Month: September 2015

Vaporwave meets avante garde post-rap. Just listening to this forward-thinking glimpse of the future causes your thoughts to occur up to 40 seconds before they normally would have.

French House by numbers right here. This could’ve been a Discovery track in an alternate universe — everything from that phaser’ed clean guitar to the bandpass sweeps. Coup critique!

Even though I’m mostly underwhelmed by the Korg Volca series (see previous entry), I must admit that this is an extremely enjoyable hour of improvised bloops and bleeps on the lil’ gizmos. Very nicely done.

My posting this here is very dangerous to my personal finances, as I have been eyeing the Yamaha CS synths for well over a decade, and currently you can pick one up for the same price as two of the (extremely underwhelming) Korg Volca synths — or less! — and adding the MIDI-to-CV Kenton Pro Solo MK2 gives you MIDI sequencing control over this badboy, in addition to it having a full-size 3 octave keyboard… oy vey. In debt thousands of dollars. But to finally have a Yamaha CS in the arsenal… difficult times in the world of discretionary debt-based money havers.

Not only is this truly classic house music from 1988, but that is so obviously FM synthesis at 1:58, and almost certainly a Yamaha DX-7 (or any of the DX series really). I feel like I’ve used that patch before. If not, it’s highly reminiscent of the obscure MS-DOS game God of Thunder being played through an AdLib / SoundBlaster card powered by a Yamaha FM chip. Stuff: It’s Cool!

Kick ass, this is a super dark post-punk track that almost sounds like it could be a distant relative of the Duke Nukem 3D soundtrack. Very atmospheric and fatalistic, I’m way down. Thank you Joey Nicoletti, aka Liquid Shits, for bringing this to my attention.

This is a truly gorgeous composition and production, through and through. At times it sounds almost like a parallel universe lost Postal Service jam, though more focused. Magnifique!

Not only is this exciting because the Yamaha PSS-470 features the same FM synthesis engine responsible for your favorite AdLib / SoundBlaster jams in the early 1990s, but there’s a damn MIDI retrofit for it. The PSS-470 has a couple sliders on-board for tone variation, which is a nice touch, no pun intended. Also, this random demonstration song (the PSS-470 controlled by an Ensoniq) is truly gorgeous. Great job.

Wow, impeccable flow and punishing beat. I feel like I’m there, minus all the bad parts of having actually been there.

Very pure hip hop, I love it. Brooklyn’s the residence.