Here are seven songs. The first four are creamy electronic pop and the last four are avant-garde electronic noise. The one in the middle is both.

1. "Cinematic Music | Moog Grandmother + MiniKORG700FS | A Love Letter To Synths from A Student for Life", HEYMUN

This is a dreamy piece where the musician sets a few synthesizers running on patterns and plays piano along with it. It's highly structured, but sneakily so. On surface it just feels chaotic; it feels as if two unrelated pieces of music happen to be playing at once but somehow keep converging in interesting ways.

Just float in it.

2. "Perkons HD-01 Bassline and OXI ONE sequencer Jam", Mark Cee

This guy spent a couple months posting jams with this large, unusual blue drum machine and I kept watching his videos like a hawk thinking… eventually he's gonna make something awesome. Eventually he did, with this complex, clicky 6-minute dance techno bop for an entire crowd of people enjoying standing at the back of a room holding drinks and bobbing their heads but not dancing.

3. "Choralberg", Alex Siebenhaar

In this video, a man wearing a bluescreen for a hat sits on a carpet and steers some racks of synths (and one analog drum machine) through a cryptic, funky melody. Just as you think you understand where it's going, it ends; you find yourself wanting more.

4. "crisping.1 #‍lofi #‍ambient #‍chaseblissgenerationlossmk2 #‍glitch", [moos]

It's actually not very hard to reproduce Boards of Canada's style, especially not since cassette equipment became a common modular synth accessory. But this piece, based around that guitar pedal that fakes tape degradation, is special, mixing tattered synth pads with a death-march beat that refuses to find a rhythm. It's scary actually, like something's gone horribly wrong.

5. "Pulsar 23 - Sounds you don't usually hear coming from it", Sonic Junkie

Occasionally in these posts I've praised songs for adapting Pulsar-23 drum channels for non-percussive purposes. This track is only that, the dude leaves the drum sequencer off, hooks up a CV keyboard (and… a device designed to convert EMF leakage from the Pulsar's circuitry into sound?!) and makes something approximating a jazz piano solo alternated with gunky glitch dub sounds. Very weird noises even by my standards.

⬇️ Two more

Here are five pieces of music, ranging from lost early electronic music to dubstep performed on a Spectrum ZX.

1. "Mixed Emotions", Bebe Barron

In 1956, experimental electronic musicians (and married couple) Bebe and Louis Barron composed the score for Forbidden Planet¹, inspiring a generation.

In 2000, Bebe visited the music lab at UCSB and recorded a new piece. It is sick. It seems to be inventing entirely new emotions. It sounds exactly like the music 60s electronic artists would have made if not held back by the friction of contemporary recording.

2. "La Jet​é​e", Sines of Exquisite Pleasure

I somehow, happily, managed to wedge YouTube in a state this weekend where it recommended me nothing but albums from the early 80s artists self-published on cassette tape. Sines of Exquisite Pleasure was a particularly exciting find from this; their 1981 album "Modular Systems" is amazing, but this one particular serene track from their 1984 tape stands out to me for its retro-invocations of Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Air.

3. "pulsar 23 volca fm jam", clyv

This jam gets some wonderfully bizarre, Paul-Lansky-worthy noises out of Volca's cheap modern DX-7 clone box, combined with some wonderful grungy noises from using the Pulsar-23 (a drum machine) as a synth voice. Once the (chugging, dirty) beat comes in the overall feeling is pleasantly disorienting, like listening from afar to a rock concert, or perhaps an alien invasion, happening on the far other side of an echoey valley.

4. "Spirals & Orbits", Benge

This was recorded this year but is going hard in both audio and visuals for the aesthetics of a 60s-70s educational filmreel, all baffling diagrams and radiophonic-workshop abstract noises, video feedback, quiet glimmering echoes on slow oscillator sweeps. (The past-decades feeling is helped by the song being recorded entirely on a 60s-period Buchla 100 with a contemporary tape echo.) As a piece of ambient music it's entrancing.

5. "Elysium State", Stardust

The "demoscene" if you're not familiar makes tiny audiovisual programs that push the limits of computer hardware. The community started on 80s hardware, and since wowing on modern GPUs is less challenging they to a large extent stayed on 80s hardware, making them a good source of modern chiptune. Here's a new 2022 demo by Stardust (not to be confused with the 1998 Thomas Bangalter side project).

TLDR Dubstep on a ZX Spectrum