Qu-Bit Data Bender – The Sound Of Malfunction

In his 1996 book, “A Year With Swollen Appendices”, Brian Eno wrote something that still resonates with me: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart.”

In 2010, the fascinating Cracked Media the sound of malfunction, a book that was all about the “malfunction” as a way to make art, or as “compositional device” provided a rich overview of what Eno had described as the sound of failure.

Why am I mentioning these books? Well, I couldn’t help but thinking of them while I was reading about Data Bender, the latest Eurorack module by the ever-creative people at Qu-Bit.

I don’t know if they are familiar with those books. Fact is, they describe Data Bender as a circuit-bent digital audio buffer providing the sounds of skipping CDs, software bugs, and defective tape machine playback – here we go, the sound of failure and malfunction!

Here’s a short demo video:

As you would expect from a Qu-Bit module, the sound quality and the specs are top-notch: audio buffer specs are 96kHz sample rate, 24-bit depth, with over a minute of stereo audio.

You can learn more about Data Bender on the product page.

Pricing and Availability

$349 – €349, available now.