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Marc Weidenbaum – Disquiet

1. Favourite knob/fader/switch on a piece of gear and why?

The knobs on the Faderfox DJ44 are, to me, the pinnacle, but what do I know? Faderfox does such great work with its range of devices, and this one, in its little metal case, is an exceptional example of attention to detail. When I read your question a few years ago, when you first sent me the interview request, the DJ44 was my immediate thought — and it remains my answer to this day. I mention it with a sense of the bittersweet, because I’m likely going to trade my DJ44 at some point, because I just don’t use it as much as I used to, but in any case it’s a fantastic device.

2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?

I love the Norns from Monome. I had the original Norns, the one with the metal case, which I bought used, but couldn’t really justify the cost, even used, so I sold it and bought a Norns Shield, which is a cheaper version that lacks a battery, among other differences. I had two Norns Shields for a while but sold one of them. There is now a larger Norns Shield called the Norns Shield XL, which I may trade up to at some point. My choice here of the Norns is a bit of a cheat since the Norns is essentially a tiny little computer that can run a wide array of software scripts, and the Norns isn’t just the Norns itself — it’s also that ever-growing library of open-source scripts that people write for the Norns, and the community of people themselves. In any case, the Norns is fantastic. What would I change about it? Honestly, nothing.

If I can give a second answer: I love the full line of Buddha Machines and I use them a lot for music-making.

3. What setup do you bring on holiday/tour/commute etc.?

I’ve pretty much always got an iPad with me. I purchased a used Traveler Guitar Ultra-Light Acoustic last year on a visit to Portland, and it is very easy to bring on a trip. Despite being tiny, it has a full fretboard with an acoustic piezo pickup. I was in Los Angeles for a few days for a friend’s memorial service at the start of winter, and I had a recuperative time in the hotel room with just the guitar, a little Orange amp (the PPC108), my iPad, and the 8mu from Tom Whitwell’s ingenious line of Music Thing Modular instruments. (I played a small role in the development of the 8mu. Whitwell says he started on the project when he read a tweet of mine in 2019 that went: “Isn’t there some sorta readily available very small MIDI controller, like the size of a cellphone, with a couple buttons, a couple faders, a couple knobs?” The 8mu is what resulted.)

4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?

I’d love for the handheld Dirtywave M8 Tracker (no relation to the abovementioned 8mu) to be available as software. I think I read somewhere that such a port may yet happen. I certainly appreciate Renoise, the long-running tracker software, but I don’t think it’d be disrespectful of me to suggest the Renoise interface can be a tad overwhelming. The M8 is, in truth, menu-heavy in its own way, but I’d sure love to be able to use it on my laptop. I would have said the Monome Teletype, but that finally happened on VCV Rack, so I’ll go with another, simpler answer, which is I’d love for the Ornament and Crime module to be a VCV Rack module — and that would include the Hemisphere Suite alternate firmware and, heck, all the alternate firmware options. A funny thing happened in the years since you first sent this list of questions to me, which is that so many great physical synthesizer modules have been ported to VCV Rack, as a result of which this question was more difficult to answer today than it would have been back in 2020.

As for the reverse, from software to hardware, that’s an even more difficult question, because a lot of my favorite software, such as the Borderlands app, isn’t purely software; these are tools that work because of the physical interface on which they run. An app like Borderlands already is hardware, in a manner of speaking, because it runs on an iPad. However, a distinction can be made between a piece of software-driven hardware that will work until the thing breaks, like a guitar pedal with firmware, versus a piece of software that is dependent on a separate operating system, such as iPadOS in the case of Borderlands, that may break the software when the OS updates and the old hardware on which it ran is sunsetted. Any number of iOS apps fall into the latter category.

In addition some software, like the Koala app, already have physical parallels in hardware: if I want Koala in standalone hardware form, I could just get an Roland SP-404 (I do want to try the MK II, which does a bunch of stuff the Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O. II doesn’t). I love Samplr, which also falls into the Borderlands category of being iPad-specific. I love SuperCollider, but it requires a computer keyboard and a screen — I wonder what “hardware SuperCollider” might even mean, right? In many ways, SuperCollider is as tied to a keyboard as Koala, Samplr, and Borderlands are tied to iPadOS. So, no, there isn’t really a piece of software that I wish was hardware.

5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?

I had two Technics SL-1200 turntables and a mixer many years ago, and I sold them as our family grew and our home seemed to get smaller. I miss them, but I also couldn’t justify the space, and I still couldn’t today. There’s some regret in that, but also a healthy dose of realism. I trade gear with some regularity, and it feels like pieces are always in flux, so I don’t regret anything I have passed on. If I wasn’t using something enough, then it’s best being with someone else who can make use of it. In fact, I currently have a few instruments on semi-permanent loan from other people who can’t quite part with them but don’t have the space or need for them.

6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?

To keep it simple: the OG Ditto Looper. Or more to the point, a handful of them in combination with my electric guitar.

7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?

The process has been inherently exploratory for me, and it remains so. I probably wouldn’t do anything differently in particular, unless I had started much earlier or much later. For example, had VCV Rack existed before I got into modular, I’d probably have proceeded in a different manner.

8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?

That question pretty much sums up my mixer, a Mackie 1202VLZ4. It’s called a “compact mixer,” but it’s only compact if your sense of reality has been warped by too much time in professional recording studios, which mine hasn’t. The thing seems absurdly large for the amount that I use it, but a mixer is essential and I’m not sure what I could use that’s smaller. I need a lot of ins and outs in a mixer. And that doesn’t count a pair of audio interfaces I use. Maybe there’s a patchbay I could use in its place somehow? Maybe the Teenage Engineering TX-6? (It does pack in six stereo inputs, but it’s priced a bit out of my realm.) Maybe I could combine an Expert Sleepers ES-9 with a mixer module and that’d do it? Maybe, as a friend recommended, I should just trade down for a smaller Mackie, the 802VLZ4, or an equivalent from another manufacturer. Maybe someone reading this will have a recommendation.

9. Most surprising tip/trick/technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?

Hooking a microphone up to the Dirtywave M8 Tracker was, as the saying goes, game-changing for me. As a result, I wasn’t surprised to read that the second generation of the M8 will in fact include a microphone.

Artist or Band name?

Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet

Genre?

Ambient, field recordings, noise

Selfie?

Where are you from?

I was raised in the same house on Long Island from when I was about a week or so old until I left for college. I moved to California after college — first to Sacramento, where I worked for Tower Records as an editor on its music magazines (Pulse!, Classical Pulse!, and epulse), and then to San Francisco. I’ve lived in San Francisco’s Richmond District ever since, except for four fantastic years in New Orleans.

How did you get into music?

I listened to the radio a lot as a kid. I didn’t have much spending money, so the radio was my connection to music. At some point my younger sister’s friend took pity on me and gave me, with her mom’s permission, a bunch of her own Beatles records, which had been hand-me-downs from her mom in the first place, I think. I dove in, and I never fully re-emerged: it’s safe to say that listening to “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” on repeat as a teenager rewired my brain. By the time I was finishing high school I had branched out — Talking Heads, King Crimson, Funboy Three, stuff like that. I wrote for a campus music magazine when I was attending college, and by the time I left school I wanted to write full time about music. As the years went on, I came to recognize I’m as interested, if not more interested, in sound than in music on its own. As I think the philosopher Chistoph Cox put it, music is a subset of sound. That’s where my head is at.

What still drives you to make music?

Curiosity mostly. As someone who primarily writes, I’m fascinated by the idea of communicating non-verbally. Related topic: making music is way more social than writing is. Also, using instruments has helped me understand more deeply the music I write about, and playing has informed the collaborations I do with musicians, as well as the occasions when I interview musicians and other people who work in sound.

How do you most often start a new track?

I’m usually trying to approximate a combination of sound and signal flow that originates in my head — or more to the point, in my mind’s ear.

How do you know when a track is finished?

My skills are pretty limited, so I know when something has gotten to where I can’t usefully push it any further. I pretty much stop at the “sketch” phase every time. I think my listening may prefer sketches, as well, come to think of it.

Show us your current studio

I don’t have a studio, just a few Eurorack cases on a bookshelf by the edge of my desk. Most everything else I keep in a closet and pull out as I need it.

Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?

Play something every day. (For me currently that is mostly practicing guitar and trying to become vaguely fluent in SuperCollider.)

Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link.

I’ll mention two things:

First, I moderate an ongoing music community called the Disquiet Junto. Since the first week of January 2012, each Thursday I have sent out a music composition prompt. As of the first week of January 2024, we had reached 627 such prompts, and the Junto keeps going every week. Musicians from around the world participate. I encourage people to sign up and give it a try. You can learn more at disquiet.com/junto.

Second, I publish an email newsletter called This Week in Sound. It’s for fellow listeners interested in the role sound plays in culture, technology, politics, science, ecology, business, storytelling, warfare, art, society, and anywhere else it might resonate.

2000F – Strøm Førende

[Editor: There are gear geeks, and there are gear freaks…. AND THEN there is the artist 2000F aka. Frederik Birket-Smith, who has got to have one of the most extraordinary collection of vintage synths, drum machines and outboard gear in all of Denmark… and this is just one of several locations where he has his gear. He is also the CEO of Strøm Festival – which is pretty much the biggest yearly electronic music festival in Denmark. So enjoy!
Also, if you’re wondering about the title, it’s danish for… ‘electric conductor’]

1. Favourite knob or fader or switch on a piece of gear and why?

My fave has got to be the Cinema Engineering Corporation Model 6517/e.

This is a low and high cut filter from Burbank, California, made in the 50’s, early 60’s. Originally made for, what you would call the telephone effect for film. It’s quite an extreme low and high cut and this unit in particular, has been modified by a local danish tech called Fairman, with a resonance control filter Q knob.

Cinema Engineering Corporation Model 6517/e front panel

So you can make it very aggressive and brittle sounding, and I use it for dub music, to get those extreme cuts. Most filter units of this type only have a low cut. Which is nice, but this one has high cut as well.

2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?

The Fender Rhodes 88 suitcase. Gotta be the suitcase version, not the stage. Has to be the one with the speakers. And I wouldn’t change anything about it.

Fender Rhodes 88

I have one from 1980 here in this studio and another one at home, from 1976. At one point I had both together in the living room, the kids and the wife were a little bit “Okay we need two?”. But my wife is really big fan of Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea as well, so she loved it. Still… it takes up a lot of room.

But the interesting part of having two was that, while the sound of the one I have here is really good, the other ’76 Rhodes, the body and the weight is much deeper compared to this one. The ’76 almost feels like a proper grand piano. It’s really nice.

3. What setup do you bring on holiday or tour or commute etc.?

Smartphone… one with Koala Sampler.

And then just the built-in Memo app on the phone, that’s the only things I would bring.

I especially like the Memo app. Actually I just use it to record stuff… Sometimes it’s ideas and melodies or basslines or rhythms. Sometimes it’s just something I need to explain to myself, like an idea that I need to remember. Sometimes it is sampling something.

Quite recently I recorded a sound while they were rebuilding Fisketovet [Editor: a shopping mall in Copenhagen]. And there was this crazy huge drilling machine that was so loud. I’ve never heard anything like it, but I had to record it. It was just banging a huge pile-driver into the ground. The reverb tail was intense.

4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?

I’m not sure I can answer that, to be honest. Because I like both worlds. If I HAD to say something that could be an answer, I think it would be, that in the last couple of years, the integration between outboard hardware and the digital audio workstation is getting pretty good. Life is getting so much easier with the new analog patch bays that can be digitally controlled.

I mean, it’s so easy to intermix it now. And I actually like both analog and digital because they’re both very different, so it is great that they can now be integrated.

They’re merging and I think that’s really interesting. I come from an old school hardware kind of workflow, but the funny thing is, a few years ago, I tried to force myself to use only stock Ableton plugins, just to to see what I can do… and boy, it sounded pretty, I still prefer hardware and all that, but I did two 12-inch releases that way.

5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?

Regrets selling? Nah… but there’s some stuff I regret NOT buying.

There was an Arp 2600 that was for sale in a shop near where I used to live. I think the shop was called ELSound. It was just in the display winder. Still haunts me that I couldn’t buy it at the time.

I’ve had quite a lot of gear, as you can tell, so I haven’t sold that much, actually. I’ve sold a Jupiter-4 and a Polysix and I don’t miss them. I also had the very, very big Yamaha SK50D. Which is the huge poly synth they made, just a big as the CS-80 and just about as heavy, but a cheaper version. Even though it certainly wasn’t cheap. But I don’t miss that either.

6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?

Samplers. And the Emu Emax.

That’s the one I grew up with. It opened up the world of music production for me. Actually, I can tell you a funny story. Particularly that unit over there, which my father bought in ’86. I remember so clearly, because when I was young, my mom used to be a DJ and my dad collected records and all that studio stuff. So I listened to a lot of music.

I listened to stuff like Kraftwerk and especially Art Of Noise. Early Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel… you know, with all those Synclavier sounds. But I never really understood how they did it. I understood the music and I loved it, but especially the Music Nonstop album, Electric Cafe album from Kraftwerk, where they used samples heavily, people don’t rate it. But I loved it because it was so digital.

When my father bought home the Emax. I can tell you where exactly in the living room I was standing and where my mom stood, when my dad used it for the first time. He set it up and plugged in a microphone, and my mom came into the living room and said, “Dinner’s ready!”.
And it was recorded. When my Dad started to mess with that sample… Then suddenly I was like, ‘That’s how they do it!’ … My whole mind was just blown away.

So I was like… ‘Gimme that!’ and I borrowed an Atari ST2 computer, the Emax and Pro-One and the PPG and made lot of music. From then on I started buying stuff, so since I was 14 years old, I was just hooked. Spent all my money, I bought my 303 and right after that the 909 and all that.

But the sampler, that was the start.

7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?

The computer.

The thing is that nowadays you’ll be able to go online and find answers to absolutely everything. And at that time around ’86 you couldn’t find any answers to anything except if you knew somebody. So a computer would, whether it was an ’86 or 2023, open your world in any direction you wanted to go.

So then I think inspiration comes from other stuff. I mean, gear can inspire me and anybody else, but I’m not sure that’s the main thing, to be honest. I think the computer will just be the door that opens the world.

8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?

Oh, that’s everything. Everything! Just keeping and maintaining a synth mausoleum like this one. That’s grief…. and a lot of money. I would say being a collector, it’s just a major headache.

Cabling and setting up wires is a huge headache, but refurbishments and service on this stuff, that’s just a downwards spiral of agony and pain. And money out the window.

The most expensive restoration I have, which is still ongoing, is the EMT-250 reverb, which is at a repair workshop in Germany right now, and has been for the past five years. Kinda crazy.

The EMT250 is the only thing my father never got to hear or see working, before he passed away. He was an avid gear collector and once even managed to find a Fairchild 670 on Den Blå Avis [danish version of Craigslist], but the 250 we found at Sweet Silence Studios, and it’s super rare. Gotta be less than 200 in the world.

It even came in the original flight crate from Germany. So this wooden box came through Kastrup Airport, and then through the distributor up in the north of Copenhagen, then finally to Sweet Silence Studio, where we discovered that it had some water damage.
So it was sent to the US to repair at Studio Electronics and they said “we can’t fix it”. It had some humidity things that happened to it.

But eventually I found this guy Stefan Hübner in Hamburg. Who I was recommended by an old PPG factory tech. Who said, I have this young apprentice called Stefan, who is willing to take a look at repairing your EMT.

But the problem with the EMT was that, they never and still haven’t ever released any schematics or diagrams for it. At the time of production, they were so afraid that the Japanese would copy it, so they even sandblasted the tops of all the chips. So it doesn’t say anything on them.
There’s no traces, or anything. It’s all point-to-point soldered in the back. It’s just one huge board of chips, which no one knows what is. So Stefan has two EMT250’s on his workshop table, and he is trying to trace and test the electronics, and build up his own diagrams to figure out what happens inside of it and what each component is.

It’s just a never ending story.

So that’s the longest and possibly the most expensive restoration that I’ve ever attempted. I have never even heard it working. I just bought it and shipped it around.

9. Most surprising tip or trick or technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?

I spent a lot of time listening to and trying to figure out all the old mysteries of dub music. I like Prince Jammy and King Tubby, but I especially like The Scientist, who was the apprentice of King Tubby.

I loved his way of mixing dub and I always liked that sharp filter cuts he had. And that was the knob that King Tubby built from a unit like the one I told you about before. [Editor: Cinema Engineering Corporation Model 6517/e]

Those filters, I mean, you don’t find them. You have to build them… And I’m sure that King Tubby’s version was also modified, because he just needed it to be more aggressive.