1. "Time Eater", Gold Panda (Ssighborggg and Luna re-cover)

Gold Panda is an electronic musician I'm fond of, one of those sample-oriented hip-hop-sorta artists on the Bonobo/Blockhead model. This is one of Gold Panda's better songs being performed, with samples replaced by a live-instruments arrangement, by an American/Korean math-rock group and a traditional Korean gayageum player. I would describe the effect as "rocking".

2. "Puppygirl Forever", @minasheep (@lynnedrum remix)

This is "breakcore" (is this breakcore? I think it is breakcore), cheerful happy hardcore pop, but in this remix it's going just a little too hard, the accelerator's pushed just a little too much, giddy until it gets a sort of a sinister edge, like a upbeat sugar high gone just a little too far, like… okay I guess like a puppy girl that's just a little too excited. I was trying not to say it

3. "System Jam #3", Edd Butterworth

A lot of the live synth jam videos on YouTube are either posted by, or made possible by equipment donations by, the companies that make the synth equipment, as semi-covert ads. The good news is instead of buying the equipment you can just watch the videos. This video was posted by ALM/Busy Circuits to show off their eurorack line, but by itself it's a funky weird-noises rave with captivatingly screwy beats.

4. "∆°S-P-3-C-1-3-S_U-N-K-N-0-W-N°∆", Th3Pock3tOp3rat0r

One for the "doing the most with the least" category, this is Teenage Engineering's cheap toy sampler/drum machine run into Korg's cheap toy echo unit. The sound here is huge, the PO-33 is pushed to the limit of its sequencing abilities and the track is hard and driving, electro rock with a touch of 80s feel. Imagine a hypothetical 00s metroidvania that the only reason you remember it is this one song from the soundtrack.

5. "Live Tribe Tekno 147bpm with Eowave Quadrantid Swarm and more Hardware!", dReadSolJah

This is a 70-minute live set of industrial-y rave techno, based on a mix of live synthesizers (with the Swarm at the center) and pre-recorded Ableton loops. A couple different days now I've listened to this while working and both times I could not tell you what happened during that hour, I just entered this totally hypnotized trance state.

⬇️ Click below for modular drum solo ⬇️

I've been doing this thing. When I find a song I really fall in love with I post it on Mastodon as a "What I'm listening to today" post, and once I've got a week's worth I collate them here on Cohost. Thing is though I started doing this about three months before Cohost existed. So there's a bunch of posts in my Mastodon thread I never mirrored here.

Here's the best seven tracks from those three months. Each is someone from YouTube's music community doing something unique with electronic music equipment.

1. "Moog Subharmonicon Jump and Run Jam", Attic Audio

The Subharmonicon is Moog's generative-music machine, based on resurrecting ideas from two lost proto-synthesizers from the 1940s, the Trautonium and Leon Theremin's "Rhythmicon". The Subharmonicon generates chords and rhythms that are just musical enough to be compelling but just strange enough no human would ever design them on purpose, and the normal way to use it is to let it free-run with some echo to generate ambient music. In this track tho the musician continuously switches settings and modes to actually play it like an instrument, and the result is not just fun to watch but incredibly catchy.

In some Synth Youtube stunt casting, drums are handled by Yamaha's now-forgotten 1990 MIDI PDA, the QY10.

2. "Make Noise Strega & Pianoteq Bechstein | Ambient", Akihiko Matsumoto

The Strega meanwhile is a truly remarkable piece of hardware— a collaboration between a synth company and a musician (Alessandro Cortini) that blends "musical instrument" and "toy" in the way my old art-game projects strove to. It's a delay reverb simultaneously uglified and overpowered to make the perfect drone machine. Here it is at its best, tearing apart the spectra of an iPad piano synthesizer.

3. "Mutable Instruments Rings triggered by drums", David L. Fankhauser

This is a drum solo with a physical trigger on the bass drum so every time the bass drum hits it advances a sequence on a modular synthesizer. In other words the drummer controls the entire piece, the synth conforms its tempo to the drumming and when the drummer starts switching the rhythm up the music adjusts to it in a really natural way. Technically interesting, but also an incredible mood!

4. "Kaleidoscope", substan

I've featured substan a few times in my Mastodon thread; they tend to make compact techno songs on Elektron grooveboxes. This song's made entirely on the Digitone, Elektron's FM box, and the youtube title claims it is "downbeat psybient". Anyway it's a lovely little piece of electronic pop, I really like the progression on this one.

5. "A Synthesist's Drum Solo // Drum & Synth / Moog DFAM / Subharmonicon / Mother 32 / Elektron Digitakt", Paul-Aaron Wolf

A structurally complex six minute performance of a man very enthusiastically playing the drums accompanied by a shifting set of semi-generative synth loops. This piece is absolutely incredible but, demonstrating the cruel attention economy of YouTube, only had 367 views on YouTube when I linked it on Mastodon, at which point it was about a year old; now, six months later, it's up to 421.