For the last two years I've been semi-daily posting "What I'm Listening to Today" links here. Mastodon has some problems with threads containing hundreds of posts, so I re-create the thread once a year.
Or, alternately, every song from year two in the least practical format possible: A 301-song, 38-hour YouTube playlist (note: video #1 contains flashing):
You've heard of the "Shepard Tone", right? That's a sound design trick where a sound appears to continuously increase in pitch without ever retreating back down to give itself space. There's a variant of that for drum beats called a "Risset Rhythm".
This song, from a Telafon Tel Aviv/Belong collaboration, uses the Risset trick plus some seriously weird production to make a dreamy, alien, not-quite-danceable dance track:
What I'm listening to today: "8888 + ParipiDestroyer + POLYS", Freaky Tweaky
This is a fun, satisfying acid jam on three small devices by different small-batch designers in Japan.
The devices are all little handheld things based on trim pots and breadboard buttons, sized like business cards and Altoids tins; one is a gorgeous reproduction of the 808, another a gorgeous reproduction of the 303, and the third an odd Roland J8-like prototype. The Pocket Operator is reborn
I love metal but I don't think I am a very sophisticated listener of it. I struggle with the squawky vocals and the occasional long samey stretches. Kittie delights me by bringing aggressive variety to their presentation, especially in this one old, unusually compact track that rapidly switches registers from death-metal screams to intelligible English as if tracking manic mood swings. You think dick is the answer but it's not
What I'm listening to today: "extinct bird gathering", Luna SC
From this musician's "tmod" series of songs performed live on a wall-sized modular synthesizer rack, this is a fresh-feeling electronic composition with gorgeous sound design. Crunchy beats and warm metallic everything else. I'm not going to say this is dance music exactly but it is definitely music to bob your head to
What I'm listening to today: "greim93", AGF / @poemproducer
AGF does poetry, VJing, noise music and Theory (so if you are looking for eastern European left feminism she is very worth a follow).
This is a immaculately sculpted noise collage wherein hisses and thumps stalk you through a fog of microsounds, constantly threatening to congeal into a beat but then instead doggedly remaining just outside the edge of your perception
What I'm listening to today: "【Moog DFAM Jam】", Sakai Meno
Noisy, scrungly fast industrial beats on some modular equipment. There's a slower, spread-out elbow-room version of this track on the same YouTube channel (id MT13WMugmmA) but I like this compact 2-minute version. It sounds very determined.
What I'm listening to today: "wierdness", recordingtruck
I love noise! I really do! The Bastl Kastle is a chaotic "modular" system with two of Atmel's tiniest, weakest chips in each unit, & little wires instead of plug cables. All it does is scream. This musician has cross-wired three of these to make a wonderfully amusical sequence of moaning bleeps interrupting each other. It has its own internal machine logic. Your human brain can't make sense of it. Just float in it
KNOWER is an incredible, funky, YouTube-bait band consisting of "The Bank Account Song Guy", Genevieve Artadi, and literally whoever else is in the building. They have a channel full of sessions live-recorded in a generic suburban house with noise foam taped to the wall and the band all wearing gimmick t-shirts. You should listen to them. As an intro, here's some funk featuring the bass stylings of Daphnycore artist MonoNeon.
@mcc oh my goodness. if you are not already louis-cole-pilled prepare to go on an amazing journey of discovery. I heard of him about 3 months ago and now I am planning to see him in amsterdam with a full orchestra later this year. He’s also the guy behind clowncore and his solo stuff is ridiculous:
@pyromuffin@mcc Yessss. I finally got to see Knower live last week in Minneapolis after being a fan for many years (sometimes it sucks to live so far inland), and I'm still vibrating. What an awesome show. Being 15 feet away from that much creative energy and skill on display is quite the rush. Those full orchestra concerts are just incredible. I'm so envious of people who can go see those live. I love his composition style.
What I'm listening to today: "Musica Ricercata no.7", György Ligeti as performed by Grégoire Blanc
This is from a set of twelve piano pieces composed in 1953 by Hungarian composer György Ligeti, as arranged for analog synthesizer and dual theremins in December 2023 by Blanc. (The mood is enormous, the future that 1981 promised us.) Ligeti would go on to write the "Monolith music" from 2001. Grégoire Blanc would go on to do his laundry
What I'm listening to today: "The River - 3 guitar ambient jam with drones and synths in the forest w/Sam Bell and Pete Ferguson"
The YouTube channel "drone-in-the-woods" is truth in naming. This is some gentle ambient post-rock and it is, indeed, performed live in the woods by three guitarists. I'm not usually one for "happy music" but I dig this. It's like if Godspeed You Black Emperor had worked their issues out and got real into Boards of Canada.
This is a soft, seductive DOS tracker track. It appears to use one single sample, so it's basically like a 2 minute electric piano solo, if the electric piano had infinite sustain. Sometimes with tracker tunes I can find a little history, but all I find googling is a forum post claiming the track was first released in 1997; and that the author is Finnish, and died in 2022.
What I'm listening to today: "Hyperbased", Firefox & Tip
This came up when I was in a fugue of listening to every Amiga chiptune I could find, and is apparently the backing track to "Enigma", an Amiga 3D rendering demo the group Phenomena made for "Anarchy Easter Party 1991" in Sweden. A gorgeous mishmash of vibes, half of them from 1980s new wave rock and the other half from somewhere deep in outer space where a dying species orbits a black hole in quiet contemplation
What I'm listening to today: "It's All Nothing Until It's Everything", KNOWER
Some more KNOWER, but in this one they get a lot more noisy. Bitcrushed bass and chiptune pads. There is jazz piano and a string section in the kitchen. Taco Bell
What I'm listening to today: "Bound By Secrets", Nebula
I coaxed this out of the YouTube algorithm during a week I briefly managed to train it to feed me nothing but early-90s jungle recorded from original vinyl. Actually it turns out this song was released in 2014 and exclusively as FLAC, but whatever. This is some atmospheric jungle with a lovely, loose jazz windup at the start. Jungle always gives me a sense of being in darkness and this is like whispers in the night
What I'm listening to today: "Playstation 1 nostalgia ambient atmospheric jungle drum and bass mix", Dopo Goto
This is one hour of pure vibes. Muffled, laid-back 90s-future jungle atop a visualization of a lo-fi cyber city and songs with names like "A Song to Fall Through Textures" "A Song to "Insert Disc 2" "A Song to Remember Aeon Flux". It says "mix" but it's more like one piece of original music with nine movements, powerful focus music, like ambient but high-energy
What I'm listening to today: "High-tech Low-life", Slowerpace
This artist has a series of albums framed as OSTs of nonexistent Playstation 1 games. This song for example supposedly plays during the opening cinematic of "Pyromaniacs" (tagline: "Violence Is Sometimes The Only Way"), apparently a Shadowrun game that failed to secure the license at the last second.
This track's got a great feeling, a warm blanket in the chill, sounds like if µ-ziq had tried to do trip-hop.
If you've seen a video bouncing around instagram/tiktok with a funny cartoon drummer and titled "Breakcore in a nutshell", that's hkmori, from her song "anybody can find love (except you.)".
This is my favorite hkmori song, where she executes the breakcore formula expertly (and moodily) but mixes it up by dropping in dense clusters of 808 kick drums where the Amen chops would normally go, resulting in a really unique sound.
What I'm listening to today: "Dracula Forever", Clarke Jaxton Motorbike
This YouTuber has a series of live-performance electronic jam videos, in each case accompanied with floating captions telling a little short story. It's fun! The stories are good.
This track's simple but is a real bop. Made with 2023 vintage devices but has an 80s feel because those two devices happen to be Roland's desktop SH-101 clone and Teenage Engineering's new take on an 80s lo-fi sampler.
What I'm listening to today: "PlayStation jungle Mix 2 | drum & bass, Frutiger Aero, liquid, Y2K, intelligent", Dopo Goto
This uses similar instrumentation to Goto's "Mix 1" for a totally different feel, instead of focused and driving this is laid back and dreamlike. There's an emotion I don't know how to describe, there's a kind of this warm feeling in the nerves of my spine when I'm either on the verge of falling asleep or about to start crying. This is that in music
What I'm listening to today: "DigiLogTokyo Microne, Synthernet 8888, CSK ParipiDestroyer, and ACID bass synthesizer prototype", Tekitounix
A short, frantic acid piece, so fast it feels like it's about to run off its rails at any moment. Goes real hard and ends with you wanting more. Just another 30 seconds please
I previously linked a jam on this same trio of handheld devices, but in that one the third device was an unlabeled breadboard. I guess it's named the Microne.
What I'm listening to today: "THEM5000 (Monomachine only track)", Dataline
A futuristic, kinda IDM-y electronic jam. Flits stream-of-consciousness between several different ideas while maintaining the same dark groove. Actually kinda feels like a little mixtape, except for the fact it is six minutes long. Nice energy.
Made on the Monomachine, the old idiosyncratic Elektron box that defined the sound of SOPHIE and Quaristice-era Autechre.
What I'm listening to today: "Set U Free", Planet Soul
So it's the mid-90s, I'm in junior high, I love techno but it's not so easy to come by in Texas. But 104.1 FM, the pop-rock radio station for Moms, will play "dance music", & some of it's pretty good. And then there was the "Planet Soul" song, which was great. This song's weird, progressive, does strange things with tempo, but its laid-back groove is so accessible even KRBE will play it, as long as it's after 8 PM
What I'm listening to today: "Sweet Dreams", La Bouche
When I think about 90s "dance music" (I don't even know what actual genre I'm even talking about. "Eurodance"? Was that later?) I think La Bouche. They were the Archetype. All their hits sounded about the same, they all had cheesy production and cheesy raps and were all extremely effective. This works, it really works, this music was created with a Purpose and it succeeds at it hard. Listen without judgement
@mcc this genre is "EDM my local top-40 format station (Power 92) used to occasionally play in the front half of the 90s between Toni Braxton and Nirvana."
@mcc La Bouche is definitely Eurodance, though the genre was already popular by the time they formed. The singing-woman-rapping-guy formula was pretty well established, Snap! and 2 Unlimited are notable examples.
I came into it for real similar reasons to you, it was the closest thing on the radio to the sorts of .MOD file / demoscene music I was real into. There were plenty of MOD covers of eurodance songs, too, which was pretty amazing in the pre-MP3 era.
I used to call this a guilty pleasure, but I'm long past the point of guilt. Shit's just awesome as hell. I did a huge thread of eurodance bangers last summer: https://retro.social/@ieure/110792737134135435
What I listened to today: "Straight Up", Paula Abdul
If I ever have to explain to someone what the Synclavier was, I will simply play them this song.
This song might actually be the exact point the 80s pop production style peaked. There's so much going on here! The sampled flutes. The Scarface visual gimmick on the the video. I spent years wondering why the worst possible retaliation she could imagine inflicting on her partner was to go "a ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba".
Control has this "hot" sound and the reason why is, the producers had worked for Prince before and he was always running his VUs in the red. But he was using a different brand of gear, where red meant 6db headroom. So they were just overdriving everything. But then the record's a hit and suddenly everyone's copying the overdriven sound they made by accident!
@mcc oh nice i love that, super interesting piece.
i rly like jam&lewis's stuff for janet. control was a huge record.
some of teddy riley's stuff was really heavy as well (eg the bobby brown records).
couple of years earlier he was doing hip hop, i used to hammer this as a kid (pun intended):
What I listened to today: "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)", En Vogue
Here's a song from that brief, magical junction point in the 90s when hip-hop, r&b, pop, "dance music", and the OST to the SNES "Paperboy 2" were all briefly the same genre. And then there's the video, which increases the sense of all things conjoining by loading up with 50s R&B imagery. 90s kids, you've heard this song but have you ever really listened to it? This is a bop. This is so charming.
@mcc in my (clearly failing) memory this was on the radio around the same time as Bel Biv DeVoe's "Poison", but apparently they came out just over two years apart.
(although I prefer the original mix, I wanted to also link the track in the form I originally encountered it: mashed up with Got Your Money. Alas, if that version's still on youtube, I can't find it.)
What I'm listening to today: "You're Not Alone", Olive
Eventually the "dance music" era of the 90s (soft rock radio will play some techno) gave way to the "electronica" era (rock radio will play some techno). Right on the border in late 1996 dropped this lovely europop song with some legitimately hype sampler work. Listen to this in stereo (headphones or whatevs).
Bonus: This "lyrics" video upload was mis-encoded and starts glitching interestingly about 20 seconds in
What I'm listening to today: "Crazy for Love", D'Breez (Autechre remix) (alleged)
I've mentioned the super-rare "MASK" record series of untitled, anonymous b-sides by friends of Skam Records. From MASK 500 (500 copies printed), which had a theme of unauthorized remixes of 80s hits, here's Æ doing an otherworldly but highly danceable mix of a song that now appears to be lost media (I can't find the original or its lyrics and the Internet barely records the band existing)
@mcc d'breez was a soul group from north mcr, daz fitton (aka bola) was an orig member, we did that remix in '93 as 'payment' for him letting us use his studio for some stuff. i think it was one of the last tracks they made before daz started working on bola stuff.
the remix was done in his studio on his gear (incl the vocoder).
Something I'd been thinking but didn't have room for in the post was I thought it was interesting to see y'all releasing a track in 1999 that sounded so much like your 92-93 style. So like… oh well that explains it then
What I'm listening to today: "Crazy (Acoustic) (Instrumental)", Seal
We don't talk about this but Seal is extremely good. From the "Maxi-Single" for Crazy, my theory is the concept on this track was they had two separate Crazy remixes that, each, didn't quite feel worth putting on the single by themselves, so they wodged them together on one track and said "okay, now it's interesting enough". It is a good vibe actually. General MIDI jazz
What I'm listening to today: "Techno Live Jam 3 || Subharmonicon, Dfam, Eurorack, Ableton", Sorrowless
This is a driving electronic jam I think I'd describe as "industrial" or "dark trance". The sounds are made on a couple modular synth racks so a neat property of this one is far as I can tell all the drums are being generated live from analog circuitry. Intense, exceptionally clean, effective production and it's all done on some evening's whim for uploading to YouTube.
@mcc I'm listening to this today, and "A Song to Nailgun" in particular is reminding me a little of Pieter K's 2002 album "Everything All the Time" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZwkhjcTPVI) — something about, like, the sensation of being on a planet where it's always 1AM. or something.
Just back from Budapest, where classical audiences will sometimes do an “iron clap” where the crowd converges on clapping in unison, gradually speeding up, and sometimes they do exactly this where some people start clapping on every 2nd beat to keep the acceleration going for another round.
@mcc dang it, this track is also giving me good reason to attend to two FIXME's in my bandcamp downloader script, thank slash curse you for that encouragement
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