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) 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 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, nine tracks of rangy experimentalism, with an emphasis on noisy field recordings, fragile piano, and old-school scifi synthesizer.
▰ As I mentioned yesterday, 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 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.