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Typical Trevor Something type of stuff from around 2017:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAxSVf7zoD8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpTVqvjUDdo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkQ6H21QBXE
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Epic mega mix put together by Neros77 with old Le Mans footage:
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It's well over a decade now since this stuff hit the scenes
Good effort with posting all these video.
Interesting.You do seem an expert, I know very little.
I assume that this wave sound references much earlier stuff like krafwerk and later, Human League etc, and the whole 70's synth sounds? -
You do seem an expert, I know very little.
Definitely not. Just into electronic music and I've been making YouTube playlists and listening to it in the lab for a long time!
I assume that this wave sound references much earlier stuff like krafwerk and later, Human League etc, and the whole 70's synth sounds?
If you go back far enough, that's where the synth sound came from. There was the Moog synthesizer in the late 60s and people started making music with it and treating it like an instrument. Synthesizers ultimately were used to generate all the sounds you hear here and most of what is in modern electronic music.
The Synthwave 'sound', certainly in the earlier part of the scene, was reminiscent of retro 80s electronic music, the sort of themes you'd hear in dystopian 80s film scores and the sort of thing you'd find in early 90s computer-generated synth like on Amiga demo discs. It still has a bit of that.
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Pretty much. Many of the drum sounds in jungle and drum and bass were generated with drum machines like the Roland TR-808 in rap songs in the 1980s and then sampled and chopped about. Trance has always had a lot of synthesizer use to generate the sounds but I think much of it by the late 90s was done in software rather than on a big analogue synth with dials, switches and patch leads.
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This is my current Sovietwave playlist. You can hear it's come from synthwave but with a different vibe. If you look up Melacholic Sovietwave on YouTube there are lots of mixes with iconic Soviet imagery. I really wanted to get into this more than I've been able to, but I've been able to pull out a handful of tracks for my own short playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTfUxZVG-cs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wPL3MbUTbo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNI1u-1xO6M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT9SruEWKiA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_HP5LKfl5A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBVQcQxGDww
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Intrigued: I'll dive-in over the weekend!
Particularly looking forward to the Sovietwave.
Either way, thanks for putting so much effort into the thread.
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nice work, lots to check out thanks for posting.
I've loved this album for a long time, played it a lot whilst starting the working from home covid thing. reminds me of the Racoons tv show from when I were a nipper for some reason.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/NDJn0SQehb4
quite like the odd bit of Simpsons wave too
owl
skydancer
Scilly.Suffolk
Dogtemple-
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About
Nu wave / synthwave / retro wave / **** wave
Posted by
@Jonny69
It's well over a decade now since this stuff hit the scenes and it's still hanging around. I'm surprised I've never seen a synthwave thread on here. Must be others who listen to it. Or is it a dirty secret on here that nobody talks about?
I started finding it on YouTube around 2009-ish when the algorithms recommended more of what you were watching/listening to. Back then some of the main channels were Maniac Synth (RIP man, we miss you), Neros77, New Retro Wave and Valerie Records. Then later on The80sGuy, Karate King etc. Kind of stuff I liked was Flashworx, Lazerhawk, Miami Nights 1984, Bourgeoisie, FM Attack, Noir Deco, MPM, Futurecop etc. I found some of the stuff like Com Truise a bit too disjointed to actually listen to, even though they had a massive influence over the scene. Running alongside, there were some more [what appeared to be] more organised 'groups' like Kavinsky, College and Electric Youth. They were producing songs rather than tracks and ended up in soundtracks for iconic films like Drive in 2011.
Fast forward a decade and the scene has evolved. Lots of different styles of synthwave have come and gone e.g. vampwave, horror, darkwave and chillwave but basically revolving around the same central retro theme. There's been what looks like a whole separate dystopian Sovietwave scene in Russia which has only made its way onto YouTube in the last year or so. Some of it simply doesn't show up on our playlists because it's in Russian Cyrillic and presumably old Soviet terminology that I'm not familiar with.
I guess at the moment we're seeing the tail-end of an outgoing scene. More organised groups have been producing songs rather than tracks, so more vocals and less tracking. There's been more collaborative stuff between the traditional trackers and the singers, some examples being Trevor Something, Robert Parker, Timecop with Parallels, ALEX with Rachel McAlpine. And now, not sure if this is a continuation of the scene or people getting a bit older and indulging in the synths they could never afford, there's a lot of live synthesizer music going on.
Anyway, I'm not an expert. Here are some tracks, which hopefully show a bit of evolution.
Defining College and Kavinsky:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0HCpGj65mU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV_3Dpw-BRY
Synthwave circa 2010-2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyZQUEMZlCU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G22X5X49VhM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfLZlvL83GM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saC3XYuai54
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kyRd_qNd-o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_JRhmppew4
After Maniac Synth got shut down, the whole scene lost a lot of good music. The channel was instrumental in a lot of people getting into synthwave. RIP Maniac Synth really defined the end of an era in synthwave for me and it's amazing that someone dedicated writing a track about it.
Quite a lot of the darkwave/horror/zombie/werewolf stuff was around this time which I didn't really get on with.
Synthwave circa 2016-2020 period:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjpn2L3DboM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKmPM4YEXC0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQCh1_2UjPM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usoMpOsxhJM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1oB2EDu5XA
Synthwave in the direction change kind of leading up to 2020 and onward:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqSiM6oBQgA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJgh5Ka9hi8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rcf_hNn4NM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjqWnCFo6KA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjwS0DeXuP8
This is just a random selection. I'll try and post up my playlists with approximate dates. Some of the older stuff is missing now that channels like Maniac Synth are dead.