Marc Weidenbaum's Blog

This is the current status of my small Intellijel case for Eurorack synthesizer modules. That spot on the bottom will soon be filled with a joystick. I have wanted a joystick module for a long time. As a friend joked yesterday, I’ve had joysticks in the past, but they’ve just been for video games. He was right. I just haven’t had one that works with my synthesizer.

It took me a long time to decide what joystick module I even wanted, a key decision being whether it would be one where the stick immediately returns to the center, or one where it stays where it has been positioned. I opted for the latter. We’ll see how it goes.

Racks like this, I’ve long since learned, are often in flux, so I’m under no impression that it’s gonna last forever but it feels pretty good and I’ve been having fun with it.

That spot at the top is TBD. I think I wanna put some sort of input in, but I’m having trouble locating a small module that would work well with guitar with sufficient gain, but I may be reading the specs of the various options incorrectly, so maybe there are some obvious ones I’m mistaken about. Also, my definition of “small” may be too narrow, so to speak.

Anyhow, the point of this post is primarily to see if I can actually publish a post to my site with an image from my phone, now that I’ve got the WordPress app working properly.

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0715: Err Apparent
The Assignment: Make a mistake on purpose. Build something from it.

Step 1: Play something wrong and record it. The sequence could be a fumble at a keyboard, or a series of bum notes on a guitar, or a erroneous beat.

Step 2: Emphasize the flaws from Step 1 through repetition and variation, and in the process record a piece of music.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0715” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0715-err-apparent/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, September 15, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 715th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Err Apparent — The Assignment: Make a mistake on purpose. Build something from it — at https://disquiet.com/0715/.

This past week or so, the musician who goes by the name nzfs, and who is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has posted a series of elegant ambient videos, often combining guitar with software. They are striking, how they merge a color wash and background footage to evoke a sense of place, while playing music that seems less than rooted in the everyday.

In this recent slate of pieces, a central tool for nzfs has been VCV Rack, which boats a richly featured free version, and is a great entry point into synthesizers. The “VCV Rack & Guitar | nzfs Ambient #126“ video is pleasing excursion into processed guitar, here taking on a quality a bit like a muffled sitar. There is also a soaring quality to the soloing that nzfs, welcomingly, pushes down in the mix, burying it in thickets of tones and patterns.

More from nzfs at nzfs.bandcamp.com and nzfs.net.

Dense, thick, ever-shifting, “Liquefaction” is Noémi Büchi at work in a zone that is at once maximalist and minimalist: packed with ideas and source material, yet also singular and focused. If you listen to “In the Heat,” the first track off her Liquid Bones EP, you’ll hear the basis of this live version, which is twice the original’s length. This one takes longer to get to the pizzicato plucking — and sublimates it noticeably — and gets even more deeply orchestral as it proceeds. There is a growing terrain of music out there that I think of as through-composed sound design, and this majestic performance, recorded last October in Zürich, is a fine example.

I picked up one of the SubSix pickups from Submarine last year and then promptly hurt my hand bad enough that I have barely touched the guitar in the time since. I fiddled with it a bit, but now I’ve finally set up the SubSix properly. The SubSix separates the guitar’s half dozen strings into individual channels. The result is not pristine, but the device does a solid job, and I’m learning to work with it.

The main issues I face are (1) the electric guitar signal is quite clean, so I have to do something with it promptly in the signal chain, or it sounds sort of anemic, and (2) I’m still getting a buzzing, even having raised the action on my Telecaster. I’ll sort out both those issues.

I made a little Eurorack setup with six small VCAs, one for each string, and then sent those into my laptop (thanks to a pair of Expert Sleepers modules: ES-6 and ES-8), running VCV Rack, the modular synthesizer emulation software. As it turns out, one of my VCAs doesn’t work (I may have blown it out), but fortunately my Pulp Logic case has a pair of mono inputs, so I can use that as a temporary replacement.

This video is a quick test run. Each of the three oscilloscopes shows a pair of strings, moving from lowest string to highest string, from left to right. I set it up in VCV Rack with a set of send/return modules, so I can easily augment any of the individual lines (this video doesn’t do that). I’ve been experimenting with varying delay lengths, and doing fun things with panning, and using one string as a trigger, and also with leaning into the SubSix’s lack of purity — that is, recording the sympathetic vibrations in the strings I haven’t struck.

This video is just a proof-of-concept recording of how I’ve arranged things currently in VCV Rack. I saved this patch as a foundation for future experiments.

More on the SubSix pickup at submarinepickup.com.

More on VCV Rack at vcvrack.com.

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ This year’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival lineup is getting insane. They just added Marc Ribot. (More artists are yet to be announced. Someone even bigger than Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, and Lucinda Williams? Crazy.)

▰ Occasional reminder:

video games, E = everyone

music, E = explicit

▰ The ambient/techno Turing Test: I’ll know my computer is sentient when it mocks me for playing Nils Frahm’s Music for Animals and Monolake’s Cinemascope on repeat all day.

▰ Switching from iCloud to Obsidian Sync — for syncing Obsidian vaults — was a tad more complicated than I’d imagined, but it is now working for me on multiple devices. #whew

▰ Snowball playlist: heard a band, led by Roger Glenn, cover Oris Mays’ “Don’t Let the Devil Ride” live; listened to Mays’ original; listened to a version by Leo “Bud” Welch, who was on the label Fat Possum; listened to heap of songs by an old Possum favorite, Junior Kimbrough, and on and on

▰ An excellent simple (and affordable, and portable) second screen for a laptop (mine: MacBook) is an older-generation Android tablet (mine: Samsung) with both running Duet — especially stable using USB, rather than wifi

▰ Happiness is the developer of an app you use a lot adding a button/function you’d requested

▰ As posted at the end of the week: And on that note, have a good weekend. See you Monday, or maybe Tuesday.

▰ Reading: I am certainly reading far too many books at the same time at the moment, but so be it. I finished reading one novel this week, my 17th this year, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, and two graphic novels, Alien: Thaw (which I picked up because I like writer/illustrator Declan Shalvey’s comics, though this one he didn’t draw; Andrea Broccardo did) and Con Artists (by Luke Healy, who wrote and drew it, and who has a great line).

A sweet little drone performance using, in particular, a module I was previously unfamiliar with, the Grone Wave. It appears to include among its functions a variation on the now classic Clouds module (from Mutable Instruments), or more to the point a firmware offshoot, Parasites, of the original Clouds. All of which means, yes, the music has a light, miasma-like quality to it, amid which tones akin to soft mallets hitting metal intone. It’s a little ritual of mysterious but presumably constructive intent. The performance is by Otsubo Kazuhisa, who’s based in Japan.

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0714: Remix Yourself
The Assignment: Rework your own music as if someone else had.

Step 1: Think of a musician whose remix work you appreciate.

Step 2: Select a track of your own.

Step 3: Remix the track in Step 2 as if you were the musician in Step 1.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0714” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0714-remix-yourself/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Is it an extended remix, or a radio edit?

Deadline: Monday, September 8, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 714th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Remix Yourself — The Assignment: Rework your own music as if someone else had — at https://disquiet.com/0714/.

I previously mentioned the Amstel Quartet, all saxophones, doing “Grandmother and Kimitake” (actually “1934: Grandmother and Kimitake”), a piece from composer Philip Glass’ score to the 1985 Paul Schrader film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, originally recorded by Kronos Quartet, all strings. This is Amstel doing another piece from the same score, though I’m not entirely clear on the track. On the video channel, it’s listed as “1962: Blood Oath” but there is no such track on the movie soundtrack release. The album does have a “1957: Award Montage,” which is roughly the same length as this, and a “1962: Body Building,” which is not, and two other tracks that actually include the word “blood” in the title: “Kyoko’s House (Stage Blood Is Not Enough)” and “Runaway Horses (Poetry Written with a Splash Of Blood).” Making the situation all the more complicated — though also pretty much confirming my sense that it’s the “1957: Award Montage” piece — is that on the album titled Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass (Brooklyn Rider is a string quartet), there’s a track titled “1957: Blood Oath,” also roughly the same length. Such discographical issues aside, Amstel’s is a great performance, just rich with subtle interplay, and it’s another fine video from ConcertLab, which is staking out an interesting realm of video-specific audio recordings of new music.