tech – The New Old Music Blog

Following up on my last post, Youtube granted me an API quota exception, but instead of a quota of 200 additions to a playlist a day, they gave me 300 – that’s not enough. I still made a few playlists from it, but I’ve kind of stopped since my setup has changed:

Shoegaze: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL34nTXIAgkSkK9pPQ3vff_7KLfcNHzAxB
Progressive / Fusion: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL34nTXIAgkSlaQH08Ad0vmXzGgC3S0SuL
Video Game Music: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL34nTXIAgkSmqyo-_2_xZwNgNfjLG_LbS
Industral: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL34nTXIAgkSmqyo-_2_xZwNgNfjLG_LbS
Psych / Noise: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL34nTXIAgkSn_H6yFvVPkEFRhZeZrmMir

I did change my music setup entirely, I would use my computer as a big fancy mp3 player, but after wiring my house for fancy LEDs, I realized it’s easy enough to add in some cheap amplifers like the tpa7297. It sounds like a nightclub in here now if I don’t cut my sound down to like 33%. I rather like this setup, I can change songs remotely pretty easy – I just use a Linux desktop on my server and play the music from the browser in there, then I can access that anywhere on my network from my phone via VNC. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to get rid of noise interfering, my amplifiers would pick up the data from my LEDs – I was using a Raspberry Pi on the same power source as the LEDs and speakers, using these bluetooth chips helped [https://www.amazon.com/HiLetgo-Wireless-Bluetooth-Receiver-Lossless/dp/B07W7YCFS1], but lag and having to sync after every restart made me dislike it. Changing the PI to a different power supply fixed it, then I got rid of the Pi completely and am now controlling the lights with an ESP32 chip and WLED instead.

Back to music, I’ve been listening to this Autechre track a bit for some reason. I think it’s kind of generic, especially compared to Warp Tapes 89-93 that has a different version on it, but I found the samples on it kinda funny. The first one is Hawkwind and seems to be well documented, a man about to get a cavity fixed, but the other samples I couldn’t find any information on.

Autechre – Cavity Job. Kinda bland early 90s UK Hardcore, but the samples at the beginning of the second song intrigued me.

At 6:28 there’s a sample of someone saying “Everybody on the freeway just stopped. Police had no choice but to just, shut down the highway. [honking, pause] THE MOST AMAZING SIGHT, EVER VIEWED, BY THE HUMAN EYE”

I found the way the guy said it kinda funny, so I started googling. A few results came back with Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygen, but I listened to the whole thing and didn’t hear it. Then I found a post buried on a forum mentioning it’s from a Houston concert he put on. And I found this, JMJ doing some massive concert in Texas for it’s 150th celebration.

Jean Michel Jarre – Rendez-vous Houston

The first half of the video is basically a documentary about the concert and the build up to it. The “amazing sight” quote shows up by some guy on the street at 9:32~, when I saw the video of the traffic at 11:45, I knew what was coming next – it’s that guy, explaining how the police shutdown the highway.

I don’t know why I like finding weird little hardly documented things like this. I just found the sample kinda funny. They sound so concerned when it’s just a big concert.

I havn’t really listened to any of Jean Michel Jarre’s stuff other than Zoolook before this, I really like the use of vocal samples on that, maybe I should look into more of his stuff. I wish I could find more stuff like Zoolook, stuff with lots of vocal phonemes cutup, but outside of one offs like “The Red House” by David Byrne, and maybe “Disco Hospital” by Coil, it’s not very common.

David Byrne – The Red House – another example of a song using lots of vocal sounds cut up

I got the idea to scrape a few social media sites to generate playlists. Here’s one for Video Game Music, a thread about retro video game music and finding a neat track made me decide to write a script to automatically add things to a playlist. I don’t know if it’s really worth posting as it’s just the basic python script provided by Youtube, as the only real addition is a loop and logic to check for previous entries in the list, but the results speak for themselves: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL34nTXIAgkSmqyo-_2_xZwNgNfjLG_LbS

The list has a lot of modern stuff too, but my favorite is NES and C64 stuff, just because of the technological limitations and how they got around it – those two platforms have a lot of fast arpeggios where there would normally be a chord since they don’t have enough voices for chords. I think it’s an interesting effect and love how it sounds. SNES and Genesis sound hardware are a lot better but still limited, the lofi sampling on the SNES is interesting (see all the crazy sampling on Earthbound) and the Genesis uses FM synthesis which can do some really crazy stuff in the right hands (although that’s actually rare, as FM was all over 80s pop music, but only games like Streets of Rage 3 actually do anything unique with the technology.)

Malcolm McClaren’s Tranquilize is kinda neat, I do like “About Her”, a downtempo version of the Zombies’ She’s Not There – it’s not chiptune, but other songs on the album are.

A lot of this music is kind of obnoxious – the only time it’s approached “mainstream” is people like Malcolm McClaren hyping “Chiptune” in the mid 00s. I can’t really think of any instances of it being popular other than that, maybe Crystal Castles but they are kinda long gone, and for good reason. I do like the band “The Depreciation Guild”, they managed to mix Shoegaze and videogame bleeps and bloops quite well.

The Depreciation Guild – In Her Gentle Jaws. Shoegaze / Chiptune crossover? I wish more bands would try stuff like that, though the actual hardware for this stuff can be kind of hard to get or even know anything about.

I’m going to submit this post to the Youtube API quota bypass page, I can only add 200 songs a day which really isn’t enough. If someone from Youtube actually reads this, please approve me, lol. I just want to make playlists, of everything! Finding new music is something I love, and this makes it much easier. Please approve~

Category: tech

More Youtube playlists, and tracking down samples.

Playlist generation script, thoughts on Chiptune/VGM and an API quota appeal to Youtube.