Awesome Music

Some songs lend themselves particularly well to being played on brass instruments. Musician Seb Skelly shows us just that with his wonderful arrangement and performance of the Tears for Fears track Everybody Wants to Rule the World, another track which reminds us just how great a decade the 1980s were for music.

Musician Jacob Collier is known for ending his concerts with singalongs. At the end of his performance at London’s O2 Academy, he turned his entire audience into a choir. He achieved this impressive result by dividing the audience into three sections, assigning them a note, and conducting them to raise and lower their pitch.

There’s no escape; I can’t wait. The exceptional electromechanical Device Orchestra is back to perform another pop music hit. This time, the band of electric toothbrushes, credit card terminals, and typewriters were joined by an Epilator hair remover which added a spinny new sound to the Britney Spears track Toxic.

Musician Demin Vladimir created this electromechanical rig plays an acoustic guitar. It has one set of actuators that hold the frets while others strum the strings. It’s not the most expressive instrument, but neither were vintage player pianos, and we still love those. He’s also built an accordion that plays the notes itself.

Musician Astrophysics takes songs from various genres, and slathers them with a thick layer of 1980s electronic sounds, then complements them with appropriately retro graphics. There’s lots of great stuff to enjoy on their YouTube channel, but this synthwave remix of Outkast’s 2003 hit Hey Ya! is our favorite (so far.)

Musician Luke Million has an awesome collection of vintage synthesizers – and he knows how to get the most out of them. In the first video clip, he performs a series of classic 1980s jams with spot-on sounds, then does the same for movies and TV shows in the second video. His recreation of Running Up That Hill is perfect too.

The Flight of the Bumblebee is one of the most notoriously fast pieces of music you can play. Despite performing just a 1-minute excerpt of the classic, Vinheteiro spent 36 hours editing this video to make it look like his keyboard is doing all of the work, and his finger is standing still.

John Hughes’ movies were a seminal part of 1980s youth culture, and so were their soundtracks. Life Moves Pretty Fast is a compilation of some of their best new wave and new romantic tracks. It’s available as a 74-track 4xCD with a bonus 7-inch and cassette, a 73-track 6xLP red vinyl, and a 25-track 2xLP. Drops 11.11.22.

Actually, the full title of musician Bill Wurtz’s latest tune is “i like to wear soft clothing (cause it makes me feel like i’m rough in comparison.)” The lyrics tell the tale of a man who finds comfort in his clothes, listens to soft music, walks his cat, and gets turned on by the news despite his television being broken.

Bassist Davie504 has played solos on a one-string bass, a 36-string bass, and a 69-string bass, so what’s the obvious next step? To perform a solo that uses every bass guitar in the store, naturally. Though he didn’t quick-swap all of the instruments, instead, he edited all 200 performances into a single track.

You can do all kinds of fun things with magnets, but we never thought of them as musical instruments. The guys from Magnet Tricks and Magnetic Games teamed up to create a series of sounds from magnetic vibrations, sampled them, then turned them into a synthwave track.

There’s no question that Jack White’s music features a heavy blues influence. Musician Justin Johnson took things to their logical conclusion by performing The White Stripes’ anthemic Seven Nation Army on a steel guitar with a slide, giving it that classic Mississippi Delta Blues sound. (Thanks, Jennifer!)

When we hear the word “bass,” it conjures up the funky sounds that Flea bashes out for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But there are so many other kinds of noises that basses can make. Musicians Bart Soeters and Joris Holtackers show off some of the distinctive sounds made by the string instruments in this original composition.

Filmmaker Brett Morgen (Cobain: Montage of Heck) directed this visual and auditory spectacle about the late, great David Bowie. Rather than present his life as a documentary, the film celebrates Bowie and his personas through concert and archival footage, some of which has never been seen before. In theaters 9.2022.

When There I Ruined It isn’t making horrible versions of classic songs, they’re creating other kinds of musical mayhem. This brief but awesome mashup combines bits of Bohemian Rhapsody, All-Star, Never Gonna Give You Up, Lose Yourself, and a few other sound snippets. Follow their TikTok feed for more fun.

Director Balázs Simon and Blinkink created this beautiful and soul-stirring music video for the Odesza and Ólafur Arnalds track Light of Day. It combines stop-motion animation and digital illustration techniques to tell the story of a lonely man seeking hope in the frigid and desolate world around him.

Barcelona’s Maestros de la Guitarra stole a gimmick from the 2012 viral hit version of Somebody I Used to Know, performing with multiple musicians on a single acoustic guitar. Their four-person cover of Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean is our new favorite version of the track.

Musician Andre Antunes is back with another musical reinterpretation of a viral video. This time, he took footage of a preacher speaking in tongues during her sermon and gave her chant an uplifting ska-reggae riddim. Todor Tchobanov, Pedro Azevedo, and Paulo Fragoso provided the brass and woodwind section.

It’s no Floppotron 3.0, but DJthefirst’s self-playing electromechanical dulcimer has got some serious soul. Put your headphones on, crank up the volume, hit play, and enjoy this soothing rendition of the Kate Bush track Running up That Hill (A Deal with God).

Stylophone expert maromaro1337 performed a medley of the heavy metal music hidden in plain sight in the corridors of the 1990s first-person shooter, DOOM. The game’s soundtrack swiped riffs from Metallica, Pantera, AC/DC, and Anthrax, among others. See how many you can identify without opening your eyes.

Ready to make your own horror movie? Sound effects are a big part of building the suspense, and this unique musical instrument from AzzamBells makes unsettling sounds. It has bars, springs, and clackers that reverberate to create its creepy noises. Three built-in microphones let you easily record its sounds.

Musician Leo Moracchioli has always had a thing for puppets, so it’s only natural that he’d expand his repertoire to include a song from a puppet show. His heavy metal cover of the theme from Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock will have you dancing your cares away and saving your worries for another day.

Now that Stranger Things 4 is complete, we were finally starting to get Running Up That Hill out of our heads. But the Kate Bush earworm is back since we heard this version by KestrelTapes in which he played the track on a 30-pound keyboard while actually running up a hill. As far as we know, no deals were made with God.