I recently played through the video game Mina the Hollower. It was really good and I'd highly recommend it and if you're wondering why I'm talking about that here it's because Algorithm 54 reminds me of my time with that game. This one is two minutes and forty-two seconds long but it sounds like the entire soundtrack to Mina the Hollower, kinda.
It's a chiptune track, or more accurately, like 10 chiptune tracks that jump from one to the other at an alarming pace, and so it feels a bit like skipping through the soundtrack of a retro indie game. Despite this, there is a weird cohesion to it.
Imagine the scene, you're a silly little guy made out of a handful of pixels and I'm looking at you from above and you can move up or down or left or right. Anyway, the ground you're standing on is yellow. It's sand. In front of you is a weird approximation of a pyramid, mostly shown using a slightly lighter shade of yellow and a slightly lighter shade of yellow. Maybe some pixels are wibble wobbling to demonstrate that this place is hot, I dunno, use your imagination.
Anyway, that's where we start. Some very 8-bit sounding Egyptian-esque chords play, before some pretty chopped up and jazzy Squarepusher-ass beats come in. Maybe some pixelated bastard is taunting you before disappearing off screen, you shake your fist, a door opens on the pyramid and you walk in.
The track shifts to a sorta bluesy thing and I guess a bunch of goofy ghosties and mummies are wandering around and maybe there's some kinda mine cart thing that's inexplicably inside this pyramid. At some point there's steel drums and a tabla and a sorta Hawaiian sounding guitar, I dunno if the theming is really working anymore but it doesn't matter because the bonkers glitchy IDM chiptunes are rad as hell.
Anyway, that's what this song is like. You should listen to it, it's very short and covers a tonne of ground.
