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. ⬇️

Here are five songs made with simple electronics and one song made with no electronics.

1. "No-input mixer minimal techno", closedcircuits

Consider the mixer. It's supposed to be a passive thing, but it has bandpass, which combined with feedback can do simple but interesting synthesis. It often has a compressor and sometimes sidechains, which means dynamics are an option. And it's got a lot of controls. So this leads to the idea of the "no input mixing board" (most famously explored in a series of excellent albums by Toshimaru Nakamura). This artist takes the idea one step further by using the technique for rhythm, cross-wiring two mixers into a funky drum machine in this quiet but rocking dance track.

2. "Polyend Tracker Untitled Electronics Jam", Risa T

This is a short trip-hop jam on a portable hardware tracker. (Like, the kind of tracker one would normally associate with text-mode DOS or the Atari ST. There have been a couple attempts recently to put one in a standalone hardware device.) Skittering, glitchy beats and a kind of mysterious air.

3. "Battle Against Belch" (EarthBound), Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka (Nintendo)¹

EarthBound is the game that famously managed to permanently change how every millennial video game hipster thinks about games, without being what Nintendo would consider a financial success. This dark jazz track from the equally influential soundtrack (one of only a few from the SNES to realize that the SNES sound chip is basically an EMU SP-1200) stitches a series of samples and ~leitmotifs~ which appear both before and after it in the game together with a grinding bass.

4. "Magritte's Dream", Yusuke Shirakawa

Music concrète on a desktop, this piece is made with tape loops and scavenged-looking cassette equipment (including one literal loop of magnetic tape which appears to have no "cassette" attached). With one four-track tape and one mono, the artist has five faders that (in a performance with no instruments) they can play like an instrument to create peaceful and only slightly creeptastic ambiance.

5. "Flowing Water", Chu-Tong Zhou

This is a piece of classical Chinese music, whose score was first written down around 1350 CE, though according to various sources on Google it existed in some form as far back as 500 BCE (and according to the YouTube summary here the most recent "paragraph" was added around 1850 CE)². Here it's performed on the guqin with a devastating gentleness, each of the five(?) sections keeping a distinct and sharp emotional tenor.

⬇️ Click below for beeps ⬇️