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. ⬇️

1. "ELOQUENCER // MEDITATIONAL APPROACH 2 // Cwejman QMMF-4 + 4 VCOs", LESINDES

This is a slow, wonderfully minimal aleatoric piece in which a sequencer controlling four synth voices starts off playing all four at once in a repeating chord then, on interference from the musician, starts allowing the four channels to desynchronize from each other, phasing the chord into lovely little chaotic arpeggio patterns. "Ambient" or maybe just Krautrock.

2. "Petrified Wood", Eyvind Kang

Eyvind Kang is a violist and composer who has recorded with artists as diverse as John Zorn, Animal Collective and Sunn O)). This is a minimalist piece from Kang's own compositions in which he lays violas and reverb atop themselves over and over until any ability to identify what "note" is being played is lost, nothing left but a nameless emotion constantly growing in intensity until you feel you will burst

3. "Dawless 025 - Stuck in a loop", Stöfbug

This is some SPACE MUSIC recorded live on a grid of entry-level Roland & Korg desktop synths. Synth musicians in the 70s-80s made almost this exact music but would have needed an incredibly highend studio to make it sound this clean. Beatless but not quite ambient, intent music for scoring a craft flying silently through space, a childrens' documentary about the water cycle, a sunrise over a racetrack

4. "Stereo Music for Yamaha Disklavier Prototype, Electric Guitar and Computer", Keith Fullerton Whitman

KFW is a composer and former drum&bass jockey with a lot of really amazing work. I've always been captivated by this piece for the Disklavier, which is Yamaha's trademark for a kind of player piano controlled via MIDI. Through some unclear computer-side technique (phasing?) a single chord is broken apart into noisy note clusters and reconstructed into heart-tugging music. Just a blast of emotional noise

5. "White Window", Stefan Torto

I've featured Stefan in this thread a couple times already. The constant attributes of his videos are (1) making complex music on unusually simple hardware setups and (2) cat.

This one's gorgeous, lush semi-ambient electronica. It's got a bit of an epic feel, bestowing a cinematic tone on this video of a cat, bathing in muted morning light, completely convinced the human arm next to her is there for her benefit.

⬇️ Click below for enormous industrial drone ⬇️