"Stable Ghost Article", by the Mathletes. Contains some flashing.

In high school I had a friend named Joe who made music. Giving CD-Rs to friends or selling hand-packaged CD-Rs on the Internet. At some point in college Joe gave me an unlabeled CD-R and this was track 17.

Joe's music is not particularly noisy but I like noise so this is my favorite Mathletes song. This week I wanted to put this song on a YouTube playlist so I made a music video for it. I didn't actually know the name of the song until I texted Joe to ask permission. In my head it was just Track 17. I haven't done this sort of thing in a while and I'm not sure about the colors and I'm not sure about the flashing and I'm really pretty unhappy about what the YouTube compression did to this (1080p my ass)* but for the moment this feels Right. I recommend full screening it (and making sure YouTube picked 1080p…)

EDIT: I replaced the YouTube version with a Vimeo version above. It's not… much better, compression-wise.

1. Unlabeled CD-R track 17, The Mathletes

I think I've mentioned Joe Mathlete who I went to high school with, who made music on four-track tapes. Most of his music was earnest indie folk-pop but he had this one song I loved that was a deafening blast of exuberant, overdistorted emotional noise. This was given to me directly by Joe on an CD-R with no track list, so I always thought of this song as "17". I think the actual name was something like "illegal ghost bikes".

2. Untitled 7, Oval

Markus Popp did this thing in the 90s of scratching CDs by hand and sampling the glitches to make ambient music. Later he contracted someone to condense his artistic process into a computer program¹, so he could set it up in art galleries. Let random gallery-goers Be Oval. He made an album ("ovalprocess") with this program; it was (maybe is?) the most alien music I'd ever heard. This is my fave track from it, the one that best rides the line between something musical and legible and something with no human-graspable logic beyond the algorithm that created it. As a song it is harsh (no really, it's pretty shrill) and beautiful.

3. "Remotely", Coil

My favoritest ambient album ever is a 1992 album of "remixes and re-recordings" of Coil's 1984 debut single "How to Destroy Angels" (subtitle: "Ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy")². "Remixes" seems to mean "we recorded some new music with the same instruments". This song's the standout (other than the title track), a growling noise symphony that gives me stark images of looming forms gyrating in darkness.

4. "CT-0W0 Computer Cowbell", emma essex aka Comet's Tail aka Halley Labs aka @Heckscaper

The beloved Roland 808 drum machine had a… let's say less-beloved "cowbell" channel. The 808 cowbell is hyper-distinctive but frankly cheesy; people tend to only use it if they intentionally want to evoke an "80s sound". But this one brave VST author not only made a hyper-advanced 808 cowbell synth, with dozens of controls and modular patching capability, but recorded this entire fascinating EP-length demo video using only the synth. It starts off as recognizable techno, ranges into mysterious sounds and ends as terrifying, abstract dark ambient. My favorite part is "The World's Maw".

5. "Ecnalubma", awk

I made this (me). It's loud.

I recorded a lot of music between 2001 and like 2006. This was my favorite song I ever made, sometime in the summer of 2001. It was made via about five lines of C and Perl mashed together on a Linux command line, piped directly into /dev/audio. I used slightly different code on the left and right stereo channels. I wasn't trying to make "music". I was trying to make a byte pattern so complex I no longer understood it, to see what it sounded like. I thought of myself less as a musician and more as a photographer, exploring the infinite configuration space of music and taking snapshots of the most beautiful structures. When I landed on this particular byte pattern I was completely shocked by the level of complexity and musicality. And structure— it undergoes multiple cryptic phase changes over 20 minutes³.

⬇️ Click below for Einstürzende Neubauten ⬇️

Five songs recorded in bedrooms or basements:

1. "I Am A Recording", m 10538

The poster of this song claims it's a cassette tape they recorded in 1981, when they were a child, on a toy organ in their parents basement. It definitely sounds like a child hitting random notes, but after a bit something clicks and they hit this powerful, spooky groove. It's Daniel-Johnston-esque in more ways than the conceptual.

The YouTube summary ends with a strange rant:

Check it out: Beethoven died almost two hundred years ago but in a way he’s still here in his music. His thoughts, his feelings, emotions, his very essence was transferred into music! Beethoven lives! The artist is gone but the art lives on, man! In the vid you see my glowing green essence being transferred onto magnetic tape. And now YouTube will glow with my essence! Ooo! ... You know, here in the digital age exact duplicates can be made of all art. So even if digital media like SD cards start to degrade after a number of years exact duplicates can be made to replace them and on and on. Art can be lossless and eternal! So I urge everyone to download and replicate everything I put on YouTube...keep me alive, man! Download me! Copy me! PLAY ME! Make me live again!!

2. "Almost in tune live play pulsar 23 buchla easel", Amon Tobin

I spend a lot of time just using the YouTube algorithm to surf randos recording synth jams in their bedrooms and I've gotten very used to incredibly hype stuff posted by accounts with 23 subscribers, so when I got to the end of this driving, buzzing techno jam I was shocked to realize THIS rando was Amon Tobin, a Ninja Tune-signed musician I've seen live three times. Apparently he also has synths in his bedroom.

3. "Bedroom electro test demo (live electro track feat Elektron Octatrack // Analog Rytm // Slav Squat)", Matt Leagre

Now this is a true bedroom synth jam, as in, you can literally see the bed and the dude visibly doesn't have enough space for all the synths he has jammed in the corner there (check out the unplugged Arp Odyssey reissue which I guess he's just storing there). Eight minutes of shifting groove with flavors from 90s dance and vaporwave. Really good stuff actually.

4. "Volca Keys + Beats ambient jam - Volca Dreams", Fortress of Sound

A lovely, gentle electronic groove made on the two most basic Korg Volca units and one guitar pedal. Feels like water level music from a lost Donkey Kong Country game. The basics, they work. This is 13 minutes long and realistically probably could/should have been like seven but you just kind of zone out and you don't notice how long it's been.

5. "True Love Will Find You In The End (Daniel Johnston cover)", The Mathletes

I went to high school with Joe Mathlete, the lead and occasional only member of this band, so I guess I'm one of their oldest fans. As a home-recording indie musician from Texas Joe's got a deep love for Daniel Johnston and played a version of Johnston in Speeding Motorcycle, a stage musical that ran in Houston and Austin. The emotion in this cover is super intense to me; it's best listened loud.