in the mix and analog bass just has this wonderful bwow bwow noise when you let it be heard, it has a really great timbre.
- "Volcano", The Swans
This was the track from "Soundtracks from the Blind" that always stuck with me hardest; it's just so different, the album is mostly spacy shoegaze and then suddenly this track hits in a blast of desynced dance beats, electronic buzzing and ghostly singing. What I didn't know until this week is the reason it's so different is it's the album's one track produced entirely by Jarboe, the woman singing on it. I'd always assumed this was a sample collage and that the singing was some folk song they'd dug up!
Note: This track is pretty loud, so make sure to turn up your speakers/headphones even louder before you start to make sure you have the full experience (of being hit by a truck).
- "G-Spot Tornado", Frank Zappa
I didn't know this existed until last week, but Zappa's final studio album ("Jazz from Hell") was created entirely on the Synclavier, a late-70s DAW predating microcomputers and shipping on several large cabinets.
I absolutely cannot overstate how strange the music on this album is. Zappa was intentionally leaning into the fact the Synclavier could play music a human ensemble couldn't, so the music is beyond avant-garde and occasionally outright atonal. But the synth quality, to modern ears, is so poor, all the Synclavier can do is simple samples and very early-gen FM. It's impossible to comprehend what this felt like in 1986 as at the time it must have felt impossibly futuristic but to me (and probably you) it indelibly sounds like general MIDI on cheap 90s PC sound cards.
(This particular track focuses more on the sample capability and so has sort of a Super Nintendo feel to someone of my generation; my other two favs from the album, "Beltway Bandits" and "While You Were Art II", which I absolutely recommend listening to in order, focus more on FM, so those ones have more of the Soundblaster/Sega Genesis feel. Those two also better showcase the weird compositional wavelength Zappa was seeking with the Synclavier, which is the real attraction here.)
- "Modular Jam#1 - Verbos Electronics", Maarten Vandamme
Incredibly quiet and gentle, this one is a few minutes of soft hissing hums with sharper melodic synths bubbling under the surface. The piece is performed on a Buchla-style modular suitcase; the "Verbos" is the touch keyboard, which is screwed into the suitcase along with the synth modules.