a tenacious and passionate microscopy enthusiast repairs a dumpstered electron microscope. the number of obstacles he overcomes and skills he develops is really inpsiring!

i'd never really paid much attention to ruban's lyrics but they're pretty fun on this album

an older sydanie track. the whole album's gas but i especially love the ideas in this one - the paring back of the harmonic samples to the sine wave; the rhythmic dragging of the vocals (also in the next track, 333); the lopsided looping of "i'm a G" etc.

it seems there are quite a few of these groups who go from the korean channel SOUNDSTAGE to NPR's Tiny Desk/KEXP that meld traditional korean folk songs with newer compositional techniques and tonalities. they're all very good!

in this track, i love the call and response vocals, the screeching flute, the dynamic escalation. really cool.

(Kim Yak Dae - Daeguem Lee Man Wol - Piri & Saenghwang Grace Park - Ajaeng Won Meon Dong Maru - Gayaguem Chun Gung Dal - Percussion Sunwoo Barabarabarabam - Percussion Hong Ok - Vocals Myeong Wol - Vocals Yoo Wol - Vocals)

mosa lina is a platformer game where you solve randomly generated level-puzzles using fickle and oblique tools.

imagine KidPix meets Baba is You meets N+ meets nopaint.art

there are 24 tools in total, but each time you start the game, you get a smaller subset of the 24 to beat a suite of 9 randomly generated levels. each time you attempt a level, you get 3 tools from your subset to use. each time you die (or skip), you spawn in one of the remaining unsolved levels with a new set of 3 tools. when you beat the suite, you do it all again.

the chaos and impermenance of the game very naturally encourages experimentation. even if you have no idea what to do on a particular level, you have to try something to move on, even if that something is using each of your tools once and then jumping to your death. and so, in the beginning, 95% of the levels feel impossible to solve with the hand you're dealt, but over time you discover new interactions between tools and develop new intuitions about how to approach obstacles. eventually, only 90% of the levels feel impossible. i get the sense that it will never be 0% - one of the game's tooltips is hard locks are possible - but that's a good thing. it keeps the game feeling pleasantly unserious.

here's an example of me failing at a level, because one of the tools i got (delete) erased the platform i wanted to run on and i fell down the hole

here's an example of me beating a level by using the phaser tool to pass through the spikey boulders, collecting the fruit, and then hopping back to the finish portal. (i also shoot the bamboo tool because i wanted to see what it did.)

the game is light on instruction or overarching objectives. mostly it's about thinking creatively, encouraged by the reticent, wry, and whimsical tone that comes through from the developers.

and because "figuring out the game" is the game, even playing it for 20 minutes feels like i'm playing it right. it's lovely.

i would love to go to a party like this, but only if it like, wasn't a big deal that we were all wearing Egalitarian Tin Can Stilts

new idol. i love the groove he gets into at the end

balm videos from a person in south korea that voicelessly document industrial manufacturing processes. (there are notes if you turn the captions on). the Primitive Technology of complicated technology.

a rotating disc with magnets in it induces a current in a taut wire. the current interacts with the magnetic field, causing the wire to vibrate. this creates some lovely sounds.

i would not have imagined a song as sleek and meloncholy from this wiki bio:

Jaime Royal "Robbie" Robertson (July 5, 1943 – August 9, 2023) was a Canadian musician of Indigenous ancestry. He was lead guitarist for Bob Dylan in the mid-late 1960s and early-mid 1970s, guitarist and songwriter with The Band from their inception until 1978, and a solo artist.

Michiel Klein (the impassive guitarist) 's guitar squealing over motorik is cool

new album out now. it's giving crack cloud, lewsberg, trust punks.

Did you hear that? I've got a real bad feeling…

i found marjan in my ceaseless search for composers who sound like ravel and have been slamming this concert non-stop since

shoutout to patio:

i remember hearing this song in the fritz the cat movie and thinking "damn, this rules" but never following up.

then the bandcamp description for previous thing-i-like shop regulars self-titled mentioned his name and bo-and-behold it was this song!

the dubbed guitar is enchanting

i don't remember how i found this band (maybe through lithics?), but i've loved their shtick ever since. repetitive, syncopated & coarse guitars playing around in one chord accompanied by drum chaos. Matt Radosevich's simple vocal parts cast the cacophany in an innocent light.

all the songs are from the EPs the band has released over the last 6 years and it's that weird thing where i already have a deep affinity for the EP versions so now it's like this album is my new stepdad that i have to learn to coexist with.

here are the lyrics to seven winds. there's also a very good live version performed during a "spoiler room"

seven winds blow hard

seven breezes blow on

wind chimes, tin cans, rope lights

rattle in the meantime

seven winds blow hard

seven breezes blow on

wind chimes, tin cans, rope lights

rattle in the meantime

rattle in the meantime

rattle in the meantime

and i won't be caught

and i won't be caught this time uncovered

and i'll bide my time till i've crossed safely now

till i've crossed safely now

seven winds

problem: your film-archiving robot is capturing blurry photos due to the table shaking.

solution: watch a man politely explain how he designed and built a device to solve this problem.

circuit design and PCB production is something i know so little about, so this whole (lovingly made) presentation of the process was inspring and fascinating to me.

this is documentary art

if you're not sure what that means, watch it!! if you watched it and you're still not sure, the making of helps

i love the foley - the arbitrary environment sounds, the artificial bouncing noises when the avatar's feet hit the ground.

an incredible piece of music. you are not prepared for the end.

jimi phillip seems like an amazing craftsperson and this video documenting his whole process is a gift

i'd never really thought about where the steel pan sound had come from, so seeing him cut the top of a steel drum off was a real epiphany - oh, obviously steelpans came after... steel - and then - hmmmmm i wonder why certain people in the carribbean had to make their own instruments 🙃

the wikipedia article on the steelpan is a good read for the history of african music, slavery, and cultural suppression that hammered the steelpan into existence

Chas Sheppard's Sounds Like Steel documentary, which this Jimi Phillip interview is a behind-the-scenes excerpt of, is also great

i found this album by searching "muzak" on bandcamp

i am such a sucker for those vektroid random tempo / rhythm switches

i remember when this album came out. people were so surprised by how enjoyable it was to listen to. alvin and the chipmunks, a novelty act for children, only had to be slowed down to be annointed with the aesthetic legitimacy of vaporwave, the melvins, and new beat.

the fact that the rest of the instruments were tuned down to sludge-adjacency by the slowdown is a huge part of the effect. listen to that guitar solo in walk like an egyptian!

anyway i was thinking about this album again and listened to Rebel Yell on youtube where there's a pretty good bit running in the comments.

delightfully, i took these comments at something approximating face value when i first read them, so it only really hit me when i started reading the band's wikipedia article and discovered they weren't actually three strung out brothers who got fucked up by the eighties.

chipmunks on 16 speed continues to surprise

compared to Politics and the English Language, which I love, this is a funny essay.

It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody. Almost all Christian writers dealing with Heaven either say frankly that it is indescribable or conjure up a vague picture of gold, precious stones, and the endless singing of hymns. This has, it is true, inspired some of the best poems in the world:

Thy walls are of chalcedony,

Thy bulwarks diamonds square,

Thy gates are of right orient pearl

Exceeding rich and rare!

But what it could not do was to describe a condition in which the ordinary human being actively wanted to be. Many a revivalist minister, many a Jesuit priest (see, for instance, the terrific sermon in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist) has frightened his congregation almost out of their skins with his word-pictures of Hell. But as soon as it comes to Heaven, there is a prompt falling-back on words like ‘ecstasy’ and ‘bliss’, with little attempt to say what they consist in. Perhaps the most vital bit of writing on this subject is the famous passage in which Tertullian explains that one of the chief joys of Heaven is watching the tortures of the damned.

space is the place of contemporary western utopias, e.g. Star Trek or Iain M. Banks' Culture. All the problems back home have been solved. A life of luxury is freely available to anyone who wants it, and for those who don't: a life of exploration and diplomacy unencumbered by the religious and ethnic atavisms of humanity's pre-perfect politics. imagine a hand cracking open a cold brewski - forever.

headsdupped to this beautiful documentary by @textfiles@mastodon.archive.org:

The book is dead, long live the book. The Book Makers is a 1-hour documentary that pulls back the curtain on the people who are keeping books alive in the 21st century. THE BOOK MAKERS profiles an eclectic group of people who have dedicated their lives to answering the question: what should books become in the digital age? From the esoteric world of book artists to the digital libraries of the Internet Archive, the film spins a tale of the enduring vitality of the book. This engaging documentary captures the painstaking but pleasurable process of creating hand-crafted books, in a diverse range of styles and mediums. The film travels from New York to Germany’s Black Forest, culminating at the Codex Book Fair in San Francisco, where the cast of characters congregates to sell their books to collectors from universities and the Library of Congress, and to curious buyers from around the world. Along the way, THE BOOK MAKERS highlights the talent, dedication and skill of these book artists, and reframes the concept and purpose of the book itself.

hakushi hasegawa's gorgeously maximalist cover of Drunkard Returns by The Folk Crusaders.

apparently the lyrics are

i like how the voice of god is vocoded. i like the hammered dulcimer. i like the pounding bass piano note. it's good art!!

this song is so god damn good

one of many sterolab tunes that i can happily loop for hours (while mass producing socialist zines, of course). i noticed in this one they did the M.E.S. thing of needle dropping in their own song to edit it. listen to this every alternate day and crest on the other.

perfect song

da da, da da, da da, da da

da da, da da, da da, da da

da da, da da, da da, da da

da

i think i first heard 111loggedin from the dismiss yourself youtube channel. now they're putting up their own algorithm amenable jungle mixes that i like.

the titles are encoded in various ways. half the comments are people commenting on this with amusement joking about how they'll never be able to find the video again. presumably they are so feed-addled they don't know about liking and subscribing!! the other half are people doing shannon entropy analysis on the strings to try and work out what scheme is being used. i tried running it through cryptii but wasn't able to get anything.

Before lofi beats to study to we had muzak to transition into a service economy to

i find muzak to be much more charming, even though it had plenty of critics in its heydey

courtesy of cabinet magazine, i tend to agree with this quote from Joseph Lanza:

“Elevator music (besides just being good music) is essentially a distillation of the happiness that modern technology has promised. A world without elevator music would be much grimmer than its detractors (and those who take it for granted) could ever realize.”

that being said, if i had an elevator, i would blast it with univeristy radio station. it's my elevator.

my brother introducted pj harvey to me when i was young and i'm very grateful to have been able to listen to her music throughout my life

the 12/8 over shuffled-5/4 polyrhythm that kicks this song off (and returns throughout) is basically the core idea of any music i play that i find interesting

the fact that such different rhythmic feelings can syncrhonise so perfectly... i think this is what mathemeticians feel when they think about euler's identity

a standout from a new album by rhys edwards, vinyl dust in the opening four bars barely prepares you for the massive attack bassline that knocks down the door.

maybe this is less surprising if you're not familiar with previous projects ulrika spacek or tripwires, where the low end was almost always supplied by a bass guitar, but rhys has a shit ton of instruments now and they're spread out all over this song. drums, synths, guitar, tambo, sure. but then strings? and a piano and idk i think i'm hearing a xylophone in here. meticulously arranged! parts swoop in and out, never intrusively.

i particularly like the snear in his voice during the line "more self assured in brighter spells" and the strained soft little overdubs in the chorus.

kväll is swedish for "evening", and andra våningen is "second floor" - i'll probably simmer on the lyrics a little longer before i feel confident interpreting them, beyond that i suppose they're the thoughts on "progress"/"direction"/"movin' on up" of a depressive musician that expatriated to stockholm.

i hope rhys is having a brighter spell at the moment.

he is doing it

such a cute song. i love the syncopation, and the botched little fill at 0:49. it all just feels so playful and fun.

love for everybody

✌🏿

i've been mainlining the second half of this LP recently. the journey through dan deacon's signature sound - animal collective meets steve reich - is wonderfully evocative of... at least an idea of "america".

love these dubby sets from eve and kasra. helps tide me over till the release of their album that i'm hoping is in the works

duplo punk that scratches my big supermarket itch and my lightning bolt swamp ass

their little EP is all that's out on bandcamp

this track is imperatively fun. i love landry's part. the drums are low in the mix, but Ricky Sebastian's also doing some great work, especially the over the bar playing around ~2:45

i could see DFA labelmates guerilla toss covering this. or working men's club.

yeah, woo!

looking for you

looking for me

yes, you know them

hang the rich

hang 'em

hang the rich

hang 'em

they look at me

they look at you

come on, ya hoo!

big long black cars

shine lights so bright

trips going to nowhere

yes, you know them

hang the rich, come on and hang 'em

hang the rich

hang 'em

designer clothes

look at that rock

which china shall i use?

swimming in the winter time

skiing in the summer

glass elevators and a penthouse, too, come on!

hang the rich

hang 'em

hang the rich

hang 'em

this one, that one

rosé, red or white?

fly here, fly there

ya hoo!

bring the bill

send it over to me

yeah that's correct 'cause i'm loaded

hang the rich

yes hang 'em

hang the rich come on and hang 'em

hang the rich

hang 'em

hang those rich

come on and hang 'em

hang the rich

hang 'em

hang the rich

come on and hang 'em

designer clothes

look at that rock

which china shall i use?

sprachen sie deutsch?

parlez vous francais?

¿hablas español

come on!

hang the rich

hang 'em

hang the rich

hang 'em

this one, that one

rosé, red or white?

fly here, fly there

ya hoo!

bring the bill

send it over to me

yes that's correct 'cause i'm loaded

hang the rich

hang 'em

hang the rich, come on

hang 'em

hang the rich

saying hang those rich

i'll hang 'em

a gentle and lovely little minimal bass-guitar-focused build-up tune from Charlotte Mermoud, reminds me of sneaks' gymnastics

the light has started to decline

the sun has gone since a while

they're just starting to warm up

stretch and twist. squat and drop

tonight we put up quite a fight

looks like the flag will not turn white

each one is aiming for the heart (so much luggage in the stairs)

and here we are a time apart (what if all this wasn't theirs?)

these are some very high quality, high effort explanations of concepts in digital audio synthesis.

Similarly, this series on saturation by youtuber sseb is also very good.

insane RNG on the lift during the sixth floor section

"This is Azi Narene, of the planetary freighter ship Demeter 227. I am marooned on planet Vesta, alone. Seeking rescue.

for fans of:

• Mœbius
• • Sable
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
• the music video for Fantasy by DyE
• Primal
• Rusty Venture from the The Venture Bros., especially his dream sequences in season one
• Peridot's meep morps in Steven Universe
• No-Face from Spirited Away
• Prophet
• Giant's Causeway
• Slime Moulds
• The Iron Giant
• Hei Bai

This show rules. It's gruesome and traumatizing and biological and beautiful - a grotesque and psychedelic episode of BBC Earth.

What is morality in a world that evolved without humans? Who (or what) should be considered? Each character has different ethical motivations - selfishness, prosociality, kindness, collectivism, and every motivation is confronted by the violence and harmony of Vesta.

booji boy: hello there. y'know, in the future, when you come to devo concerts, you won't see five spud boys up here, workin' our humps off. you'll see beautiful animated holograms floating around the room. and we'll pass out diapers at the door for everyone, so that when you all get in here, we'll turn on the subsonic frequencies and we'll all shit our pants together. yeah! yeah we'll have a good time, yeah! but if you're really lucky, if you're really lucky, you'll get to come to devo island. home to the world's first recombinant dna lab. where you too can become one of the beautiful mutants of the world. and when there's enough of us. when there's enough beautiful music. we'll come back. we'll come back and we'll kill all the normal people. we'll make it a wonderful place to live. we'll make it a beautiful planet. we'll make it on earth as it is... in heaven

a musician named Erik Nervous has a pretty good studio cover also. it misses mark mothersbaugh's tremulous tenor voice but it's probably the closest thing to a studio version of the song that exists.

a thing i often find myself doing in factorio is building a new coal mine to fuel my smokestacks to power my ammunition fabricators to kill all the animals on the planet.

i also often find myself thinking "this is fucking awful"

finally, i then wonder how i could make a morally redeemable version of the game based on ecosystems, until i get stuck at the part where the point of an ecosystem is that it doesn't require effortful intervention, and go back to throwing grenades into nurseries.

terra nil is South African studio Free Lives' attempt to get past the paradox.

in factorio, you are stranded on a planet and must construct from scratch the technological capacity of a modern nation state to build a rocket and get off the planet. how this plays out is: you're a little guy running atop patches of ore, connecting densely packed machines with pipes and conveyor belts. due to a judiciously designed material versimilitude — everything you build requires its own raw materials and energy inputs — the very act of pursuing your goal more efficiently necessarily forces you to balance the consumption and production of your factory.

this improved conveyor belt requires more steel. i'll need to increase my production of iron and reroute my coal supply blah blah blah...

ultimately, you kill most of the animals that were there first and industrialize enough of the planet to launch off into space again. as negatively as i'm framing it here, i will say that it is very, very satisfying to do this.

in terra nil, your objective is nominally the same: work on a planet and leave it. the difference is that balancing resources is the explicit goal. the planet you land on has already been desolated, and it's your job to restore a healthy ecology. you do this by placing buildings on poisoned soil that work synergistically with each other to clean, fertilize, and germinate the land. doing this optimially requires you to tetris your placements correctly in order to minimize redundant overlap, prioritised in different ways depending on which stage of the level you're on - detoxicification, biome restoration, and fauna reintroduction. once you've done these three things, you also have to recycle every building you placed, leaving only footprints as you fly off.

some more thoughts on the differences between the games

• in factorio, alongside what's there to mine on the planet, your own time is a resource because everything has to be done or set up manually. it is amazing how close it can get to the "this is work" boundary without making you want to stop playing, because you can't accomplish your ultimate goal without sinking a lot of time into the game. in terra nil, there's a currency system and buildings appear immediately as you click on where you want them to be. thinking it through takes time, too, but far less time is spent on execution of your plan, comparatively. i think there's a lot to be written here on how controlling a guy versus birdseye strategy game agency affects the work/play boundary but if you're interested in that you should just go read an actual game theorist.
• factorio's planets aren't beautiful. despite abundant water and minerals, most of the planet is brown. the animals there are basically the zerg, with no apparent culture or behaviour beyond "swarm and attack". you could take pride in this - "graphics aren't the point. it's about the gameplay" - but i think this should be understood as more than a simple consequence of game development prioritisation. the planet isn't beautiful because makes it less disturbing to destroy. factorio players grimly joke about how the factory must expand, because it's already uncomfortable enough. imagine if the land was diverse, lush, and thriving. or if the animals all had names and cultures and complex societies. it would be awful. it would be like a first-person shooter where all the enemies are children. so obviously the designers haven't done that. but in terra nil, beauty coming back to the land is probably the largest positive reward it gives you (i don't really care about getting a percentage bar to 100%). aesthetics are quite inseperable from gameplay.

so, i think terra nil's shift to something more akin to a puzzle, with a focus on aesthetic objectives is an interesting way to handle the paradox. it is a far shallower game. it doesn't teach you much in terms of fundamental principles of the universe in the way factorio does, but it was a calming and fun way to spend an afternoon and i think the designers of the future eco-factorio could take a lot of good lessons from its successes.

(i was clued into terra nil via the honourable mentions appended to Mark Brown's analysis of Jusant as this year's most innovative game. Thanks, Mark!)

i've been listening to kristine's music since hearing the audiotree set of her erstwhile band mothers, and i'm delighted to hear the direction she's taken her sound

this live performance of Ribbon (filmed at "the Gradwell House") is delicate and sensitive, syncopated and curious. the flute and percussion sections really distinguish the arrangement from more typical indie fare

back on a footwork kick.

you don't have to be overdosing edibles to make this music, but it helps.

really love how nigeria is pushing hip hop forward. DJ Rashad is in here syncopating against S-Smart's Alu Jon Jonki Jon and it's just so good.

Say my name

Go again and again and again and again

Say my name

Go again, and again..and again

this guy killlllllllls it

i was curious about how people would play this track, but found most people stylized it too far away from its trap roots for my liking.

this one stays faithful, at least during the verse with triplets on the hats. then it gets audition quality. check out the triple kick at the end :0

a cute 'n' cohesive multimedia style meets the industrial might of a hustling 'n' grinding L.A. creative. it's cool to see the gradual distinction of his aesthetic over time in spite of many (very lovingly drawn) direct inspirations.

does that make sense what i'm trying to say? even if someone starts out with "i want to create graphics that look like MacMall catalogs and vintage playing cards", if they do it for long enough they'll blend enough new things in that the original mission statement won't be what they're making any more.

it also helps that he works in many different formats

these things rule. the variety and quality of people's submissions is incredibly inspiring. some participants detail their workflows which makes me think:

1. It is amazing how much skill this takes
2. It is amazing how one person can do all of this

a transitional species between women-music and polyrhythm indie. it's less than 10 minutes long and each song has an amazingly taut structure. alongside the muffled production and unexpectedly intriciate rhythm section, there are a couple of synth parts (e.g. 0:25 in How to Become a Small Dead Dog) that are, in my estimation, essential to its character.

synth guys have the biggest fetish for aesthetics

this guy Casper Electronics is no less meticulous but there's a kind of intentional roughness in this fun and fast-paced demo of some basic sound-making circuitry that an algorithm accurately predicted i would respond positively to