good to see bandcamp continuing with #juneteenth even after being acquired by epic games. not sure if “listening recommendations” exactly but definitely on topic for a music minded server 🥰
So, if I may link, I maintain a running list of Bandcamp Friday recommendations on another site you might find of interest!
A synth-specific excerpt for Waveform users:
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Elaine Radigue: Not a well known artist but one who should definitely be on your radar, Radigue was a contemporary of Delia Derbyshire and Wendy Carlos who made strange, enigmatic experimental electronic that still feels shocking and alien today even if you’re well-versed in modern “Drone”. She excels at long, slow hypnotic soundscapes that often consisting of just one single sound building and receding. Her bandcamp stretches from 1969 to 2000(!).
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Plastikman / Richie Hawtin: You may know Plastikman already, but his Bandcamp is huge, it seems to actually contain his entire discography including a bunch of singles, the early FUSE / Artificial Intelligence Warp releases and a super rare album named “Concept 1” I’d never even heard of but which turns out to be absolutely incredible. If you’re not familiar definitely check out the Plastikman quartet (Sheet One / Musik / Artifakts (bc) / Consumed, of which I think Consumed— a hyper-minimal unintentional coda to what was originally going to be a trilogy of interconnected albums, recorded in a state of turmoil when the plan to record the third album was blocked by the US ejecting him from the country in a fit of post-OKC-bombing weirdness— is the most interesting).
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Chance McDaniel: I found this dude through the YouTube synths community (actually I thought he was an r/synthesizers member, but searching I can’t find anything?) and this album’s super inspirational to me, I especially link “With Ink”
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R Beny: This guy is a giant in the YouTube synth jam community and he’s got entire albums worth of material not on his YouTube on Bandcamp. The Bandcamp stuff is a little more ambient flavored but it’s super good.
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Eryngi / Nyarluu: I know this person through the indie games community but they also recorded some electronic music; link goes to a album of super spaced out FM jams with some amazing timbres
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Laurie Spiegel is another early electronic composer; she did a bunch of cool influential synth work in the 70s and one of her songs is on the Voyager “golden record” (as of this second 15 billion miles from earth, so I guess she’s the most widely-distributed electronic musician alive). They’ve got her magnum opus collection “The Expanding Universe” on Bandcamp but also there’s a couple new pieces, link goes to a really cool track from 2018.
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Oval / Markus Popp: Oval in the 90s made what is still some of the strangest, most alien music I’ve ever heard, beginning with a suite of albums made by hand-scratching CDs and playing them back in old players with bad error correction to sample the noises for ambient. His whole discography’s on there including the absolutely essential extended Japanese version Ovalprocess, the height of his wierdness, and the bizarre trip-hop/noise fusion album he released as “So” in collaboration with a Japanese folksinger.
Also notably on Bandcamp / in that post: Liz Ryerson, Fahmi Mursyid, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Tim Hecker, Boards of Canada, Bjork
An observation: Bandcamp lets you pay extra on a purchase, so if you add 20% to your purchases today this is basically the same as a Bandcamp Friday plus you helped fund the NAACP LDF.
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