Here are five pieces of music, ranging from lost early electronic music to dubstep performed on a Spectrum ZX.
- "Mixed Emotions", Bebe Barron
In 1956, experimental electronic musicians (and married couple) Bebe and Louis Barron composed the score for Forbidden Planet¹, inspiring a generation.
In 2000, Bebe visited the music lab at UCSB and recorded a new piece. It is sick. It seems to be inventing entirely new emotions. It sounds exactly like the music 60s electronic artists would have made if not held back by the friction of contemporary recording.
- "La Jetée", Sines of Exquisite Pleasure
I somehow, happily, managed to wedge YouTube in a state this weekend where it recommended me nothing but albums from the early 80s artists self-published on cassette tape. Sines of Exquisite Pleasure was a particularly exciting find from this; their 1981 album "Modular Systems" is amazing, but this one particular serene track from their 1984 tape stands out to me for its retro-invocations of Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Air.
- "pulsar 23 volca fm jam", clyv
This jam gets some wonderfully bizarre, Paul-Lansky-worthy noises out of Volca's cheap modern DX-7 clone box, combined with some wonderful grungy noises from using the Pulsar-23 (a drum machine) as a synth voice. Once the (chugging, dirty) beat comes in the overall feeling is pleasantly disorienting, like listening from afar to a rock concert, or perhaps an alien invasion, happening on the far other side of an echoey valley.
- "Spirals & Orbits", Benge
This was recorded this year but is going hard in both audio and visuals for the aesthetics of a 60s-70s educational filmreel, all baffling diagrams and radiophonic-workshop abstract noises, video feedback, quiet glimmering echoes on slow oscillator sweeps. (The past-decades feeling is helped by the song being recorded entirely on a 60s-period Buchla 100 with a contemporary tape echo.) As a piece of ambient music it's entrancing.
- "Elysium State", Stardust
The "demoscene" if you're not familiar makes tiny audiovisual programs that push the limits of computer hardware. The community started on 80s hardware, and since wowing on modern GPUs is less challenging they to a large extent stayed on 80s hardware, making them a good source of modern chiptune. Here's a new 2022 demo by Stardust (not to be confused with the 1998 Thomas Bangalter side project).
TLDR Dubstep on a ZX Spectrum