A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.
▰ Raw material is often some of my favorite listening, and so while these short loops (collected as [*Field Notes 02*](https://sjfmusic.bandcamp.com/album/field-notes-02-sample-pack)) by Simon James French are intended as source audio for music-making, in fact the ambient tones, field recordings, and general droning-goodness are fine just unto themselves.
▰ Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison) scored the new Netflix anime series *Yasuke*, about an African-born samurai, and while the [soundtrack album](https://flyinglotus.bandcamp.com/album/yasuke) has plenty of cinematic instrumental hip-hop (“Using What You Got” is a particular fave), it also has chill for days (check out “Shoreline Sus” and “Enchanted”).
▰ Claude and Ola Aldous publish the zine *Deft Esoterica*, and they also make their own deftly esoteric music, on display on [*vol*](https://tqn-aut.bandcamp.com/album/vol), nine tracks of rangy experimentalism, with an emphasis on noisy field recordings, fragile piano, and old-school scifi synthesizer.
▰ As I mentioned [yesterday](https://disquiet.com/2021/05/01/twitter-com-disquiet-voice-recognition-robot-dreams/), I’ve never actually played *Cyberpunk 2077*, but I’ve spent an enormous amount of time with YouTube videos of its ambient street noise playing on loop. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsbalTIJQEg) is a good example, though the title is a bit ambiguous, so possibly not all the sound is from the game itself:
Flicking from point to point in that video, I’m pretty certain all of that is in-game sounds; it’s all quite familiar from my 100+ hours I spent in the game. The small camera movements strongly suggests the creator just found a spot and recorded the audio and video; the movements are that of the player’s character ambient breathing.
Thanks so much. I have been listening to (and watching) these on repeat lately.