Would you like to hear some noises
- "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
- "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.
- "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.
- "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
- "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 ⬇️