a compilation of strange game music

When we asked Drew Daniel of Matmos and The Soft Pink Truth for his Baker's Dozen, he refused - and with good reasons. Thirteen of them, to be precise. Here Daniel presents them in an essay titled A Rant Against The Quantification Of Aesthetics.

Wiretap began on an extended visit to Detroit back in 2016. The project is about transformation, and finding hidden potential in the built environment. In practice, it combines mechanical music with aspects of field recording, and urban artforms like graffiti.

The video here was made in Detroit’s legendary Packard Plant, which was demolished last year.

I worked on this with Raphael Merriweathers, aka Ray7, who is a percussionist, producer, and DJ for Underground Resistance. With the help of Justin Moncrieff and Tom Linder, we snuck into abandoned factories around the city and made music from whatever we found, using the solenoid percussion setup I’d been developing to build makeshift instruments and write music for them, bringing the factories back to life with a different purpose.

Pynchon's Sound of Music is dedicated to cataloging, exploring, and interpreting the manifold manifestations of music in Thomas Pynchon's work. An original mix of close and distant readings, this monograph em-ploys a variety of disciplines—from literary studies and musicology to philosophy, media theory, and his-tory—to explain Pynchon through music and music through Pynchon. Encyclopedic and eclectic—though never exhaustive—in its approach, Pynchon's Sound of Music discusses the author's use of instruments such as the kazoo, the harmonica, or the saxophone and embarks on close readings of the most salient and musicologically tantalizing passages. Zooming out to a bird's eye view, all his historical musical references and allusions are put into perspective to trace the trends and tendencies in the development of the oeuvre's interest in music. A treasure trove for fans and an invaluable source for future scholarship, this book includes the Pynchon Playlist, a 900+ item catalog of all musical references, and an exhaustive index of more than 700 appear-ances of musical instruments.

A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.

plugdata is a free/open-source visual programming environment based on pure-data. It is available for a wide range of operating systems, and can be used both as a standalone app, or as a VST3, LV2, CLAP or AU plugin.

Heavenchord - To The Antares

In Russia, May 9 is Victory Day, a national holiday. It’s also the birthday of Dave Gahan, lead singer with Depeche Mode, and a group of Muscovite fans have declared it Dave Day, gathering together to celebrate the group with homemade banners, mass sing-alongs and club nights. In Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union, the band’s music has been treasured since it was only available on illegal bootlegged cassettes in the 1980s, and it formed the soundtrack of the march toward freedom those countries embarked upon following the fall of the Berlin Wall. This situation is mirrored in Tehran, where fans take huge risks in listening to their music in a country that has banned all Western music since the Islamic Revolution. In the UK, the church of St Edward King and Martyr in Cambridge holds services for goths where they play Depeche Mode records. Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller and filmmaker Nicholas Abrahams tell these and other stories of faith and devotion from around the world in this fascinating and inspired documentary about fandom, which is at turns bizarre, funny, sad and often touching.

women of ambient

Detroit's pre-techno history that spawned the techno movement itself

🎵 Introducing Diffusion Radio - A 24/7 livestream of AI-generated music! 🎵

The Harmonai team has been working hard on diffusion models for music generation. We're happy to bring you this stream to share the progress of our experiments!

We definitely appreciate any feedback you have on the music. These models aren't fully trained and are being worked on as we speak. We will keep sharing fresh new output. Keep tuning in if you want to hear our progress over the weeks and months.

Disclaimer: The music is shared for research / educational / fair use purposes only. Any overfitting or similarity to real music is accidental (we're trying to avoid it).

Harmonai - [[ AI music R&D lab ]]
➡ Follow https://twitter.com/harmonai_org
➡ Join https://discord.gg/harmonaiplay

Musika!
Fast Infinite Waveform Music Generation

Previous revision of the altern-8 wikipedia page, very casual and subjective : "a music that became faster, with more bass, and definitely more noise"