andi

Oh my gosh!! Oh my gosh I love electronic music!!!

1. "The Roland TR-8 Drone Machine", Kablehead

Pitch is rhythm on a different timescale. Play a PCM impulse twice a second, and you'll perceive a 120 BPM beat. Play it 256 times a second and you'll perceive a middle C tone.

This musician exploits this by turning up a TR-8 drum machine to 300 BPM and filling all 16 steps on each channel, so each drum smears out into a rattling chug. Then for ten minutes they explore the sonic configuration space of the resulting combined roar. Good stuff.

2. "Explorations 007", Stöfbug

This starts off as a minute or so of ambient synth whooshes before settling into a determined, dubby techno drive. (The artist describes it as "minimal techno".) Brings a series of recurring elements in and out over nine minutes but refuses to ever get predictable.

Made on the Syntakt, which is (speaking in terms of synthesis engines here) the most software-like / least "opinionated" of the modern Elektron devices; compared to other Elektron-based music, Syntakt tracks vary more by musician in feel.

4. "Syntakt and Analog Heat + FX Jam", Risa T

Using Elektron's Syntakt and also their digital effects+analog distortion box, London-based DJ Risa T here creates a fun, boppy, unpredictable techno piece with some really unique far-future-reggae sound design. Lots of strange, slippery sounds to groove to.

In the performance she's wearing a T-shirt that says "Love who you are". I just thought that was nice.

5. "Whorl", Ezra Fike

A chill, slightly forlorn ambient/dance piece made entirely of tape manipulation. Ezra combines three devices: One of those nice four-track Tascams, a mysterious chunky tape player that looks like school equipment, and Bastl's digital granular tape-loop emulator. Everything is tape, kicks are produced by scrunchy tape catches, a bassline is performed by changing a tape speed.

An affectingly understated piece, it builds a hype (but strangely quiet) beat and then lets it slowly get devoured by noise. Someone is standing in the corner of a large room dancing by themself, turned away from the room like they don't want anyone to see.

⬇️ Click below for more Elektron, more tape music, and electric piano. ⬇️

Here is some music for listening to in a dark room lit by a computer monitor at exactly 2 AM on August 8, 2003.

1. "ZIQAL DIMENSION + bionic lestar + Zadar", Plugman

"Plugman" is an electronic-music performing artist actively operating in Japan, but his YouTube account is used exclusively for short sound tests and module demonstrations; I've been watching the account for months waiting for him to post an actual song. Here he finally has, sort of, a short but extremely sick 2-minute jam with cool swooshy synths. This makes me think of whatever it was "dub" meant in the early 00s techno scene.

2. "Taxi", Pole

In 1996, a DJ named Stefan Betke dropped his Waldorf "4-Pole" filter and broke it. The "broken" filter turned out to make strange, unique crackly noises that Betke loved so much he recorded 3 entire albums of minimalist, borderline-ambient "dub" techno based around the filter's new sounds. This is my favorite track from the set, a tense, hypnotic descent into a single hissing loop disrupted by sketchy reggae instrumentation.

3. "10 minutes of DUB TECHNO on the korg VOLCA bass/FM/Sample", Gunjack

"Dub" emerged in the early 70s as a minimal, bass-focused, echo-drenched variant of reggae.

Then "Dub" emerged in the late 90s as a techno genre aping dub reggae style, generally with no lyrics and often with minimal, microhouse, or (sometimes) no beats.

This YouTube dub techno set was made on Korg's quartet of cheap desktop synths, and it's good. Actually, it's very good. Cocooned in floaty vibes

4. "Wallfacer", Vladislav Delay

Vladislav Delay has been making distinctive, often cryptic glitch-adjacent electronic music since the late 90s, and is considered one of the foundational artists of dub techno. He's now releasing lots of rapid-fire EPs on a Bandcamp-mediated subscription plan. This is from this year and feels dub-like in spirit (if not in stereotypical elements), beats and isolated abstract noises floating in dark space. A zen rock garden made of sounds.

5. "Starlight", Model 500 (Moritz remix)

This week's list wound up with a dub techno theme, so I thought to cap it off I should listen to some dub techno classics and pick a really epic track to post on Friday. What I then realized is that dub techno doesn't really do "epic". "Satisfying" or "chill" is more its speed. So here's a seminal dub track from 1995 that is just really intensely satisfying, a tiny understated funk groove. A splash of cool water on your face in July.

⬇️ Click below for more dub from YouTube and the list I got "Starlight" from ⬇️