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#Sinking Feeling

mcc
@mcc

What I listened to last week: Final test after repair & service

  1. "Modular jam with Volca Modular, Korg NTS-1 and Playtronica Touch Me", ITSME

This is a short, peaceful synth piece performed on a tree. Like, uh. This person got hold of a device that converts current (capacitance?) changes from human touch into MIDI, and then they wired it to a small tree. So the harder they squeeze the tree the higher the note on the Volca Modular goes. Anyway, it's a real nice song.

  1. "Roland MKS-80 REV5 & MPG-80 (1983)", Werkstatt Matlak

This unusual YouTube account has a number of videos, each featuring exactly one vintage or rare synthesizer and a sparse summary like "Final test after service". The channel's "about" page identifies itself as belonging to a small synth repair shop in Bavaria; apparently whenever they finish repairing a customer device they make a song with it.

This video features the Super Jupiter (a rackmount MIDI Jupiter-8) and its programmer. They use it to make sick retro hip-hop in the style of early Warp.

  1. "A8 KM34", Funkstörung

"Appetite for Disctruction" was released in the brief initial golden era of IDM and I think got kinda quickly forgotten?, but almost every track on it would have been the best track on some other album. All bizarre dirty bitcrushed beats and catchy clean synthtone melodies, all really satisfying.

This isn't my favorite track on there, but last Wednesday I had a day I just couldn't stop thinking about it. Sometimes you just have an A8 KM34 day.

  1. "最強ACIDマシーン。The strongest ACID machine.", TUNASAN

The "T-8 Aria Compact" is a neat device from Roland that tries to get some of that Volca money Korg's been scooping up by putting in a single tiny box [digital emulations of] an 808 and a 303, Roland's early-80s drum/"bass" synths that failed, flooded the used market and then accidentally invented ACID.

In this video, a dog wearing a tiny hat (judging from their avatar) makes some ACID. A T-8 review, in English and Japanese, is hidden in the YouTube captions.

Video contains color strobing effects

  1. "Devolver", Stardust

This is a 2021 demo for the Spectrum ZX by demoscene group Stardust. I linked a Stardust demo in these posts before (again: not Thomas Bangalter related) and the other one was more visually impressive, but the music in this one is incredibly hype and stands on its own as a piece of relentless, borderline-gabber hardcore dance music. There are acid sounds in here I am sincerely baffled how they tricked a ZX into making.

⬇️ Click below for IDM and more Werkstatt Matlak ⬇️

mcc
@mcc
mcc
@mcc
mcc
@mcc

The best electronic music on YouTube (according to me)

There's this really neat community of people who do live synthesizer jams at home and post the videos to YouTube and Reddit. I discovered this around late 2017 and it quickly became the main source of music I listen to.

For a while now I've been building a playlist/mixtape of the very very best songs from this community, the ones I come back and listen to again and again. It's been stable enough for long enough now I finally feel confident publishing it, so I made it public today:

Playlist: The best electronic music on YouTube

If you follow me on Mastodon, I do a daily "what I'm listening to today" post (usually a Synth YouTube jam), so for the next couple weeks I'll be instead using those posts to post thoughts on the tracks of the playlist one by one. (I'll come back here and post a digest of those when I'm done.)

EDIT: Did you find this post through tag search? The true post is here.

mcc
@mcc

Update: And now as promised, the track explanations

(1/13) "Follow Nina", Caspar Hesselager YouTube link

This is a 15-minute, totally unearthly piece wherein a loop of Nina Simone singing, fed to an envelope follower, controls a swarm of oscillators "following" her voice. The piece builds incredibly slowly, from indecipherable bass rumbling to distorted singing to indecipherable chaos again as Nina's voice is drowned out by tones flying off on trajectories she merely suggested.

2. "Novation Peak | Ambient", r beny YouTube link

I've linked r beny from here before; this is my favorite song of his. It's so simple but so powerful, a few chords run through steadily increasing distortion until they become a universe of sound. When I first heard it I just posted "Why did my heart just stop"

Used to when I felt like listening to this track I'd search YouTube for "Peak Ambient". That pretty much covers it.

3. "A Healthy Dose of Dope AF", Aidan Burns-Fulkerson YouTube link

This one's fun.

This is a good showcase of the jam genre I think of as "misfit toys". It makes use of a drum machine, echo, and tiny keyboard (the last modded with a soldering iron and drill into a CV controller) literally designed as toys; all three used to hang in the checkout lane at Guitar Center. Combined with a high-end 0-coast, the sound is massive.

4. "201002 Moog DFAM, Subharmonicon, Lyra 8", Ryan Bocook YouTube link

This has a strange vibe but is really catchy. The poster deploys the Lyra and Subharmonicon, two machines designed for ambient music, to create rhythmic pop, and in the background uses Moog's drum machine as a melodic element. Regardless nothing feels mismatched, it's all very cohesive. It feels like the soundtrack to something, but I can't identify what.

5. "Volca Tribal || Volca Drum & Volca Modular", User 173 YouTube link

This… this is the good drone. This piece is based around the two most advanced of Korg's Volca desktop synths (a patchwire modular unit that's basically a Buchla clone, and a physical modeling drum synth with some strange corners in its parameter space) and a LOT of echo. The result: Wwwwoooooooommmmmmmmmm weyyyyeyrrrerrwow

Also I like the little animations.

6. "I Learned A Cool Secret", Ivar Tryti YouTube link

Elektron has this family of "Grooveboxes" that all have similar casing and interfaces. Their unchallenged master on YouTube is Ivar Tryti, who three years ago got a Digitakt and in time since has posted at least 3 albums' worth of trip-hop excellence. This track combines Elektron's FM synth box with their sampler to build an incredible, blissfully loopy, unnamable energy.

7. "Square (Volca Keys, Volca FM, OP-1, PO-32)", Leonid Zarubin YouTube link

Mr. Zarubin has a bunch of videos that stand out to me for getting a ton of mileage out of simple, low-end synths and guitar pedals (its not in this one, but some of his best tracks make amazing use of the Casio SA-5 keyboard for children). This one track in particular sticks with me for just having a really great chill feeling to it.

8. "Sempervirens", r beny YouTube link

Here beny uses a Roli Seaboard MPE controller (a kind of squishy keyboard that records how hard you press and how you slide your fingers around the keys) to play a violin sample synth with the expressiveness of real violins. Run thru chunky reverb, each note becomes a stuttery chorus of violins. Result is an intense feeling of floating in viscous air, slowly orbiting an indistinct point.

9. "Ambient jam with the Arturia PolyBrute", Jay Hosking YouTube link

The Minibrute is my favorite monosynth, really full sounds. In this video Hosking sat down to do a product demo of the absurdly-expensive polyphonic Brute, but wound up just incidentally composing an independently gorgeous piece of music.

What originally fascinated me about this is it's the only song I can think of that has no drums yet still has a drop.

10. "Comfort Zone", Ivar Tryti YouTube link

I made a rule for myself no more than two songs from a single artist on this list, so I had to pick just two r beny and now here's the second Ivar Tryti song.

I'm not sure what genre this is. Not quite trip hop. Whatever DJ Shadow and maybe early Four Tet were? A lot of Tryti songs have long piano samples in them; I think he might actually just have a piano somewhere off camera.

11. "AFX Station, Korg Wavestate, Elektron Digitone, Stutter Edit 2", Sinking Feeling YouTube link

Some unusual synths involved here: Korg's modern wavetable synth and a variant of the Novation Bass Station coproduced with Aphex Twin. What sells it tho is MIDI and a stutter plugin generating quasi-random sequences and changing things up every few seconds to make something unpredictable, haunting and a little bit frightening.

12. "Oscillation", Jeanie YouTube link

Modular synthesizers are usually about sculpting single finely tuned timbres, and YouTube synth videos are often just to show off one single sound or groove. It's kinda rare to see anything with conventional song structure. Which is fine! But then here's a complete, compelling pop song, with singing!— very good singing!— based around modular synths and a Buchla easel, and it's amazing.

13. "Futuresonus Parva analog poly-synth with LinnStrument demo", Geert Bevin YouTube link

Another MPE controller, but plugged into a fancypants 24-saw oscillator, so you have a synth being controlled moment to moment with the expressive dimension of a violin. I worry these writeups overemphasize the technical so to be clear the piece performed is gutpunch stunning. This is the power of a human playing a musical instrument.