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Have you heard this yet? Seems to be a compilation of limited edition tracks from a couple years back. No idea if it is or ever will be a real album.
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downvote
lol you wrote it right
This is seriously worth watching just for the video.
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What about older stuff you might like and haven’t heard?
This was the last thing I listened to:
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I have to say I’m really pleased with how this thread is going so far. Way more activity than I expected in just a couple days! I appreciate all the contributions.
I’m still working through the posts and listening to everything, but I thought I’d drop in this nice little track I just heard on KEXP:
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Inc. long post about the unsung father of trance and progressive house(genres that have become passe, supposedly, but that I still love), Brian Transeau (BT).
If you listened to electronic music in the 90’s-00’s, you heard him. Maybe not his stuff, but his influence. And probably his stuff, you just didn’t know it. Always pushing the envelope.
Let’s start with the early stuff. From 1995’s Ima, a true trance classic. This was a dance classic.
To show some range, this is from the same album. There’s a great story behind this song.
The story: In the album notes for BT’s 10 Years in the Life compilation, BT says that Tori Amos performed 15 minutes of improvisational singing over his track “Divinity”, which later became the vocals for “Blue Skies”. He says that Tori never sang the words “blue” or “skies” in the recording. He joined together syllables and breaths to make new words through editing.
Moving on, the seminal trance hit from ESCM, 1997. If you are a long-time fan of the genre and haven’t heard this, or samples of this, I’d be truly surprised.
Next up, Movement in Still Life still had some trance classics on it, like Godspeed, Mercury and Solace, and Dreaming, but when it came out n 2000 it was a very different album than the previous two. It was groundbreaking and amazing in it’s own right.
Next up, BT moves EDM into pop…in 2003. Way before EDM turned mainstream, he was exploring more pop elements. A lot of people didn’t like Emotional Technology because it was so different than his previous stuff, but it’s a great entry point for people not as familiar with EDM, trance, breakbeats, etc. Obviously I have to put this in here, you may have heard it before.
" The song features BT’s signature ‘stutter edit’ technique prominently in his vocals, largely contributing to the song’s inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records in 2003 for the largest number of vocal edits in a song (6,178 BIAS Peak edits)"
After some sidetracks into movie scoring (Monster, The Fast and the Furious, Stealth, Catch and Release), we come to 2006 and the release of arguably BT’s greatest achievement, This Binary Universe. It is completely different and shows off his compositional skills. I’m just going to post the youtube playlist here. You need to watch the visuals along with hearing the tracks, in order. It was released on DVD and played in theatres.
in 2010, EDM became mainstream, and BT got his grammy nomination (finally) for These Hopeful Machines. It’s a masterpiece.
In 2014, he followed it up with A Song Across Wires. This was ore traditional EDM and featured a lot of collaborations
Oh, you want a side project? How about some synthpop?
Latest release, from his 2020 album The Lost Art of Longing
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Lol Skydiver loves her some BT.
It also had a remake of Calling Your Name, one of his very first tracks, but I think the original is totally worth linking and I think we had this conversation before about it being one of my favorites from that era and genre:
p.s. lol Libra was his stage name before he just started going by his actual initials, BT, in case somebody thought I linked the wrong track
ooo that’s a nice one
These instruments you mentioned in addition to some others he has sound amazing and are highly prized now. The prices reflect those facts unfortunately so a lot of people just work in the box. In that bottom video I can make out a 303, 909, OB-6, Juno 106 (top synth), and Ensoniq ESQ-1 below it. He also seems to lean on the MC-202 a lot in other videos:
Also check out the related SH-101 if you’re interested in acid/house.
http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/sh101.php
Here’s the track I think of when I see that instrument list:
Bass: Roland SH-101
Drums: Roland TR-909
Pads: Roland Juno 106 (filtered through Casio FZ1) + Roland D50
Birds: Akai S900 “Canadian Loon” sample
Lead: soprano saxophone (acoustic)
https://www.soundonsound.com/people/classic-tracks-808-state-pacific-state
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I recommend listening to this track in some headphones to get the full effect of the glitching stutters. I wish I actually liked the track so I could enjoy it more, but the editing is absolutely amazing.
The Guiness Most Vocal Edits I always found to be a weird footnote for a few reasons but one is that usually glitchy stuff is done in instrumentals, but it’s still a cute thing thinking of somebody counting them up.
The gltichy stuff starts to move away from being danceable but you might like it @SensiblePerson:
Have we reached falling down stairs on purpose yet?
I think of glitchy stuff as the antithesis of all that nonsense, like, just wild out instead of nerding out with some nested nonuplets.
I mean, sure, 90% of everything fucking sucks and that’s being conservative.
Depends on how amusical it is and whether or not it’s PLANNED. Remember: falling down stairs sounds awful and nobody wants to listen to that. Dude even admitted it. Falling down stairs on purpose though…
That is true but for different reasons. For example, 90% of radio pop doesn’t suck because they’re calling the backing track the finished product. It sucks for other reasons but not that one.
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Like, with this track below, we wouldn’t analyze it in terms of some polyrhythmic structure, it’s just 4/4 with a bunch of electronic fills and stutters:
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Lol I feel like we should bump the Music Makers thread instead of letting this keep spilling over, but if you’re saying there’s not a strong leading, defining melody then I can dig it. Writing melodies is hard.
But some of it, that’s a feature not a bug:
full version
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