News - Playlists

How it works:
For each challenge we provide two short music samples for our members to include any way they choose in a music production by a set date. The submitted tracks can be any length but we prefer them to be around 3 - 5 minutes.

The challenge period generally runs for a few weeks from start to finish.

Other members of the community will listen, comment and often provide valuable feedback. It's alway great to hear the variety of approaches with the same samples.

Below you'll find some recent challenges and each post includes a playlist on Soundcloud.

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Gairaigo

This month we were privileged to have some unique samples provided by Melbourne based electronic music maestro @Gairaigo aka Gary Franks.

The MG1 was my first real synth, I think I bought it in 1985. Best $100 I ever spent.

The Orac sample is from one of my old tapes from 1986. Year 11 at high school, what a time to be alive. I was way into musique concrete, listening to Karlheinz Stockhausen and Edgard Varese, so I hacked a tape recorder to change speeds and de-activated the erase head so I could record over and over on the same tape, building up sounds and mangling the audio until it disappeared into background noise. I was possibly the biggest nerd in the world… I think this part has some Hohner Chromonica, my parents Yamaha organ, a casio PT80 and maybe some weird sounds off my Commodore 64.

  • Listen to the Playlist

    • Gavin Dwyer – Outrageous!

    There’s a nice story behind this month’s challenge.

    Gavin Dwyer is the guy who religiously puts together the Soundcloud podcast “Outrageous“, a megamix of latest BC/Lemom/indie producer tracks every single month.

    He’s sent us this rather sweet sentiment of a recording of his grandmother’s bell.

    This is “Kranky Nan’s Bell” when my Nan was in her last years, she had what we called her beer bell ( a larger version of mine). When she died, all the grandkids got a smaller version of the bell…and I put mine on the rear vision mirror  any time it rings it’s my Nan looking out for me.

  • Listen to the Playlist

    • Spectoral

    This round we had samples from long time member, Melbourne based Producer and self proclaimed Masterchef wannabe SPECTORAL. “I’ve submitted for you 2 vocal samples from an abandoned unfinished track 🙂 Feel free to destroy/warp/chop/use completely. Royalty free 100%, even if I end up finishing the song someday 🤷 but I have a feeling some of you here could smash the production so well I would want u to release it instead!“  

    Henry Toft

    In March we received a lovely warm piano piece from Danish producer Henry Toft. It was a real piano in a real room with all the reflections and harmonics that come along that. And also he provided a recording of a nice glass of sparkling water.   Henry Toft has made some gorgeous music over the years under a variety of different names. Go have a listen if you get chance, there’s some beautiful and emotional stuff in there.

    Kirigirisu Recordings

    This round we had two samples provided by Kirigirisu Recordings from Tokyo, Japan. Our members created new work using these samples. There was a hardware noisebox synth whirring away, another droney hardware-synth with a more rhythmic rising tremolo quality, and some lovely guitar noodling. There is a guitar playing so this is a treat. All very lo-fi. Neil goes under the artist name Broken Shoulder and with his partner Kaoru runs an obscure and experimental tape/CDR label Kirigirisu Recordings from Tokyo, Japan.