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.
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.
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).
