ok yeah extended hiatus or closure
may or may not keep posting here but either way it's been real, thanks for reading all several of you
live life, have fun, be excellent to each other. see you on the other side :3
2024.03.13
phonon - polyriddim i wish conlon nancarrow was alive so i can show this to him and either have him totally love it or beat me into a small red stain on the ground. it feels like i'm playing a brostep song on DDR but every time i get a note wrong i get hit in the head by a tennis ball throwing machine
2024.03.12
1000 gecs - Songsmith Remixes these have no reason to even be listenable much less good, but somehow this is a genuinely fantastic reworking of the original. if you ever wanted to hear 100 gecs as a sims soundtrack this is your chance. my iq is dropping with every second i listen to it but its worth it
2024.03.11
DJ BENDROWNED - DJ BENDROWNED VOL.1 RE-RELEASE i should NOT find sample-spamming glitchy prank calls as funny as i do, but god just imagine working at your minimum wage pizza place job or w/e and you get this, it would make my night
the random nightcore mixes aren't bad too for sure
2024.03.10
stupid picture sparse digital melodies echoing out in a vast empty space, warm and lonely sitting at the vanishing edge of existence and ringing out into silence
very pretty
2024.03.09
Surfside - astral eyes ironically achieving success through it's own obscurity, most attention to this single (the only surfside release i am aware of) came after it's identity was finally found from an unlabelled mp3 that drifted around for years without artist or title. it's more than a curiousity, too, and holds its own against the best shoegaze(?) out there, an absolute dreamy haze that wraps around you like a blanket half-asleep and sweeps you away into a blissful fog. gently drifting through the haze
sometimes i'm aware that all of this is just a dream
2024.03.08 (NEURAL NeTWORK WeEK day V)
multiposting i couldn't decide on a single piece to wrap up AI week with, so here's a cluster of media fragments that might be of interest.
https://heckscaper.com/coolpics.php?t=ml_txt&page=1 - neural network spawned textures, patterns, engravements, and growths
User 771815816 fake audio generated by a computer - listening to the original and this version is actually surreal, it's like when you hear something at such low volume you can't make out any details
this concludes AI week. remember, land-based robot hounds are vulnerable to piles of wire (too complex to deal with in real time) and electrical tape on your face renders it invisible to most facial recognition. stay safe, subvert developing techonologies, and piss on social media's grave at every available opportunity. god be with you
i love madcatlady. nobody has been so dedicated and so creative for so long in misusing digital technologies in displays of unbridled creativity. nobody asks for them to do any of this, most of their videos rest in almost complete obscurity, and i've never seen them discussed outside of their occassional old video that achieved semi-meme status (death's dynamic shroud.wmv owes madcatlady for their name, fun fact,) but they seem to constantly tinker, toy and experiment with how to create and advance their personal dreamscape filled with cats, forests, and medieval fantasy. it's like being able to tune into someone's idle daydreams, almost daily, and they're seriously one of my biggest influences in showing how to exist as a creative eccentric online completely outside of any real circle, just doing whatever the hell they want. if madcatlady was born in an earlier century they would 100% be living as some kinda like outsider art visionary like a derpier william blake
2024.03.06 (NEURAL NeTWORK WeEK day III) greenhouse - levällään
from my definitely flawed understanding, the vocals on this album were created by blending the speaking and singing voice of the artist, with donated samples of their friend's voices into an ambigious whole that was then fed wordless phonemes. for reference, the lyrics are:
the capacity to use borderline organic technology to abstract ourselves into quasireal digital dream sillhouettes in our general shape hits an uncomfortable and deep chord in my heart. we've spent thousands of years seeing distortions of humanity and nature in the shadows and just outside the borders of our vision, and when science turned the lights on and dispelled all the wonders and monsters, we sat down and made our own that can't be banished so easily. it's the closest thing we have to the recording and playback of dream logic and half-awake hallucinations and it feels like just as much as we play with and try to justify or understand our own creation, some dim pair of eyes is staring back just outside of the light of the screen.
2024.03.05 (NEURAL NeTWORK WeEK day II) Holly Waxwing - Away From Keyboard - PC Music livestream curated by Ö & A. G. Cook (@ 33:00)
a quiet gaze into the slowly churning depths of human and machine subconsciousness alike like you would stare into lapping waves on the beach as thoughts flow shapelessly and day turns to night
NEURAL NETWORK WEEK!! i dislike most AI stuff and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to look at (also fuck billion dollar corporations OFC i hope your ceo stubs their toe,) but in the hands of creative visionaries, the kind of wonders and terrors neural networks will allow us to culture up from the digital dataset stew like a specimen in a petri dish is absolutely mind melting. i'm a random stupid dork alive in the single most incredible decade long span of known human civilization ever and i'm just slackjawed at what some of my favorite creative geniuses / artistic terrorists are doing with it. let me show you
usually i like my art happy and beautiful, or at least meaningful and fun, but i have to appreciate kingcon2k11's ability to record literal hallucinogenic visions and nauseating childhood fever dreams directly to mp4 files. it actually makes me feel ill and i respect that immensely. every single frame radiates terror good work sir
2024.03.03
Pink E Swear - Pink E Swear my #1 guiding principle in life is belief in beauty everywhere, and there is a glittering core at the heart of even the most commercialized media and money-making product art. usually it's buried under cynicism or some veneer of protective irony and needs to be freed through either the bravery of an artist unafraid to embrace absurdity and beauty and complete sincerity or sheer naivity to forget that irony even exists. pink e swear, being a teen pop group basically just making unapologetic catchy electropop for kids, accidently nailed the second section there perfectly. it's like the buried humanity and wonder in top 40s radio ready pop, undiluted and funneled in from a parallel universe where first crushes never end
2024.03.02
Subscene - Ms. Whitecoat this blew my mind when i first heard it and i realized just how indebted the current like.. god i fucking hate saying digicore but i think that's the most accepted term for it? is to the crunkcore / electropop sound of a decade prior. it's like 80% the way to the soundcloud emo rap rave shit i listen to daily, mad respect for achieving that in the year of our lord 2010
2024.03.01
+89b3io5yuawehktj82&/!,@ who is this? what is this? why are there so many alt accounts? is there a name for any of this? is there a human behind the keyboard or is this the product of some automated digital detritus-gathering script trying and failing to parse fragments of emotion?
2024.02.29
love again - 30/500 mix i've never heard a single dj set that quite does what this does. soundcloud rap lovingly warped into an artistic artifact, and while the exact style here usually isn't my thing love again melts it all into something singular and undeniable all in the span of about 5 minutes. one of the best real minimixes i've ever heard
2024.02.28
ANGEL CANNON & Dead X - Destination radioactive green melodies and pounding kicks, nothing not to love. god i swear if i ever do a live set i'm gonna break this one out (nightcored ofc) and do some autotuned screamo bs over it, like if vaporeon was hardstyle instead of chiptune and it's gonna be terrible
2024.02.27
SP - Grinding music has been pushed against a spinning grinding wheel until nothing is left and this is the faint residue
2024.02.26
Cahn Ingold Prelog - The Well-Tempered Diffusion Model the degree to which we've just accepted AI technology is wild. we're looking straight into the subconscious of an artificial life form that's evolved under completely different circumstances than terrestrial IRL life and follows thought processes more alien than actual extraterrestials would have going on inside their head or equivalent. i'm glad somebody else sees both the endless creative possibilities and potential eldritch terror in AI and uses both to the extent of their ability. the process of creating music from spectrograms created by something that has absolutely no concept of sound, basically a deaf mute hollow intelligence in a digital void consisting only of endless training data, is the closest thing the government will let us get to alien contact (then again we're prolly gonna get partial disclosure by like 2030 at this rate so whatever)
2024.02.25
@HNW00000 local man bridges divide between ASMR and noisecore, asked to "stop" by local authorities. he will not
2024.02.23
Dot Dot Curve :) - ScreamingMayday ok so after listening to the greatest song ever we'll now be listening to crunkcore. the duality of man
the first twelve seconds are genuinely great electropop then they set the autotune to a note that doesn't fucking exist in any known musical system. i am not complaining ofc, half of my brain is having a fantastic time and the other is learning how it feels to be beaten to death by scene kids in the alley behind the mall
2024.02.22
MY BLOODY VALENTINE WHEN YOU SLEEP APPRECIATION DAY when you sleep is a top song of all time objectively. i will concede that all of my subjective favorite songs are ok at best in the minds of most other people but WYS is just a masterpiece and i will die on this hill if need be
youcutoffmyfairywings - this is exactly what kevin shields had in mind when composing it but his bandmates vetoed the idea
k.k.shoegaze - unsure how this one matches the exact emotional levels of the original but it does. eternal classic
dem0n dollars87 - this one is BEGGING for a transcendent hardstyle remix. if you make one i owe you 200 USD and an internal organ of your choice
ilyfrankh - ok so no electronic wackiness here, just solo acoustic guitar. nothing more, nothing less
for real if there's a single piece of media ever that captures love and everything good in life it's this fucking thing. if this song makes you feel the way it makes me feel i want to give you a hug
2024.02.21
FEVER DREAM PARTY CREW - ETERNAL DAMNATION this one and NEOPETS DREAM are pretty comparable, much of what i said for Vertigo Karma also applies here. it is more coherent which certainly works in it's benefit, but still feels like it's on thin ice where you have no idea what's going to come at you next. the cover is also one of my favorites of all time (that isn't a picture that's just what maverick looks like irl)
also!! new mediafire account since i filled up the old one, this time including every known maverick album and some other goodies: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/frnuy3v2ucebl/music have fun and take care
2024.02.20
Vertigo Karma - NEOPETS DREAM deleted furry mashcore from 2019 lets go!! i don't think this can be found anywhere online except in the above mediafire link
it's haunted me ever since i first heard it because it features some of the most aggressively bizarre production choices ever made. it's so incompetent at traditional song structures that when it pulls together some form of coherency you'll probably find yourself cheering it on (shout out to the intro of homemade dynamite which unironically rocks,) and even when it doesn't it's a fascinating and fun listen. the sparkledog mspaint aesthetic involved here and in similar artists is way more accurate than even the artists probably intended; i have to admit that it sucks in a traditional sense but they completely ceases to matter when you can just feel how much fun is being had
2024.02.19
ESP - LDM i have never heard a cleaner song. it scraped all the grime from my soul and left it as empty and peaceful as the cloudless winter sky
is there a name for this ongoing wave of idyllic ambient trance? there's also 500, @pat_16120, and an increasing number of other producers taking the genre from the dancefloor to spiritual realms that used to only be accessible through near death experiences and divine revelation
2024.02.18
snuffles - what the i will always love music that's emo on the surface for lack of a more realistic term but is really as life affirming as it gets one layer beneath. the lyrics disintegrating from standard emo rap to actual nonsense are incredible
2024.02.17
cat tribute multimedia day!! i'm unsure who made this; i downloaded it in 2019 and can't find any trace of it anywhere. it's a "reading" of my favorite poem of all time, and while it's kinda unrelentingly sad i view it more as a reminder to be always be kind and treat others with love
2024.02.16
Sidney Phillips - 8th grade romance sorry these are all like soundcloud singles, i'm currently neck deep in soundcloud mp3s but sometimes it pays off. naive bedroom pop is was and always will be my thing, and this hits the nail on the head. repetitive synth, stream of consciousness unrhyming kinda mumbled lyrics, and just *look* at the cover. the spring water is a nice touch
2024.02.15
doublepost fuck it
NOOOO I DON'T WANNA BE AN UTAU NOOOOOO utau (kinda like opensource vocaloid if you didn't know, I didn't until last month) artist tries recording vocal samples, their cat gets in the way of the recording instead and gets turned into a synth. It even has the voice bank if you wanna mess around and do something which is hilarious on it's own
ちいさな こねこの だいぼうけん who is this? what is this? hell if i know i don't even know how i found it, probably trying to find something totally different on soundcloud and ended up with something even better. is it too late to add a song to the voyager golden record, i have a suggestion. tell me you wouldn't wanna be friends with a species that makes somethings that sounds like this
2024.02.14
Nora The Piano Cat - Nora The Piano Cat™ MP3: Expanded Version 2024 I LOVE NORA!!! this is music totally unconstrained by ANY system ANY restrictions, nora doesn't even know what music is, she just likes pressing keys, listening attentively as they fade out into silence, press a couple more... if you check out the videos on her youtube it's weapons grade cuteness and actually really eye opening as to animal behaviors and intelligence. sadly she passed away last week, and in honor i made a bootleg compilation of her various solos and duets with her owners, just over a half hour. thank you for the tunes and i hope there's a piano for you in kitty heaven
2024.02.13
BreakfastFork - aurora this person goes to my old school and my sister told me about their stuff. i took a passive interest in it until this landed in my email inbox this morning and blew me away. cutesy aesthetic pastel watercolour pop PERFECTION this is why i love love love love underground + diy art. absolute hidden gem if you like this kind of stuff, the kid's going places for real
2024.02.12
wormy - dragonfly Walked ten miles yesterday trying to get to the mall. I didn't and it was cold and I could barely move my hands by the time I got back but I found a kinda hidden wooden path through the back of a suburban neighborhood down the hill to a stream with a little bridge and a patch of forest and I hummed this the entire time. When I got back I installed windows movie maker and made this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X7E2eg_Ig4 that is all thank you. I hope you had a good day
2024.02.11
sudan family poetry night abandoned no-fi digital scraps, extradimensional hold music for third world clickfarms. drugs in the mall, everything high-class offbrands
2024.02.10
L. Barko - ░▒▓ 10,000 SUNSETS... ▓▒░ Who is this? What is this? Where did it come from? Who are you? Was it you? Please don't go. It's so cold here.
(the single soundcloud upload by a now-deleted experimental vaporwave project, forgotten and unheard for five years)
2024.02.09
sticky mallet sticky mallet is one of my favorite youtube curators, consistent underground music with that rainbow OC flipnote kinda digital crustiness that all internet content truly worth your time has. They're also a music maker by the side, sporadically dropping outsider chiptune that doesn't seem to exist at all anywhere but youtube. I was seriously tempted to pull some fan-made bootleg album BS but instead just collected em all as mp3s in that there folder. Lovely amateur electronics that kinda feel scribbled all over in multicolor which I exclusively say as a high compliment
2024.02.08
pr6blms - raver boy w/ zawmbi3 (wasty) I stand by the fact that rave revival has been the best thing to happen to soundcloud in close to a decade. Emo rap-infused trance / dance / happy hardcore is not the future but thank god it's here anyway, and it's at it's best when it leans this hard into combining the melody from one style and the energy from the other into a single indulgent whole that genuinely would have been huge if it was released a decade ago (edit: hold up that's 2014 not 2010, jesus christ)
2024.02.07
A. G. Cook - Virtuous MIDI PC Music is an absolutely bottomless pit of media. Unreleased snippets left and right, more IDs than you can count, confusing aliases, the whole Gamsonite thing - behind the veneer of pristine, distilled pop is the debris of ten years of creative explosion. My point is that you're always going to be finding new bits and pieces and today it's a short but absolutely beautiful organ solo. AG's usual melodies shine through but don't stop it from being an aural anxiolytic. The MIDI that plays when you attain inner peace.
2024.02.05
Porter Robinson & Madeon - Shelter (Luna remix) I love love love Porter Robinson, but can't listen to him often because it's just emotionally exhausting. Worlds and Nurture aren't sad, but they make my soul feel like it ran up ten flights of stairs and collapsed. Fortunately, remixes like this exist. It's decidedly lighter and softer and easier to casually listen to. Instead of an epic journey, it just feels like a nice walk outside on a summer day.
2024.02.04
Dream Puzzles - My CRT I'm beginning to wonder if this all-consuming alternate reality nostalgia feeling is something I should get checked out. Maybe I'm in love with my internet friends. Maybe there's a shadow of a hand pressed to the inside of my computer screen when I sleep.
2024.02.03
Hungarian Folk Tales: Brother Fox I've posted the 1930 animated adaptation of the medieval Reynard the Fox stories here before, but in the time since I've become increasingly attached to them. If you weren't there, Reynard is a trickster who also verges on peasant-hero depending on the particular locality (many different areas in Europe have their own variants.) The fact that most versions I can find are in languages I don't know means that it's all wordless and uncluttered and blows around in my head like a breeze often. I found a stuffed animal fox in the attic and now he sits on my dorm window watching over my hard drives. Here's a cute Hungarian cartoon from 1978 that I found without even looking for it.
2024.02.02
Infinity Frequencies - Forgotten structures What amazes me about Infinity Frequencies is that when he finally took a tiny step back from behind the curtrain with his recent Spotify uploads and physical releases, I was genuinely shocked by the fact that there actually was a flesh-and-blood human behind the music. Mentally I knew there had to be, but somewhere deep down it sincerely feels like automated signals made as a by-product of some long-forgotten archival subroutine in an abandoned and aging server bank. Even with his comparative flurry of activity, we still have no name or face, like some kind of witness-protected voice-shifted mist-shrouded silhouette. And that's just the beginning of the vague cluster of signalwave recluses (空気系 and 天気予報) who show no signs of stepping out from hiding and are likely to forever remain faceless voices echoing from the digital abyss, anonymous broadcasts being collected by some wordless inhuman ghost in the machine. God I love this genre.
Any fuckin way, here's a compilation I spent all morning putting together of every little I∞F loosie I could get my paws on*, ranging from the usual computergaze loops to an older eccojams style to the newer ambient research. Nearly two hours sourced from deleted uploads, soundcloud strays, unreleased mix appearances, and youtube clips. If you put your ear to your sleeping computer late at night you can almost hear a voice at the very edge of perception but you can never make out quite what it is.
*I have said this three times by now; if I ever say it again please find me IRL and reduce my head to a fine paste thanks
2024.02.01
Tripleposting Thursday - VITO蒸気の波を行います edition I've been up to my neck in vaporwave for as long as I can remember and what I've learned is that the quality of a vaporwave release (and music in general but VW even more so) is less about how conventionally "good" or even competent it is, but whether the artist's vision, their unique sincere internal guiding light separate from trends and formulas, shines through into their work, and Vito's is BLINDING. His production choices are often unconventional (very short tracks, crunchy distortion entirely unlike your usual low fidelity, rock and spoken word sampling,) his aesthetics and themes have so little to do with vaporwave as a whole and clearly are 100% his own, and if you sift through his RYM self-reviews on his insanely prolific catalog (700+ releases) you can put together a portrait of someone who just lives vaporwave in a way I've only seen in one or two others. This ultimate Floridian is easily one of my favorite artists of all time and I could ramble for a while but I'll cut to the chase and ANYWAY here's a few gems I recently found in his discography for tripleposting Thursday (which I just came up with and which may or may not ever happen again):
ＦＬ ＸＬ - のみトゲピーのみトゲピーTHERE IS NO FLORIDA ／／ DMT-085 Short snippets fit for hazy Floridian summer nights staying up playing video games on the family TV
Links '98 - GameWinners.com ／／ DMT-089 - Anonymous post-punk samples and vaporwave processing are a match made in something resembling heaven, made of unreal memories and warped in the sun
ＤＡＶＩＤ ＤＥＡＮ ＢＵＲＫＨＡＲＴ ＡＤＭＩＮＩＳＴＲＡＴＩＯＮ ＯＦＦＩＣＥＳ - HQ Virtual ／／ DMT-782 - More alternate-reality 90s college nostalgia, with the first and last tracks being real standouts. 7/11 is a hidden *masterpiece* of vapor slowjams. Late night in the mall food court
2024.01.31
cupcakexclouds444455555 - Nightcore - Secret Place I remain convinced that thousands of years of human musical and artistic history were simply for the eventual creation of this song
I know a place way far away
Where the sun shines every single waking day
And the clouds, they fade away
And I'll tell you 'bout it
2024.01.29
Underscore - Euro Matsch 2050 My first experience with Schnuffel (00s bubblegum dance / euro trance idyllic visions) was through an unofficial rip on soundcloud from 2010 in incredibly low audio quality, like super muffled and lobit. I'm increasingly realizing that low fidelity just makes everything so much better, even if I wouldn't like the original music (Schnuffel rocks obviously but just in general) you can mix it down in like 10 ⨯ youtube reupload/download quality and enjoyment goes up like 35% (incidently the go-to nightcore ratio.) This taps into that exact little secret loophole, just with a vaporwave basis and it works like a lucky charm
2024.01.28
seb - i like talking ;; most of rthe time :) for some reason i really like listening to people talk to no one about nothing with no real audience. i sometimes spend hours checking out old youtube videos of teenagers talking into laptop mics, archive.org podcasts from 2011, albums like this. also seb's super cool, i'm convinced his mind just operates in the wavelength of random camera roll photos and spam and digital media fragments
2024.01.27
oaf1 - think abt it w/ppgcasper this song is beyond nostalgic, but not for anything in my past. this is what i mean when i say i love my internet friends
can't think about it enough can't think about it enough
s
2024.01.26
A. G. Cook - Best Day Of Our Lives Between "The Best Day" (7G,) "Today" (7G) and this, A. G. Cook seems to have a lot of great days, good for him. This one perplexes most of all because it exists, as far as I can tell, in a *single* bootleg PC music compilation. I've been obsessed with everything PC and AG for the last year and this is NOWHERE. Where would it even come from? It's obviously not live, not from a various artists comp, maybe a DJ set? but I've listened to em all and it's not there, and what's with the GROWLING at the end?? a man of unending mystery
2024.01.24
Lil Raptor - Darksunn// My memory is so gone that I have no idea where I found this and it was like a week ago but I guess that's the 24/7 datahoarder grindset. Point is, Lil Raptor's earlier mixtapes were really something special in the world of lofi hiphop, harkening back to old-school hiphop moreso than youtube-friendly beats, combined with some bizarre production choices that nevertheless somehow work (he repeatedly samples Death Grips and actually makes it function?). Then he dropped off the earth for a while and returned with a post-rock/shoegaze behemoth dedicated to finding light in the dark. What kind of album like this sets out with the mission statement "All hope is regained"? That's fucking bold and I love him for it, may Lil Raptor find all the light he could ever need. " Dragon's Milk and The Redeemer" should be a classic.
2024.01.23
Oneohtrix Point Never - Animals It’s like Lopatin ripped my heart out of my chest and held it in front of me, or kneeling before a medieval court. I don’t think I can say more if I tried.
2024.01.22
The wonderful world of Keygen Music If you’re involved in cracked or pirated software, keygens need no introduction. If you’re not active in that realm, many illicitly downloaded programs have flashy introductions added by their respective software cracker(s), usually accompanied by an absolute jam of the creator’s choice. Since the entire scene is inherently underground and impossible to document keygen music tends to be ephemeral and shadowy, except for the rare users and videos like this one.4
TLDR: Software Piracy (OST)
2024.01.21
Renard - Written for Cartridges If you dislike Renard’s normal style, please hold on just a second. I was on a Vulpvibe streak earlier today and was pulling an all nighter with back-to-back albums of assorted -cores, but then this came up and stuck out like a sore thumb.
I’ve never been into video games, but regardless of how far your usual frame of reference is from retro gaming systems and late-night 8 bit eyestrain, this pulls you right into the place of finding beauty, wonder, and a strange kind of home behind the screen. Between the fuzzy, autotuned vocals that are so obviously being quietly sung into a computer mic by a 16 year old, the unexplained and somber “at least I can remember something,” and being equal parts catchy and uneasy, it’s like very few other songs I’ve found, Renard or not. Definitely not melancholy, but there’s a certain ghost in the machine here.
2024.01.20
HDBOYZ - PHOTOSHOPPED God, the early 2010s were such a magical time for underground pop. In the diffuse realm of the internet and weird art passion projects alike the walls between irony and sincerity lost all relevancy and THIS is some of the absolute gold we got. For context, the radios were playing Last Friday Night, Firework, and Party Rock Anthem, meanwhile these guys were leaving the entire mainstream in the dust and were at this point just a glitter of sparkling chrome on the horizon. In the words of $erious Thug$, a project of PC Music not too dissimilar and doubtlessly heavily endebted to this HDBOYZ, “it’s so weird/exciting watching kids on tumblr run rings around established magazines.”
And then they played one show, released a single EP video, and disappeared for good. I have no doubt I could find answers to this entire mystery with a google search or two, but I won’t; I want to pretend this was some kind of divine intervention without origin or explanation. If I had a single-use time machine you know exactly where I would be.
2024.01.18
Motion Graphics - Screentones Smart Homes, Smart Cars, Smart Everything
Balanced Ecosystems and Green Communities
The Future Is Everything I Could’ve Dreamed It Would Be
2024.01.17
police academy dropout - bedroom club cuts: the unsung diary of a failing cop intern There’s a special, haunted quality about early vaporwave. So many of the artists are unknown and forgotten, which almost too perfectly complements the warped and anonymous music itself. Many chase the feeling of their music having no real human behind it, some product generated by the ether of the internet or the airwaves and straddling this world and some other, and police academy dropout is prime among them. There’s definitely some fragment of a ghost lingering among the unwatched broadcasts documented here. Pop culture debris and cheap substance-induced delirium.
2024.01.16
The Beatles - The Beatles 1968 Christmas Record Apparently throughout the Beatle’s entire existence, they continued producing yearly Christmas singles for their fan club, from the early merseybeat days right through to the later psychedelia and final disintegration. This particular one is the result of the band, frazzled by the White Album recordings, not being at all enthusiastic about the idea of getting together to record a Christmas song and instead sent a bunch of random snippets to a radio DJ to mix. The result is midway between their least coherent conventional music and Revolution 9 and jumps from one half-baked idea to the other in very vaguely holiday related delirium. I’m *still* trying to decipher the unhinged telephone skit at the end.
2024.01.15
lucario - Audio Recording on Friday morning I think it’s fascinating to listen to a faceless voice without any apparent past or future ramble about a tumblr quiz over a decade ago then vanish into the digital ether again like a ghost. It’s the same feeling as the strange garbled signals and voices you can pick up on WebSDRs with no corresponding station or explanation that never come back after speaking once or twice. Even if I could figure out what blog this corresponded to, chances are all that remains would be a half-broken archive.org save.
2024.01.14
氷河 / 空気系 - Scenic Route It’s easy to forget the visionary beauty lurking within the mounds of generic bandcamp vaporwave but there’s some bright lights shining quietly, endlessly blinking like radio towers. I’ll keep this one short because my quiet would describe it infinitely better than my words could. Signalwave just feels almost spiritual when in the hands of clearly passionate, obsessed artists like 氷河 and 空気系 and 天気予報 - finding beauty in mundanity.
2024.01.13
Unknown artist - Unknown (“Digital Girl”) The lostwave scene continues to fascinate me. In the digital era with innumerable databases at our fingertips, it becomes pretty noteworthy when something has been lost entirely, and a whole different kind of haunting when it’s been almost abandoned, severed from it’s origin and left as an unmarked cassette or unlabelled mp3. The more I think about it, the more “haunting” is applicable: even if the actual process of media / context loss is totally normal, the phenomena feels like nothing more so than finding a tiny, mundane, but unsettling crack in the world.
It also doesn’t hurt that this is genuinely one of my favorite songs of all time. It reminds me so much of the modern electronic-infused alt emo rap / digicore (RYM tells me that’s the right word but it still sounds wrong) scene, capoxxo & oaf1 and all those people, that I genuinely doubted it was actually from the 00s until I looked a little more into it. Seriously hoping the full track gets uncovered soon - it’s DEFINITELY on youtube somewhere, we just don’t even know where to begin looking.
2024.01.12
Soup - me and my friends all remixed 100 gecs [glitch.cool remix chain] I’ve DREAMED of a remix chain like this but didn’t think anyone would actually pull it off, and of all the songs they could have chosen this is definitely one of the best. The first remixes just decimates the track, broken into tiny little microsound sized pieces and put together like a mosiac into a massively warped and borderline sickening glitch piece that feels like being at a brostep show if you’re actually dying, and that’s track ONE. There’s 7 and each tears the last one apart in a completely different way, usually adding a little bit of the original so it isn’t reduced to pure audio mush. 2020s music concentrated to almost dangerous levels.
2024.01.11
Yabujin - Chalice Of Mind 守卫大门的鲸鱼。 I taught myself the basics of jumpstyle today and danced for an hour straight to this until I couldn’t move and sat on the floor and cried tears of joy. It’s like all of the tragedy and beauty of the world condensed into a two minute gut punch, visions of everything that makes life beautiful and the ultimate triumph of love and peace over destruction hitting with every kick. When I say I’m religious this is what I fucking mean.
Seeing a friend for the last time
Love for everything and everyone
Beauty triumphing over all
The end of the world
Divine visions on the dance floor
Losing everything you had
Finding everything you need
2024.01.10
alternate path Raine and I continue our endless orbit around each other’s online presences like two tidally locked planets. May the parallel lines continue ever onward.
2024.01.10
Nok From the Future - Smoke and Drive I don’t know for sure if there’s a word for it and I’m sure “post-internet” has been taken as a term a dozen times over for different things, but that’s how I think of the early-mid 2010s wave of highly aestheticized internet music that leans so hard into both “nostalgic” and hyper-modern imagery that it winds up making something that feels like an entirely separate cultural timeline passing ours, like a snippet of heavenly music heard for two seconds from a car going 80 on the other side of the highway. I’m thinking the first-wave NXC scene, PC music, early cloud rap, that kinda thing. I’m not sure if the style is reviled or well regarded nowadays but it’ll have a special place in my heart for it’s superficial layers of irony containing a completely sincere core and transcending all of that + perpetually feeling like it was made ten years ago and ten years from now. We’ll never catch up.
2024.01.09
Tu m’ - Monochromes Vol. 1 We’ve started getting our first snowfalls here and I could not be happier about it. I think about rain and snow all the time as a 24/7 background process because everything is infinitely more peaceful with a cold, soft blanket covering everything, and Monochromes is that precise muffled quiet, converted into audible sound in shades of grey and pale blue. Movements are soft and slow and you can see your breath; find a quiet place and bundle up.
2024.01.08
hazelboy - F4LL1NG-B4CKW4RD5 (feat. paper rose haiku) I’ll openly admit that while I’m not exactly a hyperpop aficionado and know next to nothing about the scene as a whole, a lot of my music exploring is chasing the high of when I first found 1000 gecs and had my mind blown out of the water. That sounds terrible when I say it out loud but whatever, it’s true and this nails exactly what I am searching for: energy and fun back to back with emotional resonance all ran through a glitchy computer music framework, emo rap / alt rock influence and a blown-out brickwalled ending to let you know it’ll all be alright.
You’re a bright light you just need to know it’s true
Angel numbers in my head I’m seeing triple two’s
2024.01.07
Stray Songdog - Cry Coyote “Rusted Americana” is a good self-description of Stray Songdog’s debut, but between the more modern lyricism, open-hearted sincerity, and earworm or two I think it’ll appeal even to those not too familiar with or fond of the genre. I don’t know enough about it like I do about electronic and experimental stuff to be able to throw words around carelessly like I usually do, but suffice to say the title track will be intermittently haunting my stream of consciousness for a long time to come, and Modern Memento Mori merges old styles and new themes in a uniquely wistful kind of nostalgia.
2024.01.06
Moa - Trance 6-34 I have yet to find another genre that is capable of pulling my soul out of my body and into another dimension as consistently as vocal trance epics. The longer the track, the further you voyage into the kind of collective consciousness that spawned the Odyssey, nightcore, and most major religions, and a part remain quietly with you forever, one note higher in the cosmic glowsticking harmony
2024.01.05
Patrick Totally / Héloïse Schumacher - International Kissing Day When I found this, it was like a puzzle piece clicked into place and I felt a deep peace that coasted me along for the next week or so like a wave. Stuff like this, vvf, torrent my pets, steve roden, etc. all speak with the same message to me: the incomprehensible enormity of the world and the simplicity of one’s small place within it, quiet days spent in isolation, a spirituality consisting of digital fragments and stray links.
Feels like wandering a foreign city in a sleepy and disoriented and peaceful state. A wandering vibraphone tells me everything I ever needed to know.
2024.01.04
vvf - one day Visions evoked:
Sleep deprivation in public places
Vast expanses of cold concrete
Wandering down a long grey empty hallway you shouldn’t have access to
Being alone just out of sight of countless others
Contextless digital shards cast out from the lives of strangers
Trees in winter
Cold rooms
2024.01.04
DJ Supreme - Glowstick Gyrations 3 I cracked open a random thrift store CD and someone replaced the original disc with a self-released rave mix from 2001, which is an upgrade if I’ve ever seen one. It’s only presence online is a single picture on facebook as far as I can tell and I’m unsure if it’s a DJ set or original remixes / tracks, but it’s held up admirably regardless. Just from that opening sample you know what you’re getting into.
2024.01.03
greenhouse - “arc,regn” odds and ends, WIPs, scraps, etc I always associate computers and nature as existing in a kind of unity. The awe and peace of an overwhelmingly massive forest is more alike the depths of forgotten databases and archival information systems than it is different and I can see a future where the natural/artificial dichotomy begins to break down. This in mind, I was thrilled by discovering greenhouse, the newest offshoot of Halley Labs (of former Lapfox & Vulpvibe fame) and “arc,regn” in particular. It echoed this concept completely, and felt like every development in music technology, from modern software to trackers that look like Excel to quasi-human artificial voices, was being put to good use in bringing this future just within reach. Your mileage might very well differ but point is I took the liberty of splitting up the demo compilation video for the album into separate tracks as a kind of accompanying mini release. Even if you skip the rest, if you’re at all into ambient it’s worth the price of admission for ink1 alone.
2024.01.03
Will Cirènes - Soulseeker “nonsense music” is a pretty accurate tag. Stream-of-consciousness sound collage of samples drifting in and out of view, looping and slicing with little expression of a particular emotion beyond the flight-like freedom of being able to do anything you want with any sound you wish. Reminds me a lot of the dream-based free association of automatic writing or surrealism. Moments of startling beauty peek through the semiconscious chaos; for fans of noises and sounds.
2024.01.02
Unknown artist - Unknown
Maybe not the most exciting first rip to post, but more musical things are coming and disc this has a special place in my heart and CD wall regardless. I found it on the free shelf at Asian Grocery in Exton and can’t get a translator or OCR to work on it. Tracks 1 & 3 have some lovely background music, and tracks 2 & 4 are extended, repetitive spoken word. If anyone knows enough chinese to shed some light, it would be appreciated. ^^
2024.01.02
Mineral Water - Kiss It isn’t gonna be nightcore here forever I promise, but this one was too good to pass up today and represents the dichotomy of the genre very well. Some people focus on sample selection and curation and let the speed-ups speak for themselves; some take the remixing to destructive extremes, and Mineral Water goes all in with reducing an ethereal, glittering bubblegum bass-ish dance track to a smoldering, sparking ruin. It sounds exactly like it looks and provides an eight-minute glimpse into a blacklight neon heaven as seen through an unstable reality flux. Track 2 is definitely an afterthought but holds it’s ground just the same. Probably equally fit for swinging glowsticks and for drinking their contents.
2024.01.01
____________________________ - MyLove4u A gorgeous, wintery ambient album deleted from bandcamp. Sustained tones and crystalline drones for cold rooms and snowfall through windows.
2024.01.01
Miranda Cosgrove - Sparks Fly (nxc) Sometimes all a release needs is a little bit of glitter and a 30% speed shift to reveal the masterpiece hidden inside. The NxC scene in particular is pretty much based on this concept of finding the statue in the marble block of commercial pop and forgotten EDM, and synova nailed it by giving Sparks Fly just the little energy boost it needed to shine. I can’t tell if I’m starting 2024 on a good positive side of things or cementing my reputation as dumbest music blog on day 1, but into the pastel plunderphonics future we go headfirst anyway ^＿^