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Joseph Branciforte: Patch Notes · Feb 16, 2026

2026 / upcoming tour / inspiration vs. refinement

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Joseph Branciforte · Joseph Branciforte: Patch Notes

The last two months have been an exceptionally busy period: creatively, in the studio, and on the upcoming Greyfade release front. This has meant that the Substack page has gotten off to a bit of a slower start than I would have liked in 2026. I’m hoping to rectify that in the coming weeks.

One of the things that’s been keeping me busy is finalizing the details of a new duo record from myself and Belgian keyboardist Jozef Dumoulin. The album will be out this spring and we are gearing up for a run of shows in Europe this March and April.

13 March 2026—Reykjavik, IS—Mengi
16 March 2026—Cologne, DE—The Loft
20 March 2026—London, UK—double bill with Scanner—Richmix
3 April 2026—Paris, FR—Le Triton
4 April 2026—Brussels, BE—BRDCST Festival atAncienne Belgique
5 April 2026—Roeselare, BE—Inval

I’ll have more to say on this project in the coming weeks—from the music itself, to the Max/MSP programming that went into recording it (and the system for the upcoming tour), as well the package design for this album, which took me over 8 months of consistent work to develop and execute. In some ways, the silence here has been part of the process of finishing this project.

There seem to be periods for me, particularly in the final stages of one of my own releases, where I go very deep into refining existing material. It’s less about generating new ideas, as seeing existing ideas through. The last two months have been one of those stretches—and I’m looking forward to sharing the results of it all shortly—but in the meantime, it’s meant less time for me to do the forward-moving & speculative work I originally envisioned for this Substack.

I came across the clip from Steve Jobs a few years ago. For all I know, it’s a well-circulated soundbite, but I had never seen it prior. It seems to encapsulate a lot of what I’d thought about for years along the lines of the creative, music production, and design process.

That tension between idea and refinement is something I’ve wrestled with for a long time. While it’s always tempting to romanticize the spark—to treat inspiration itself as the valuable thing—an idea that isn’t carried all the way through to completion is ultimately just potential energy. At the same time, towards the end of a long project, where it’s all refinement and very little inspiration, things can come very close to feeling dead.

The challenge for me is that I want this Substack to be a place for new ideas, not necessarily refined or finished. I want to allow myself a place to be a bit messy. At the same time, I do still believe in the power of an idea taken all the way to its end. So if this space slows down from time to time, it may simply be the shadow of ideas developed here reaching completion elsewhere.

16 February 2026


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