Here's a mixtape for you that slowly transitions, over 7 tracks, from noise pop to regular pop.

1. "Soma RoAT Exploration N°2", HELL F.O

This is based on the Soma "Rumble of Ancient Times", an opinionated/toy synth based on configuring four drone voices and triggering them with a pad. The normal problem of noise synths is they sound cool but wind up just making one undifferentiated drone; the ROAT solves this by making four drones.

Here the ROAT is combined with Korg's desktop drum-modeling synth to make a cool and nicely structured glitch hop jam. "It's just like listening to real music!"

2. "Soma ROAT Jam - Mélodie d'automne", Sidney Cote Nadon

This one uses two Rumble of Ancient Times units plus an Akai sampler to make dance techno with the ROATs' various noise generators providing the sirens, swells and background beepy noises you expect to be drifting in and out in the background of such music. It jams. If you liked whatever "Electro" was in 2008 ("Electroclash"? Was that the same thing?) you'll probably like this.

3. "random noise 079", glenn clyatt

A bizarre journey back and forth and back again across the border between music and noise, this uses a Bastl Kastle and a chiptune synth to pile together bizarre noises until suddenly the noise coalesces into some pretty cool sounding dance techno!… before just as suddenly slowing down 800% and becoming one of, depending on your mindset,

1. An out-of-body bliss state as chill alien timbres lead you on a psychedelic trip
2. Absolute terror, as something you cannot see or escape (perhaps the song itself?) is crying out in pain and despair

4. "Koma Krell | 0-Coast | Field Kit | Part Two | Extended Cut", Bottle Makes Music

The "Krell Patch" is a setup various synthesizers make possible to construct, where the closing envelope at the end of one note triggers the start of the next note. The name is supposedly a reference to the movie "Forbidden Planet". This Krell is augmented with a synth-controlled radio and the fellowship hall from a suburban church used for natural echo.

TLDR: This is 12 minutes of beeps.

5. "live stream #1 … subroom signals", substan

substan posts a lot of chill electronic music on YouTube; I've linked him in my Mastodon recommendations thread before. This is an absolutely lovely two-hour-long (!) flowing set of chill-beats ambient songs performed by substan, alternating "music they'd play in a yoga class" and "music to program to" with flavors of acid and dubby clicks-and-cuts floating in and out. It is massive; every song in this set individually is a song I'd recommend by itself.

Basically, if you like Future Sound of London, then listen to this.

Notice ⬇️

I've been doing this thing. When I find a song I really fall in love with I post it on Mastodon as a "What I'm listening to today" post, and once I've got a week's worth I collate them here on Cohost. Thing is though I started doing this about three months before Cohost existed. So there's a bunch of posts in my Mastodon thread I never mirrored here.

Here's the best seven tracks from those three months. Each is someone from YouTube's music community doing something unique with electronic music equipment.

1. "Moog Subharmonicon Jump and Run Jam", Attic Audio

The Subharmonicon is Moog's generative-music machine, based on resurrecting ideas from two lost proto-synthesizers from the 1940s, the Trautonium and Leon Theremin's "Rhythmicon". The Subharmonicon generates chords and rhythms that are just musical enough to be compelling but just strange enough no human would ever design them on purpose, and the normal way to use it is to let it free-run with some echo to generate ambient music. In this track tho the musician continuously switches settings and modes to actually play it like an instrument, and the result is not just fun to watch but incredibly catchy.

In some Synth Youtube stunt casting, drums are handled by Yamaha's now-forgotten 1990 MIDI PDA, the QY10.

2. "Make Noise Strega & Pianoteq Bechstein | Ambient", Akihiko Matsumoto

The Strega meanwhile is a truly remarkable piece of hardware— a collaboration between a synth company and a musician (Alessandro Cortini) that blends "musical instrument" and "toy" in the way my old art-game projects strove to. It's a delay reverb simultaneously uglified and overpowered to make the perfect drone machine. Here it is at its best, tearing apart the spectra of an iPad piano synthesizer.

3. "Mutable Instruments Rings triggered by drums", David L. Fankhauser

This is a drum solo with a physical trigger on the bass drum so every time the bass drum hits it advances a sequence on a modular synthesizer. In other words the drummer controls the entire piece, the synth conforms its tempo to the drumming and when the drummer starts switching the rhythm up the music adjusts to it in a really natural way. Technically interesting, but also an incredible mood!

4. "Kaleidoscope", substan

I've featured substan a few times in my Mastodon thread; they tend to make compact techno songs on Elektron grooveboxes. This song's made entirely on the Digitone, Elektron's FM box, and the youtube title claims it is "downbeat psybient". Anyway it's a lovely little piece of electronic pop, I really like the progression on this one.

5. "A Synthesist's Drum Solo // Drum & Synth / Moog DFAM / Subharmonicon / Mother 32 / Elektron Digitakt", Paul-Aaron Wolf

A structurally complex six minute performance of a man very enthusiastically playing the drums accompanied by a shifting set of semi-generative synth loops. This piece is absolutely incredible but, demonstrating the cruel attention economy of YouTube, only had 367 views on YouTube when I linked it on Mastodon, at which point it was about a year old; now, six months later, it's up to 421.