First Orbit – First Year on YouTube
Last Thursday, Digitalzelf’s YouTube channel turned one year old.It wasn’t something I had planned at first, although I had been thinking about it for some time. My main reason for creating the channel back then was to build some kind of archive for my modular synth patches, so I could go back to them and remember how I achieved certain results I might want to revisit. Then I thought that if anybody else found it interesting or useful, that would be a great bonus — and that idea reinforced the decision to create the channel. Then Fallas came, and I was in a particular state of mind. The constant, strident noise outside my walls turned into some kind of hellish mantra that pushed me to integrate it into a patch. So I took my Zoom H6, plugged in an SM57, and sent the H6 signal into the Make Noise Strega external input. From there I got really inspired and ended up recording a pretty interesting ambient jam, together with some nice video footage of the fireworks that night. You know… “If life gives you lemons.” After that, it became very clear to me that I couldn’t just leave the channel with one video and worry about it later, especially because the video unexpectedly generated some conversation and responses. I remember being genuinely surprised that anyone outside my room was watching this kind of thing. I began to realize that on the other side of the comment box there was a whole community of people sharing knowledge, impressions, and ideas back and forth. It felt like discovering a universe that had been there all along, quietly breathing. One year later, I can see that I will always remember the experience of creating and uploading my first video in a very romantic way. The feeling I get every time I think about it is strangely warm, with an aftertaste of serene loneliness — in the best possible way. Throughout this year I’ve also learned about commitment — not as a form of pressure, but as a form of responsibility that comes from love: love for the craft, for sharing, and for oneself. Having to create something regularly helps build the muscle of discipline, intention, and time management, among many other things. And knowing that there are incredible creators posting sometimes more than one video a week is really impressive to me. But by now I feel that the number of videos you upload matters less than finding a rhythm you can consistently sustain. I ended up organizing the channel in seasons, with a small break during the summer between them. I don’t really have a recipe for how to do things right, and I certainly don’t consider myself an expert in managing a YouTube channel, but consistency and rhythm have probably been the most important lessons so far. The best part of this whole experience, without a doubt, has been the people. I’ve met so many incredible fellow creators along the way that I sometimes find myself smiling just thinking about how I wish I had started the channel earlier. I know I’ve said this many times already, and I wouldn’t want repetition to reduce its value, but I really want to thank all of you who have been there — whether in a very active way or more quietly in the background. Your presence is a gift and an inexhaustible source of knowledge that makes our dense and distant planet feel much more luminous and warm. Here’s to all of you, my dear friendz. I hope life — and whatever higher designs may exist — will allow me to keep showing up, and to keep finding you out there, vibrating and resonating while sharing your art. Orbit one complete. See you in the next trajectory.
Thr33fold — A Mutable Zelf
Thr33fold came to be during a brief “back to the roots” lapse that occurred last week. I had to record some drums to finally close an old pending project — a rock song that needed to come to an end. I hadn’t played our primal, beloved instrument for a long time, and reconnecting with it wasn’t free of friction or insecurities. Still, I was determined to do it — as naturally as breathing. And so I did. I finished recording the drums and ended up enjoying the process a lot. That experience took me back to a past where everything felt very different from today, and I think it uncovered a reservoir of long-kept feelings and memories. Suddenly, I felt the need to be closer to the ground. I took one case from my main desk and placed it on the floor of my studio, trying to express how vulnerable we are to our past and our genealogy. As I allowed myself to feel and observe those impressions, and as I looked at my instrument, I was reminded of the beginning of my modular expedition — when the canvas was blank and everything was there to be discovered. A tabula rasa, waiting to be shaped by curiosity and devotion. Back then, I was all in for analog sound. I wanted nothing to do with digital gear, with its menu-diving and all those “inspiration-draining traps.” Yet, while learning the modular craft and exploring the available tools, I repeatedly stumbled upon silver-panel modules with evocative names and colorful knobs. My analog obsession was at its peak, so I didn’t give them much of a chance — but every time I read the developer’s name, my modular vein pulsed unmistakably: Mutable Instruments. Come on… how could you resist at least taking a peek? Clouds — saliva glands at full steam.Rings — a resonating heart.Rings into Clouds… what’s that?Elements… mallet, blow, strike… My all-analog obsession slowly dissolved into Clouds’ reverb, and a whole new universe revealed itself behind a thick veil of ignorance — one not ill-intended, and therefore destined to transform into a mantle of understanding. Time has passed, and now that Mutable Instruments is no longer operative, I can’t help but recognize the enormous mark Émilie Gillet has left on the synth world. And I’m not speaking only about the technical dimension — much has already been said about that — but about the conceptual and perceptual one. For me, Mutable Instruments was an invitation to experience. It removed the fear of being wrong when embarking on the modular journey and offered sensorial inputs that pushed me far beyond a simple analog-versus-digital distinction. Looking at my Erica case now, I notice a holy trinity of voices — Rings, Plaits, and Elements (even if two of them are clones). I can’t help but laugh, imagining what my past self would say while pointing at Beads, twisting his mouth in anger. How little I knew then that Mutable Instruments was no other than an invitation to mutate myself through those wonderful tools and to expand myself into a Digitalzelf. So here it is: an ambient wandering through a timeless ellipsis, crystallized somewhere within my dusty archives — a proposal to change perspective, to experience things from different distances and moments, and to reconnect with the core, threefold.
A Wild Blue Yonder
Notes written from the innermost. There are rare moments when, during a search for an anchor to re-place the existential axis of your presence, you suddenly finish watching yourself observing the world. In that moment, a distance becomes perceptible — between the center stage and its reflection inside you. The reactive surge dissolves. You begin to accept how limited your perception of what is, embracing the boiling atmosphere that surrounds the outer layer of the dream. But distance is identification-dependent. It bursts into the nonsense your bluest obstacles are, pulling you down toward the bottom of a denser, confusing dream — although not quite a nightmare. Extend your arm.Remember opportunity.Focus on your breath. Contemplate. Accept, but don’t resign.Lock the constant hidden in the innermost circle, beneath the high-tide wall. I couldn’t find peace, but I found impermanence.Eyes wide shut. Eyes wide open.Let me be unsafe — and sing with me.
Resolution
Here we go again —prisoners of time, locked inside the tick of the clock, slowly accepting our resemblance to our noble tools of precision: gears turning carefully, mechanically, making the world spin while our minds sprint. Here I go again —my carriage aligning with the last stretch of our planet’s rotation, my horses agreeing on where to point and how to keep direction.What a ride this year has been. I began this cycle incubating ideas that finally broke their shell around the third month of 2025. Sometimes things align for reasons we don’t fully understand, and this year has felt like that to me. Not an easy ride, but a rite of alignment — learning through clearer goals, self-observation, and communication. You’ve been a key part of this process, and I’m deeply grateful for it.For your generosity and presence.For sharing your vision and impressions.Thank you. Now it feels time to resolve the dominant we had set — to let the tension soften, to dilute the tritone into a new progression shaped by intention. I hope you’ll stay for a while longer in the next cycle, so we can keep sharing this strange and beautiful thing we call music — something that lives both inside and outside the wheels of time, even when the ticking of the clock leads us astray. Wishing you a gentle end to the year,and a new one filled with possibility.
Atlas — On Letting Go of Beautiful Things
While working on the Atlas patch—and reflecting on the influence of external forces on organic life on Earth—a parallel arc began to unfold. It placed me in front of a familiar conundrum: beauty versus fair expression, or perhaps honesty, when trying to tell a specific story or explore a concrete idea. On a technical level, I knew I wanted to work with a reduced setup—ideally a single case—and to push MI Marbles further than I usually do. My first attempt came with its struggles, but eventually I arrived at something I genuinely liked. It sounded good to me. Marbles was behaving beautifully, and I revisited some functions I hadn’t explored deeply before—like feeding external random voltage into the quantizer instead of just programming a scale or melody and letting Marbles do the rest. Everything seemed right. And yet, something wasn’t working.I wasn’t resonating with the patch on a deeper level. Why?What was missing? First attempt So, while that question hovered around my head like an uncomfortable fly, I found myself unplugging everything—clearing the canvas for a clean new attempt to get something that would make me smile, or at least something that wouldn’t turn me into a suspect of soulless music-making. This time, the tools were mostly the same. As you may have noticed in the first clip, I had already failed at my original plan of using just one case. Strega made its inevitable appearance (gotta love Strega), joined by a small 4ms Pod48X filled mostly with utility modules and the always-reliable µOrnament & Crime. The result was beautiful. Stunning. I was listening to these sweet Lydian melodies intertwine and dissolve into differently flavored delays, smiling for sure… but something was missing. “What do you mean something’s missing, you bastard?The piece is beautiful! The objective has been achieved!Just record the video and let’s get this thing done!It’s truly beautiful—don’t you see?” Second attempt But… no.I didn’t see it.Or rather—I didn’t feel it. As beautiful as the music was, it didn’t translate what I was trying to express. I couldn’t find Atlas in it. I couldn’t find organic life on Earth, nor the relationship between the two. The elements weren’t speaking to each other inside the sonic spectrum. The story wasn’t there. So once again, I found myself facing the same opportunity: To let go.To bring impermanence back to the foreground.To be humble.To be honest. And so, for the second time, I unplugged everything.The canvas went blank again. Beauty, I remembered, cannot — in this case — be a means to an end.Or at least, it shouldn’t be. And then it came back to me, like that same persistent fly, now oddly conciliatory, landing gently on my head and echoing my own words: The function of art should be contained in its aesthetics,and aesthetics should be contained in the function of art. This final attempt became Atlas.
I Dreamt of a Unicorn
I dreamt of a unicorn in a long instant — years of recurring, vivid flickers of a blurred idea.Hours of sci-fi must’ve camped somewhere inside one of the clever systems within my limited existence. And all those books… where did you even get them?Do you remember anything from that ink-filled ocean of despair? Flick. Flick! Always flickering.There it is again: the unicorn trapped in a long instant.You should do something about it.Do you hear the ring behind your left shoulder? Many days from my not-so-distant past were lived like that.What a tricky madman the brain is. But right after “the ring behind my left shoulder,” an inflection point was set.From then on, many inherited concepts began to dissolve, losing their shape — becoming half-full containers waiting for future re-significance. So many years sleeping while traveling — thinking only of the destination, erasing the transition between point A and point B.Nothing interesting there, right? Right? Well… maybe.But this last time was different.I needed to stay focused on the objective while remaining present during translation — to learn through the process, any process. The flickering turned into a clearer picture, clearer each incandescent time, until the purpose was unmistakable and all timelines converged at one point — a point with the shape of a unicorn trapped in a long instant. And so became Digitalzelf. Maybe an implanted memory from a higher intelligence, or a goldfish from David Lynch’s pond of ideas — but there it was. Since then, many months have passed, and I’ve learned so much about fragmentation and unity, about the laws that govern creation and every process from conception to realization.And there’s still so much to learn — which feels deeply exciting. Hence the “Z” in Digitalzelf:Z is 7 in the Greek numeral system.Seven steps unfold in everything we do, forming an octave — with the last step becoming a new state of the first. Anyway, after all that wandering, I suppose I just wanted to say, that the road that brought me here — to this point of concretion — was steep, but full of nuances, synchronicities, and textures that helped me to always turn my head back to the main goal: to finish building this Digitalzelf universe, conceived to express, to share, and to keep learning from you. So here it is: Digitalzelf, with its digital home now rooted in the World Wide Web. A place that includes this blog — a freer form of thought-thrust — alongside its kinetic daguerreotypes stored and shared on YouTube, where most of it first took shape. Its sound waves resonate from Bandcamp and the site’s Music page, while reflecting on better ways to share through streaming services. In the next few days, when I’m able to take some distance and look at it all with perspective,I hope I’ll keep finding that unicorn — trapped in a long instant. 🦄
Octave: Learning Through Friction
Octave came to life from the unexpected.It wasn’t aimed for or thought about in the beginning, but it opened its own space to our shared reality. While I was looking for “the right” idea for my first ever release as Digitalzelf, many melodic cells and harmonic structures were discarded and some other were included somehow into the final composition, mainly as texture material – a very relevant one.When I finally found the direction I wanted to follow, everything that happened reminded me of the absurdity of planning conviction. Planning is necessary, yes — but it’s just a reference point.Life often has very different “plans” for you. So, my modular synth symphony exceptionnel began to crumble midway as my main sequencer started freezing when saving the project. That led me to rethink the whole setup, instrumentation, and structure to be able to adapt to the situation. It all came with days of not-so-good health, clogged pipes (in the kitchen), and some emotional distress. But none of this came as a surprise. I was expecting the final friction that always arrives in the last stretch of any relevant project. And not without effort — and sometimes frustration — I rode the wave of what I firmly believe and try to imprint in every piece of music, video, or art form: self-observation and learning through friction. And I’ve learned a lot in these last few weeks. It’s my pleasure to share with you the result of this transitioned octave, with an open heart and the desire to bring a sonic experience that might complement a moment in your everyday life. Thanks so much for listening, and for being here. 🖤