There is so much music out there, way too much to listen to in one lifetime. The really good stuff is often buried under the huge amounts of tossed off gear showcases, rough sketches, or noodly jams (no offense to anyone posting such things). While I do occasionally (and mostly randomly) listen to the music that’s posted on here on elektronauts, I think it would be nice to have a dedicated thread with some choice picks, the crème de la crème.
I hope this won’t be viewed as shameless self-promotion, but more like proud self-promotion, the stuff where you think “This is exactly how I want my music to sound like, and I absolutely nailed it!”
So, if you could only show 3 of your own tunes to people, what would you choose? Feel free to write some words on why you selected each one: Are you proud of the composition, the mix, the innovation, the danceability, the sounds, the raw energy of the take?
I’ll start off with my picks and hope many people join in:
I’ve been playing in a handful of bands and recording my own music since around 2009, which resulted in 10 albums (released mostly on bandcamp) over the timespan of 15 years. It’s incredibly hard to narrow it down to just 3 songs, but these are my favourite ones I’ve made:
#1
I’ve had this band with a friend (the singer on this song) for about 5 years or so and this is the last song from our last album (80s kinda synth pop). We’ve played it (and the rest of the album) live for about a year before recording it, trimming what didn’t work and perfecting what worked through many many iterations. It’s quite a journey at almost 11 minutes. It’s spacy synths, analog drum machine sounds, proggy guitar riffs, time signature changes, polymeters and syncopated rhythms, but it still remains somewhat catchy (imo). The ending, where the beat switches to 4/4, is the pinnacle of what we did with this band and such a great payoff to how the song builds up to that ending part. Perfect as an album closer (and a show closer). The vocals in the climax still give me goosebumps. For me, it hits the sweetspot between musically compelling and catchy and there’s always new stuff to discover with multiple listens (even to me, and I’ve played all the instruments on it). I’d probably mix it a bit differently nowadays (snare sounds like shit), but I think it’s the best thing I’ve (or we’ve) ever recorded (the whole album is really the most consistently good thing I’ve been involved in making up until now).
#2
After writing most of my music on guitar until that point, I gave myself the challenge of doing a whole album without any guitar at all. I mostly used the og DT and og OP-1 and it was simply lots of fun to make and turned out pretty unique, especially for being out of my comfort zone. Quite lo-fi, but all the more playful and maybe the most cheerful record (at least soundwise) I’ve ever done. This song is the one where I feel everything came together in a perfectly imperfect way, the lyrics (it’s about trying not to leave the world in a mess for future generations), recurring melodies, wacky synths, cluttery beats. To me, it sounds like how the painting of a toddler looks like, a cheerfully crooked mess. I don’t even know what genre I would put this in. Only a handful of my songs could ever move a listener to tears, but weird as it is, this was one of them.
#3
In contrast to the first two songs, where many ideas are crammed together, this one is the total opposite. Again, a two-piece-band effort where I did everything but sing. It’s centred around one single idea and making the most of it. It’s the albums opener and serves as sort of a “palette cleanser”. The synth intro is so hypnotic, it always feels like it wipes every thought away and sends the listener off into the rest of the album. It’s basically a krautrock song that builds and builds, layer upon layer until it dissolves into blissful guitar echoes and soothing hums. It might be obvious, but I had just discovered the band NEU that year. Simple idea, yet I feel like we executed it very well. Pretty challenging to pull off live with just a RC-50 boss looper, a guitar, microkorg, and an og sp-404, but always good fun.
Looking forward to seeing this thread filled with lots of your contributions!
