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Top-level
 What I'm listening to today: "Breaking Point [live improvisation]", Stephen Torto Here's a video showing off the power of the Novation MIDI controllers with Ableton Live, specifically the looper interface. Torto builds an entire dark electronic song from nothing as the song itself is playing; other than what seems to be a pre-prepared drum loop, Torto is playing every note himself on the Launchpad's weird isomorphic-keyboard scale grid thing. It's legit cool to watch. 181 comments
What I'm listening to today: "If You Knew", Le Solitaire This is a simply charming desktop synth duet from 2016 (which for Synth Jam YouTube is basically the paleolithic era). One musician drives the bass and drums while the other one sings into the looper function of an OP-1, constantly tweaking until she's singing in harmony with an entire choir of her own voice. What I'm listening to today: "Mini Jam Monday #8", littleBIGsynths / Mod Maquina A jam from 2016 that does absolutely the most with the absolute least. This sets up a killer hook on one Volca Keys and one Pocket Operator drum machine and then explores it as completely as the sequencing capabilities of the devices allow, and then some, as the musician proceeds to hand-animate what seems like every single knob the Volca has. You could dance to this. What I'm listening to today: "PO-33 & NTS-1 | LoFi | Synthwave jam", Stefan Torto A lo-fi hip hop beats track with a sort of Earthbound feeling to it. The entire complicated track is produced from the PO-33 (the little calculator looking thing on the left, it's a sampler) with Korg's DIY-kit microsynth used to add reverb. What I'm listening to today: "Qu-Bit Aurora getting angry", synthe sizer83 I listen to a lot of extremely varied electronic music and this one is still very mysterious to me. I guess this is "drone". Six minutes of enigmatic hums and distant flutters and clanks. There seems to be a melody, but it's too large and slow to see the entire thing at once. This all appears to be the result of using a reverb filter for something entirely other than reverb. What I'm listening to today: "SOMA Pulsar-23 (a brief sequence to try things out)", TÆT I think I've posted a few tracks before based on SOMA's idiosyncratic instruments; the Pulsar is their take on a drum machine, based around heavy rewirability, chaos injection and a *lot* of distortion. This is a fun robot dance number showing off what the Pulsar can do. What I'm listening to today: "Industrial Raga 1", Vadjuse The Ornament is a machine for algorithmically sequencing triggers. One of its trigger output modes is "connect to ground", and wiring those outputs to the touch plates on the Lyra simulates the touch of a human finger. So in this one a PO-32 drum machine plays highly distorted beats while the ornament is picking out a note sequence on the Lyra's finger keys, producing something intense and unsettlingly alien. What I'm listening to today: "Modular Jam#1 - Verbos Electronics", Maarten Vandamme Incredibly quiet and gentle, this one is a few minutes of soft hissing hums with sharper melodic synths bubbling under the surface. The piece is performed on a Buchla-style modular suitcase; the "Verbos" is the touch keyboard, which is screwed into the suitcase along with the synth modules. What I'm listening to today: "New Jazz Underground Live! #2", New Jazz Underground These are some dudes who crowdfund recording their jazz band performances and posting them on YouTube and they just happen to be super good. I found them through a track they called "Sad Boy Anthem" but they've got a bunch of these full-length 50-minute-ish "Live!" performances up and that's the real gold. I listened to a few of their livestream sets and this one was my favorite. What I'm listening to today: "3x NYMPHES and 1 spare hour to shoot a video", Dimitra Manthou As the title says, a synth designer/cofounder at Dreadbox had a slow afternoon one day, so she grabbed a Nymphes and over an hour dubbed it on itself 3 times to make this strange little song. It's short but it turned out really compelling, there's a fascinating mood to it. It tastes to me like aluminum. What I'm listening to today: "Finding Beauty in Distortion", Raucous Studio Six minutes of meditative "weird noises" based around using an analog implementation of an OR gate as a distortion filter. Mostly very quiet actually, but full of lovely subtle moments. A good demonstration of how one can perceive rhythm in otherwise ambient works through simple things like a repeating click or a phaser pedal. Headphones recommended. |
Gregory's Server
What I'm listening to today: "Negions Fail"
This is a melodic drum&bass track with a lovely feeling to it from the golden age of IDM (circa 2005). The artist is named either "Wisp" or "RWD", it's not clear. I feel like this is something I should have known about at the time it was released but I'd somehow never heard of this artist until I stumbled across this album on YouTube this week.
https://reiddunn.bandcamp.com/track/negions-fail