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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. ⬇️

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 ⬇️