I love analog, lo-fi sounds. The soundtrack to my childhood was made of Little Thinker tapes, squarewaves and sawtooth tones from the NES, scratchy crackling old vinyl, the Peter Howell version of the Doctor Who theme, Wendy Carlo's compositions for Tron, et cetera. I suppose some of my fondness for that era of electronic music is due to seeing it through nostalgia goggles, but I'm definitely not the only one out there who feels that way.
There are a handful of artists out there who deconstructed this stuff, took apart the basic components and used them like found objects. The samples themselves, or the looping structure, or the recurrent themes, or the sound quality. I love this music because to me it clearly conveys the subjective nature of some of these memories in a way that words can't. Childhood memories are unique because kids don't get everything (and don't feel a need to), and that's kind of how this genre of music is -- it doesn't have a "point" to make, it just kind of wanders around the backyard with a tape recorder in hand, studying the curious world around it.
Here's a few tidbits. Pretty much everyone knows the first one, but I can't make a post about this sort of thing without including Boards of Canada.
Boards Of Canada - Skyliner by parse
Baths - Maximalist by ericstein
Tycho - Coastal Brake by Tycho
isan - 64 fire damage by Katahati
Oneirist by Ochre
Thank you to Soundcloud (and its users) for hosting this stuff.
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