What I'm listening to today: "Funky Stars", Quazar
This is a poppy eurodance DOS tracker tune from 1997. Feels good, slick production, moody 80s/early 90s feel.
After 2000 the artist behind this .xm went on to have a conventional career as a producer, making club techno remixes for a bunch of hip hop artists plus Madonna under the name "Axwell", then cofounding Swedish House Mafia ("Don't You Worry Child").
This track is listed on some mod archives as "Hybrid Song".
Max/MSP is a open-ended music tool, a commercial fork of PureData. It lets you fine-control every element of making a song, from sound design to mixing, using a visual programming language or by building your own UIs.
For this artist's last album, he YouTubed himself making the tracks in Max, so you can see the bespoke-UI instrument he built for himself. Skittery beats & seductive alien echo sounds. Kinda Ryoji Ikeda ish
What I'm listening to today: "A Bell is Tolling", Christopher Hernacki (orig Hiroki Kikuta)
In this video, a guy* multitracks himself a whole bunch of times to perform the "Ice Palace" music from Secret of Mana on trombones and tubas. While closely following the original score he slowly veers from soft melancholy to 70s movie-theme funk and just basically all the feelings in this arrangement are real good.
In 1993 Hiroki Kikuta, composer of Secret of Mana and its Japan-only sequel Seiken Densetsu 3 released a single-track CD containing a fluid, album-length rearrangement of music selections from those two games, featuring stadium rock, acoustic versions transposed into classical Japanese tunings, and ambient sounds seemingly recorded around Kikuta's home. If you like these game scores, this is *definitely* worth a listen.
From 2015, this is a banging, echoey jam by psychedelic electronica musician Yppah, mixing drums from the DJ Shadow school of hip hop with rock guitars. It's got a really good clean feeling to it and a flowing structure that slips away from you when your mind tries to get a grip on it. The feeling is not so much nostalgic as just remembering what it was to live in a time when it still seemed like there was a future
Note: Because nobody can really stop me, for the next week in place of my usual "listening to" thread I am going to be one-song-per-day posting a YouTube mixtape I made in 2020, titled "In The Future It Is The 1960s". ( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLIjft6ja7DP31gmCfPqxQO-I67dp_uza )
The concept of this playlist is a mix of songs from the 1960s that sound like they are from many decades later, and songs from the present that sound like they could have been recorded in the 1960s.
What I'm listening to today: "Prophecy", Julien Jacquart (orig. Hiroki Kikuta)
Ahh, *there's* the Flammie intro.
This is an arrangement of "Prophecy" (from Secret of Mana) by a French gamedev and progressive-metal guitarist, performed on guitar and piano. It's charmingly homemade in places but does a great job of capturing the enormous, epic feel that the original, for all of its mastery of the SNES S-SMP chip, strained to capture in its 64 KB of sample memory.
What I'm listening to today: "Pish", The Brian Jonestown Massacre
The Brian Jonestown Massacre can probably be described as the less commercial Dandy Warhols, and are one of a few modern-ish bands, along with the Warhols and I guess the Beta Band, who decided there was something worth resurrecting in that pre-prog rock era I'd call "psychadelic" for lack of a better word. They released this dreamy, echo-drenched song in 2015 and I think it just feels great to swim in.
What I'm listening to today: "The Porpoise Song", The Monkees
It's 1968. The actors who play the Monkees are tired of being actors. They want to record their own music, be taken seriously. So they make "Head", a surreal movie with songs by Carole King (!) a script by Jack Nicholson (‽) and a plot about the fictional Monkees struggling to become real. The movie doesn't… seem very good, but the songs are lush and gorgeous. An overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice
What I'm listening to today: "Gumball Machine Weekend", Yppah
This is another Yppah song, this one from 2009, with sugary tv-commercial xylophones and grooving rock guitars. I really "dig" the bassline here (I would describe it as "hip").
I cannot actually identify what element of the presentation here causes me to mentally classify this as "electronica" or "hip-hop" instead of just being an instrumental rock song, but it's there somehow.
What I'm listening to today: "Aluminum or Glass (The Memo)", Negativland
Negativland is most known for discursive sample collages with "Adbusters"-flavor politics. But in 1997 for once they just sat down and recorded a rock song (intercut with a dramatic reading, by the Weatherman, of what appears to be an internal memo from Pepsi's advertising department) and it is transcendent, it is everything. Video treatment by Tim Maloney as part of the "Our Favorite Things" DVD.
What I'm listening to today: "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)", Jimi Hendrix
Hendrix's 1968 masterpiece Electric Ladyland has two meandering 14-minute epics on it; "1983", which I love, and "Voodoo Chile", which I'm not so sure about. But I *love* the album's closer, the "Slight Return", which reworks Voodoo Chile as a six-minute rock onslaught that showcases both Hendrix and the Experience's rhythm section (amazing musicians in their own right) all at their absolute best.
What I'm listening to today: "Ventlaris", Ceephax Acid Crew
Ceephax is (in real life) Squarepusher's little brother. Last night he posted on YouTube this 26-minute live techno performance that apparently shows up in edited form on one of his albums. The jam is accompanied by a lovely video that appears to have been created on an Amiga Video Toaster. He's making basically the same music he's been making since the 90s, but now it's retro which means it sounds futuristic.
What I'm listening to today: "Anemone", The Brian Jonestown Massacre
This is a slow jam from the BJM's second album in 1996 and probably the closest thing the band has to a breakout hit. Lovely chill feelings, tambourines and bongos and one single held sustained organ note.
Anthony Bourdain once said in an interview that this was his favorite song; there's an episode of "Parts Unknown" that is just Anton Newcombe, BJM's front guy, doing home cooking for Bourdain.
What I'm listening to today: "Mixtur Trautonium (exercise #4)" LudoWic
The Trautonium is an early electronic instrument from the 1930s. Instead of a "keyboard" like a post-1965 synthesizer would use players make contact between a resistive wire and a metal plate, allowing fine control more akin to a violin than a piano. In this piece, the musician works the plate (and the pedals?) for a complex and stunning tremolo effect, like a guitar pedal under direct human control.
What I'm listening to today: "Minimoog and Rhodes Chillout Track", Kurti
In this charmingly guileless video a dude smiles at the camera and then proceeds to perform a song which is pure distilled 1985. Simultaneous solos on a minimoog and a gorgeous-sounding Rhodes electric piano (not a synth), with rhythm provided by an actual one-piece Macintosh Plus DAW hooked up to some MIDI modules. It's at times like this I understand why people liked "smooth jazz".
What I listened to today: "The industries of the unused mind.", Soaring Tortoise Orchestra
In this video a man in a basement appears to be mastering an ambient track on tape, tweaking the mixing board. But if you watch carefully he's actually just picking up various objects on his desk and staring at them as if he does not recognize them. What is happening here? The music is cryptic, striding a line between epic and creepy, like a guitar solo is being haunted by ghosts.