After Illusions, I gave two more of my mix playlists the same treatment. Each mix gets its own visualizer, drawn in code from that mix’s cover art and tuned to the music on it.
- Breakcore / Hardsound: twelve breakcore, gabber, jungle and industrial mixes, 2001 to 2026.
- Electro / Techno / Italo / EBM: eleven electro, techno, italo, EBM and darkwave mixes, 2004 to 2023.
Breakcore / Hardsound
These are the loud ones, so the scenes hit hard. On Coughing Up Blood, the red CD from the cover spins on its tray, and kicks drop blood on it that the spin flings into spiral smears. Tell Me (Lies) is a polygraph, with each track a new question marked on the chart paper. Thunder Troll is a bridge troll in a shell suit doing the hakken stomp in front of a Rotterdam speaker stack, slamming its club on every kick while a little D&D party keeps trying to cross. Flesh Lathe turns a length of flesh whose profile is the spectrum. Terminal Atroxity is a wall of monster stickers that sing their slice of the spectrum, with new ones slapped over old ones on the kicks. Detroit Industrial is a stamping plant, five presses each listening to their own band.
Electro / Techno / Italo / EBM
The synthetic side of the floor. On Italian Danse 1990, the spore from the cover is wired to an old tape computer that types out each new track. Cold Wave has the cover’s black cat waiting in the barrel of a frozen wave, with frost creeping over the glass. On Cell Death, cells divide on the kicks and die when it gets crowded. Food Router plays its flyer as an arcade attract mode, with a maze, four ghosts and power pellets on the kicks. The Breaking Wheel turns the woodcut’s wheel into a sixteen-step drum machine that draws each track’s groove on itself, and 80disco plays as a music video taped off the TV.
Play with it
As in Illusions, every scene responds to the cursor, and a hint at the top says what your hands do. You can scratch the CD on Coughing Up Blood, call down lightning on Fortean Crimes, steer the router through its maze, pin pegs on the Breaking Wheel, or send the Kill Disco robots across the floor.
Each scene has four looks. The first takes its colours from the cover, and the scene eases into the next look at each track change; press V to switch yourself. The audio is split into bands, kicks, snares and hats, so each scene can react to them separately. Before you press play, or if a mix can’t be analysed, the visuals follow a built-in pulse set to that mix’s tempo. If your system asks for reduced motion, the flashes and shake are toned down.
The audio and tracklists come from Off Grid, so both playlists are also on geoffreymaddock.com/audio: Breakcore / Hardsound and Electro / Techno / Italo / EBM. Every mix has a deep link, like /visualizers/breakcore-hardsound.html#rave-demon.
Controls
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| Space | Play / pause |
| ← → | Skip 10 seconds |
| Shift + ← → | Previous / next mix |
| [ ] or Shift + ↑ ↓ | Previous / next track |
| T | Tracklist |
| V | Change look |
| M | Mute |
| F | Full screen |