Or Nixon? Shirley Chisholm? Thanks to Brian Foo, the data driven dj, wonder no longer!
Here are seven songs with good sound design.
Cortini is a colossally talented synth musician famed for doing Nine Inch Nails' analog synth parts for many years; he was a part of the recent Buchla revival and arguably helped cause the analog synth revival entire. He also has a YouTube channel where along with his music videos he posts jams, and videos of his cat sitting on rare vintage synthesizers. This video, from 2017, is a spooky, swaying ambient piece; he claims it was the first thing recorded on a "newly restored" Buchla 400. Check out the ancient, CRT-based builtin sequencer.
This is a short and simple, kind of ambient / abstract trip-hop piece made with a handheld sampler and the Strega, a synthesizer/effects unit (co-designed by… Alessandro Cortini, actually). Not super attention-grabbing or anything and it's over near as soon as it starts, but it sounds really cool and it creates some nice distinct moods before it goes.
This one uses a Pulsar playing a gritty industrial drum loop, but the centerpiece is a guitar pedal that simulates the sound of highly degraded magnetic tape on a poorly maintained player. This, and an unusual (sequenceable) bitcrushing delay-echo by Bastl, place the loop on a rack and stretch it into 10 minutes of muffled, unsettling error noises. William Basinski in real time.
An extremely quiet piece consisting entirely of Schoenberg-y tonal hums rising and falling in possibly-patternless waves. In places it just falls into complete silence. There's a feeling of intense isolation here, maybe something like dread.
The piece is mechanically generated in VCV Rack; the video shows the machine that generated it, and overlay text explains what each functional block does.
All those "chill synth jam" videos I link in these posts? You can ultimately blame basically all of them on Boards of Canada, who perfected a blend of educational-film-score analog synths and hip-hop beats that was an absolute revelation in 1998, when their first commercially-distributed album landed and changed music.
BoC had tons of early stuff recorded when they signed, so they have multiple rerelease albums. My favorite BoC track ever is still "Sixtyniner" from their 1995 self-published cassette. The mood remains unmatched.
More sounds ⬇️
