Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto Project 0715: Err Apparent

The Assignment: Make a mistake on purpose. Build something from it.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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/.

VCV x Buenos Aires

Courtesy of nzfs

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

Noémi Büchi’s Transformation

Through-composed sound design

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 track=2727418200 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

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.

[bandcamp width=640 height=307 album=2220132184 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

SubSix x VCV Rack

Six strings, one at a time

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.