Apr 6, 2023, 8:36 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "It's Universal", Croaker
Somewhere out there in the 90s, before mp3, there must have been an *incredibly* cool scene of BBS-shared tracker music that I missed out on completely (I had BBSes, but could not figure out how to operate Player Pro). This is a groovy drum & bass bop made in 1998 in ImpulseTracker for DOS by… a teenager named Jaakko Iisalo who… went on to become the creator and lead designer of the Angry Birds series. Um. Okay wow
Apr 7, 2023, 8:30 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Slub", STU
The Atari home computers probably deserve more cred in music production; they had a working MIDI/DAW ecosystem back before Windows was viable or Macs were affordable.
Anyway here's a 2017 Atari ST tracker song I just really like. Chiptune you can just *almost* believe could have been a synth pop song in the 80s. The hook in the second half slays me, there was seriously a day last week I listened to this song like five times.
Apr 8, 2023, 10:36 PMWhat I'm listening to today, "Yay Bahar", Görkem Şen
This is a performance on the Yay Bahar, a fully acoustic instrument Mr. Şen himself invented, perfected and built by hand. It's got some similarity to traditional Turkish bowed instruments but with loose springs and large resonating tubs to act as amplification, echo effect and occasional additional playable element. It sounds Evocative as heck and Şen seamlessly moves from wowing you with weird sounds to violin solo.
Apr 9, 2023, 7:16 PMWhat I'm listening to today, "Return", STU
This is by the Atari ST tracker artist I linked Friday, from their Bandcamp. This song apparently started life as an ST demo, but at some point they got carried away and made a conventionally produced song that uses an Atari ST as an instrument. The result is dark, echoey dubstep with strange chiptune blood flowing through it and I really ~~~ dig ~~~ the ~~~ vibe ~~~.
Apr 10, 2023, 7:14 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Hivemind II", Max Ravitz
The "Mavis" is a single-oscillator budget Moog synth; it's a more expensive, less interesting version of their old "Werkstatt" kit. But it did give us this really interesting video where a Moog employee densely cross-wires seven Mavises to produce every sound in this complex idm track. (The eurorack at the bottom does sequencing and adds a bit of echo.) Never mind the product demo, this is some good dance techno.
Apr 11, 2023, 7:00 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "20230226 - live @ Baitattack!", @nonmateria
"Orca" is a 2D programming language / music production environment by 100 Rabbits. This is a livecoding performance with Orca, recorded at a concert space in Trentino, Italy that I think might be operated out of someone's home. The Karplus is very Strong in this one.
The upload post (https://mastodon.social/@nonmateria@merveilles.town/110044179701228549) links some other sets from the same night. The video contains a slowly flashing light.
Apr 12, 2023, 7:00 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Grongy Time"
Another Spectrum ZX demo, from 2022. This one is entirely self-explanatory from the title. It is Grongy time
I really like the recurring isometric visuals at 1:47/3:38/3:56.
Apr 13, 2023, 7:07 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Noise Box War Drums", Paisley Computer
Contact microphones are *magic*. This is a jam session that sounds like an entire room of percussionists directed by Bear McCreary. In fact you can see what it's being made by, and it's… a small wooden box attached to some springs, rubber bands attached to screws, a doorstop, and one of those head massage scratcher things? being smashed with a single commemorative basketball pen. Sounds great actually.
Apr 14, 2023, 7:01 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Interlaced", MKustomAudio
This is a 27-minute eurorack performance of dark, cinematic atmospheric textures. There's no rhythmic elements but the progression between different ambiances is deliberate and thoughtful and there's a lot of energy in parts. If I imagine this to be the score to a short film set on a haunted spaceship I feel like I can break down each 3-minute segment of this and imagine what is happening in the accompanying scene.
Apr 15, 2023, 7:28 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Roland JX-3P & PG-200 (1984)", Werkstatt Matlak
Another final test after servicing from that Bavarian synth repair shop, this time on a Juno variant that was Roland's first MIDI-supporting synth.
Again I must compare Boards of Canada, as this sounds like one of the half-tracks BOC used to put in between songs. What interests me here is WM balanced the synth on the arms of a deskchair. WM that is a valuable customer device. WM fears nothing
Apr 16, 2023, 7:38 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Our distress call", TRDRT
A moody, melodic eurorack performance driven from a Deluge in CV control mode, made of physical-modeling string and drum synths pushed just slightly past the line where the model makes sounds any real object could produce. Slow but rewarding, it evolves over 15 minutes from crunchy anti-strings to tomdrums jittering like a nervous leg to breathy distorted moans to harps and clicks in fog.
Apr 17, 2023, 8:05 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Make Noise Strega, Korg nu Tekt nts-1", grumpfigrumpf
This is a lovely, brain-stem-grabbing ambient jam I return to sometimes. It's basically the epitome of drone music, because it consists entirely of an echo filter run into a second echo filter. (The Strega *does* have a vco, but it isn't on at first; instead they initially seed the feedback loop by turning the delay speed down until the bbd resolution is so low it introduces crackling.)
Apr 18, 2023, 7:01 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Cartographer - Eurorack Drone", Michael Furtak
This is a slow, threatening ambient piece. It's the length and shape of a "song" but it is definitely all about the sounds. Metal-y FM noises, shimmering sweeps, gradually introduced deathmarch beats. And of course the standard drone moan. It feels like standing on a hill and watching something indescribably enormous passing far overhead.
Apr 19, 2023, 7:30 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Make Noise Shared System Jamuary 11.2023", Lukas Hermann
A minimal synth noodle with some note sequencers and the Shared System (Make Noise's standard eurorack module bundle). Not very complicated but I like it. There's some interesting implicit clicky percussion when the echo gets its teeth into some of the notes' attacks. Goes through an interesting change partway through.
Apr 20, 2023, 7:00 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Ambient improvisation 7 (Soma Enner + Cosmos)", Più
I've linked this same artist using this same equipment before but this piece comprises totally different sounds, starting with gentle buzzy hums and escalating to ominous swarmscapes and rocking thumps (if you pay attention, caused by physically smacking the device). I find this one very emotionally intense; it definitely shows the expressiveness of the Enner as a performance instrument.
Apr 21, 2023, 7:19 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Bombora || Sequential Prophet Rev2", Pat Carroll
A peaceful low-key keyboard solo. A lot of the synth music I link in this thread the focus is on the technical shock of the instrument capabilities, so I'm not sure how to express the idea a synth piece is just about the synth player's performance. This possibly could have been performed on a piano, though the Prophet voice's LFO does add some nice subtle rhythmic elements. Anyway. Feels good
Apr 22, 2023, 8:24 PMWhat I'm listening to today: Outro, God Lives Underwater
My favorite thing by 90s industrial group GLU is the "hidden track", not very hidden, from Life in the So-Called Space Age, which starts right after the final song and begins with a repetitive humming noise that goes tens of minutes without noticeably changing.
The best way to listen to this is to put it on speakers and then forget you had it on, so the thing that happens after hits you like a truck. Trust me.
Apr 23, 2023, 7:35 PMWhat I'm listening to today: "Last Ap Roach", Squarepusher
When I was in college I had awful insomnia. One night, exhausted, I went to McDonalds at 2 AM. When I got up to the window, they had installed a machine that makes your drink and drops it in a carousel. There were no humans visible. I was alone in the world with a robot and a slowly-rotating coca-cola and, at this song's precise climax on my stereo, I watched the robot smash my unattended drink against the wall
May 1, 2023, 7:35 PMThread continues here: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/110266784325478972
Nov 11, 2026, 8:08 PM@mcc What you're looking for is mod files. It was a great scene with loads of good music.
Nov 11, 2026, 8:21 PM@jamesb One time we bought a APC hard drive for our mac and it came with some shareware, including a game named something called "Galaxica", and it had the *coolest* music. The music came out of a "mod file". I was so obsessed with this "mod file". I would open "Galaxica" and leave it running just to listen to the cool song in this game.
Then when I learned to drive, I turned on the car radio, and the Galaxica song was playing! It turned out it was "Blue Monday" (EDIT: NO. TRUE FAITH) all along
@mcc Are you sure it wasn’t True Faith?
Nov 11, 2026, 8:45 PM@bob_zim 1. Yes
2. HOLY SHIT YOU FOUND IT
@mcc I played that game a lot. Dropped it on several Macs at my school, and it was popular with a bunch of the other students, too.
The author of the game misattributed the song to Depeche Mode, which gave me trouble finding it at the time. Great rendition of a great track, though!
Nov 11, 2026, 8:56 PM@bob_zim for some years after learning the true name of the song I misbelieved that the lyrics in the chorus were "my morning sun is the truck that brings me beer"
