andi

Here is some music people recorded on modular synthesizers in their homes and then uploaded to YouTube where they received between 50 and 150 views. Also: Hatsune Miku

1. "Techno Live Jam 3 || Subharmonicon, Dfam, Eurorack, Ableton", Sorrowless

This is a driving electronic jam I think I'd describe as "industrial" or "dark trance". The sounds are made on a couple modular synth racks so a neat property of this one is far as I can tell all the drums are being generated live from analog circuitry. Intense, exceptionally clean, effective production and it's all done on some evening's whim for uploading to YouTube.

YouTube has a ton of videos like this and it gives me life.

2. "Desmorph", AcidTonic

Made on one of those wall-sized modular synth racks, the artist describes the video with "Loose ended live improv. First take."

A chill but determined groove undergirded by erratic drums, with a sense of low menace starting to creep in in the second half. Good zone-out music.

3. "Battery Driven", quadratschulz

This is a quirky little hiphop jam on a small collection of handheld/toy synthesizer equipment. Featuring 808 tom bips, Chase Bliss pedal mangling, and extended vocals by Miku Hatsune. For serious. That stylophone looking thing is the "Gakken Otona no Kagaku NSX-39 Pocket Miku Singing Keyboard", an officially licensed Vocaloid product. Skranky¹

4. "Sound Check pre serata - 03052024", Michele Giletto

A modular synth jam based around the Make Noise Shared System. It's thumping and intent, Detroit style, with feedback as a musical element. It builds a really cool feel out of minimal elements, I like the way the rhythm seems to kind of catch on itself.

This one's 10 minutes long, if that's too long for you 6:20 would be a okay time to stop as it enters a kind of separate movement then. But I like the second movement too.

5. "Titan", S 57

Dense faux-retro synths and breaks accompanied by psychedelic MPEG-glitch visuals. I'd call this a dark dance track but it actually may be moving a little too fast to dance to. It's intense.

A space probe you sent out in the 1970s has finally after years of silence sent back a signal but now somehow it is evil and corrupted. That's what you're watching here.

⬇️ Click below for zoomer breakcore and bass headaches ⬇️

Six horror-adjacent noise walls

1. "Neutral Labs Elmyra DIY drone synthesizer & friends", nyppy

The Elmyra was a DIY/"Open Hardware" clone of the SOMA LYRA-8, with 3 operators instead of 8. A drone box. In this video the box's designer demos the Elmyra with a variety of other equipment (including, in some clips, a LYRA-8). A buffet of atmospheric booming sounds.

I try to limit the links in these posts to single tracks but frankly, all 22 of these pieces are really compelling. 30 minutes and none of them wasted.

2. "The Day Of Opening The Tomb", Aural Holograms

This is a 23-minute recording of atmospheric drone ambient, from 2008 and a genre somewhere adjacent to black metal. Metal sounds and distant clanking, sounds that could be wailing or maybe just wind. The YouTube thumbnail actually summarizes this track better than I could. As a connoisseur of structured humming noises, the 23 minutes I spent listening to this were very high-quality ones.

3. "DarkMatter by Lefty’sSoundLab+Eventide BlackHole drone improvisation", Arkady Marto

This is a sorrowful audio inkblot made by a handmade drone synth covered in mysterious knobs. Hypnotic but constantly changing, saws like low horns over a foggy Thames at the start of a spy movie. About 12 minutes in I realized I was convinced I had been hearing a sequence of 3 bass notes for many minutes continuously, but when I concentrated they evaporated

4. "Wail of a Decomposed Star", Hobboth Music

In this beautifully atmospheric piece the musician rigged up a modular system to run on its own and then, they claim, "left this patch to record while taking [a] shower". This is surprising because the piece really does feel like it follows an arc to a distinct climax and decline over its 18 minutes, as if someone was carefully turning knobs to adjust the energy level. So either something effectively acted as a very long LFO or we got lucky. The piece uses sound to paint an evocative H.R. Geiger alien landscape, and incidentally is accompanied by an autovisualizer video of an H.R. Geiger alien landscape.

⬇️ Click below for two more pieces of this type ⬇️

1. "Cruel like Flint", Amon Tobin

So after "Foley Room", drum&bass-adjacent jazz god Amon Tobin went in a very odd direction, focusing on complex live shows and ever-more-fine-tuned monophonic sounds. His newer stuff's pretty challenging even for my odd tastes…!

But! This one track, from a sampler album of the label Tobin founded, really does it for me. Mind-expanding timbres and a quirky rhythm, a cool mix of his old and new sounds. Like feedback dubstep.

2. "Quick Jam with the Moog Mavis", HeadyBeatShell

This is a fun dance techno duet between a simple analog synth and some complex digital synths. Good robot noises and some really effective production for a desktop jam. The Mavis doesn't have a sequencer hooked up so the musician has to play the little toy frontplate keyboard all the way through.

3. "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.

4. "Vegas Bound & Down", BrokenSines

A fun dance techno jam with cool clicky beats, skittering tones and some giant sidechains. Really good sound to it. It's performed (or at least mixed) live on a modular rack, and the YouTube description mentions "VCV Rack", implying an interesting setup where they're mixing or somehow interacting between the physical modules you can see in the video and some emulated modules on a computer, but they don't show that on camera.

The video has a flashing lights warning due to Visual Effects.

5. "Tangie 1hr+ improvised modular techno (live)", Tangie

An unseen person with a modular rack and an octotrack delivering a good 80 minutes of driving, industrial-flavored rave techno. The sound design is consistently full of pleasant surprises and I'm not sure how they keep the energy level up this long while improvising but they somehow do. I would describe this set as "hott" with two Ts. Hott like homotopy type theory. I would highly recommend this if at some point you plan to spend about an hour continuously using a computer for some reason

⬇️ Click below for a brief Amen ⬇️