Here's a mixtape for you that slowly transitions, over 7 tracks, from noise pop to regular pop.

1. "Soma RoAT Exploration N°2", HELL F.O

This is based on the Soma "Rumble of Ancient Times", an opinionated/toy synth based on configuring four drone voices and triggering them with a pad. The normal problem of noise synths is they sound cool but wind up just making one undifferentiated drone; the ROAT solves this by making four drones.

Here the ROAT is combined with Korg's desktop drum-modeling synth to make a cool and nicely structured glitch hop jam. "It's just like listening to real music!"

2. "Soma ROAT Jam - Mélodie d'automne", Sidney Cote Nadon

This one uses two Rumble of Ancient Times units plus an Akai sampler to make dance techno with the ROATs' various noise generators providing the sirens, swells and background beepy noises you expect to be drifting in and out in the background of such music. It jams. If you liked whatever "Electro" was in 2008 ("Electroclash"? Was that the same thing?) you'll probably like this.

3. "random noise 079", glenn clyatt

A bizarre journey back and forth and back again across the border between music and noise, this uses a Bastl Kastle and a chiptune synth to pile together bizarre noises until suddenly the noise coalesces into some pretty cool sounding dance techno!… before just as suddenly slowing down 800% and becoming one of, depending on your mindset,

1. An out-of-body bliss state as chill alien timbres lead you on a psychedelic trip
2. Absolute terror, as something you cannot see or escape (perhaps the song itself?) is crying out in pain and despair

4. "Koma Krell | 0-Coast | Field Kit | Part Two | Extended Cut", Bottle Makes Music

The "Krell Patch" is a setup various synthesizers make possible to construct, where the closing envelope at the end of one note triggers the start of the next note. The name is supposedly a reference to the movie "Forbidden Planet". This Krell is augmented with a synth-controlled radio and the fellowship hall from a suburban church used for natural echo.

TLDR: This is 12 minutes of beeps.

5. "live stream #1 … subroom signals", substan

substan posts a lot of chill electronic music on YouTube; I've linked him in my Mastodon recommendations thread before. This is an absolutely lovely two-hour-long (!) flowing set of chill-beats ambient songs performed by substan, alternating "music they'd play in a yoga class" and "music to program to" with flavors of acid and dubby clicks-and-cuts floating in and out. It is massive; every song in this set individually is a song I'd recommend by itself.

Basically, if you like Future Sound of London, then listen to this.

Notice ⬇️

Here's a sort of seven-track mixtape of the most alien noises I was able to find. Featured: Feedback, Supercollider, Software Defined Radio, the Bastl Kastle, the Wing Pinger, Björk.

1. "Triple Kastle", alloutofsync

The Bastl Kastle is a lovely toy-like palmtop instrument that mocks the entire expensive idiom of modular synths by costing like $60, running off 3 AA batteries and yet sounding like it contains an entire universe of glitchy noise.

This piece combines three Kastles crosswired to make otherworldly noises unlike anything you've ever heard, although oddly it does remind me a bit of the Earthbound cave music.

2. "Every song on Björk's album 'Vespertine' at the same time"

Play two songs at once, and you find interesting convergences as the rhythms go in and out of sync. Play twelve songs at once, and you get… well nothing really, mostly you just learn 606 drums and the harpsicord sound from "Pagan Poetry" stand out well amidst noise.

This experiment starts off feeling kind of pointless, but then there's a shift, like the floor dropping out under you. Once the song intros are past everything blends, and coalesces into a slowly-mutating, gloriously creepy, shockingly emotional uniform howl.

3. "Saigon Window", Dexba

A flowing 20-minute live set featuring a slightly unusual setup (including multiple of the idiosyncratic, opinionated synths designed by Meng Qi) and, as advertised, a window on a Vietnamese street. Starts with some basically okay distorted chimes and echoing howls but around the seven to ten minute mark it finds an atmospheric groove and from there to the end is a transcendent cosmic journey.

4. "#Noisevember 12", Daniel M. Karlsson

Daniel M. Karlssonis a experimental electronic composer I've been following for years, with a prolific output mostly based on algorithmic generation and an open-source extension to Supercollider he developed. (My favorite was the Bandcamp album with over a thousand tracks added one by one over a period of years).

This was Karlsson's Nov 12 entry for the "#Noisevember" event on Mastodon (he's now moved on to Dronecember). In the Mastodon post he explains this track is based on a string physical model; the model seems to be pushed to (past?) its limit, producing frequencies no string instrument could produce and unearthly, sorrowful noise.

The Bandcamp image for this track is, in fact, its source code.

Notice ⬇️