Chaos and Precision

The frantic glitchcore of MTCH's hkyrbnnpkmdtvovgjr (EVEL)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

[bandcamp width=640 height=472 album=1286483180 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

Half of an upcoming glitch/beats album by MTCH, hkyrbnnpkmdtvovgjr (if something is encoded in that letter slurry, please lemme know), is up now for streaming, and it’s a fantastic set of frazzled IDM, full of heady echoes of Autechre and Monolake, with a vibrant arrhythmia that suggests live coding at work. Here and there are ominous drones, from which snatches of whirling effects, bounding percussion, and cybernetic beats emerge. It’s sound-design techno, breaking noises into fragments and moving them around with the subgenre’s trademark mix of chaos and precision — artisanal pick-up sticks tossed into a cyclone. Tracks like “kjbg” and “5_bstrckt” resemble a sonification of a subroutine attempting to take matters into its own hands (or lack thereof). The full album comes out Friday, June 6, on the label EVEL, which — at least based on its social media and Bandcamp pages — maintains a geographic ambiguity.

Junto Profile: Ángel Luis Martínez

From New York, New York: The music of poetry, and recording in the moment.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This Junto Profile is part of an ongoing series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.

What’s your name? My name is Ángel Luis Martínez.

Spirit Turnpike is my project that I’d like to see perform as a full band someday. I use Professor MTZ (first word is derived from my “day” job) on recordings where my main contribution is mixing other artists’ work.

My first band, and which exists to this day, is The Arawax. It’s where I gained deep confidence and understanding of the bass guitar through folk, punk, and many other influences. We have done concerts together that were fun and well-received.

Currently, I also collaborate with New Haven Improvisers Collective.

Where are you located? I grew up in Brooklyn — specifically in Williamsburg and the adjoining areas in Bed-Stuy. While I played a little guitar, tape recorders and a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard were at the center of my sonic adventures. The sampler also has a synthesizer function to make more sounds. This was the 1980s, so I made mixtapes from radio and TV programs, my own voice, and occasional noodlings on instruments, enjoying especially sampled weirdness from loops. I still have many of those cassettes, so now I sometimes think what, if anything, I can make from them.

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Listen to the Code

And watch

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In a manner of speaking, much electronic music is made entirely in code, whether within standalone physical devices that provide tactile means to control sound digitally, or in software that runs on, say, laptops or phones. And then there are coding systems that allow one to, from the ground up, create what might be thought of as raw software, such as the work GrundTon does in Pure Data (a visual programming language), here making what he calls ambient breakcore. And for a bonus, he posts some of his code on his GitHub. Below you can see (and listen to) a slightly spruced up version of the visual system he is developing. GrundTon is an art and technology student based in Vienna, Austria. 

On Repeat: Score, Drone, Shadow

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰  I end up listening to a lot of scores to films I never end up seeing. From the strength of the fragile ambient and minimalist music that Chris Gestrin recorded for his collaboration with filmmaker Jeff Carter, I’ll definitely be tracking down So Below, which is described as “A contemporary reflection on the utopian vision of Charles Fourier (1772-1837), framed in a multi-format cinema landscape variously local, regional, global, and cosmic.” Gestrin is based in British Columbia.

[bandcamp width=640 height=472 album=3197209799 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

▰  Dreunen, by Magnetic Loops, is a series of quite varied drones recorded for International Drone Day, May 24, 2025. Magnetic Loops is based in Bristol, UK.

[bandcamp width=640 height=406 album=917770467 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

▰  Christopher Hanlon’s gentle “Thought Shadows” hides little glitches and beat-like plosives in its embrace. Hanlon is based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Scratch Pad: Fog Horns, Ponzi Schemes

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

▰ It doesn’t seem that windy, but the Golden Gate Bridge is singing like nobody’s business

▰ Nothing like waking up to fog horns

▰ Books are a Ponzi scheme. Every time I finish reading one, I wanna read several more.

▰ One good thing about selling music gear is you don’t just get rid of the gear, you get rid of another box.  And if you carry the package by foot to the post office, you feel even lighter after mailing it.

▰ Been in three group book clubs and one two-person book club this year, and there’s nothing like reading a book with other people — more dutiful, perhaps, but so much more insight, and I pay a different sort of attention.

▰ This week in #dronescrolling: Dunno if I’ll do this regularly or not, but it occurs to me I might, as part of the social media summary (slash digital life self-assessment) that I compile at the end of each week, post some mentions of solid things other people posted. Here are a few: Jeremy Wentworth regularly uploads short clips of his VCV Rack (i.e., modular synthesizer in software form) patches on his Mastodon account. The musician Dave Seidel, aka mysterybear, posted a janky yet photogenic jury-rigged stereo-mono adapter on Threads. Femi Shonuga-Fleming (aka Sadnoise) posted, on Instagram, a massive steel horn art object he made with Enid Corcoran. And these next are actually from a little earlier in the month, but Jeremy Bushnell published on Bluesky a bunch of photos of musicians performing at the recent Cleveland Re:Sound event, including Keith Fullerton Whitman and Maria Chávez.