Oh my gosh!! Oh my gosh I love electronic music!!!
- "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.
- "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.
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.
- "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. ⬇️
- "Reset", Robbie Traughber
So chill I'd use words like "cold", this is a quiet, spooky electro jam with several lines of complex arpeggiating beeps colliding against each other chaotically like ocean waves.
Notably in addition to Elektron's FM box this is using the Bastl/Casper SoftPop 2, a VERY chaotic noise synth that in this case has had the chaos dialed down to where it can plausibly coexist in a boppy little pop techno song like this.
In this laid-back, improvised-sounding piece, Matthias Dewilde plays the classic Rhodes electric piano— beloved of Herbie Hancock, Ray Charles and the Doors— plus a couple guitar pedals. And he actually does play the pedals, as an instrument, one hand on the keys the other on the delay knobs, making the pedal a second instrument producing ethereal crosstalk that gradually dominates the piece.
Kinda makes me think of Steve Reich's "Electric Counterpoint".
Here is a recipe for ambient music. People have been using it since the 1980s.
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Get a 4-track Tascam tape machine.
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Record a different, unrelated thing onto each track. (Anything works as long as there's no pronounced beat.)
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Play back the tape while slowly moving the four faders up and down as whim takes you.
This always works. It always works!!!