It Held the Horizon
I pierced a drone in my ear so it would stop moving further away. I had my doubts and was afraid, but the girl piercing my ear calmed my nerves down with a smile. “You’ve never done this before, haven’t you?” she said. I responded, folding my head between two light pulses coming from the drone’s horizon. I noticed the girl’s eyes were shaped by the thinnest sand there is. They sounded like chorals floating on liquid decaying crystals from a lunar hidden lake. “She doesn’t exist,” I thought out loud. A subtle pressure began to build on the sides of my head. It held.The girl kept staring at me—or at least at the part of me denying her existence—and her smile turned into the most hopeful sound ever produced. I was alone. With my left ear pierced. Every other thing seemed far away, scented with cypress and eucalyptus. I was confused, still hopeful. I was in love with the unreachable horizon that kept moving further away—unmutable, always changing, yet always itself. Its essence was as pristine as the baptismal jets underneath the lunar hidden lake. I was its reflecting surface without a will, channeling time and speaking in tongues full of absence and mechanical divinity. “I don’t exist,” I spoke inward, silently, as silent as the girl’s smile. I was in her, and she was in me. We were together in this— she was a drone pierced in my ear.
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.
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.