Currents & Nostalgia is Unusable Engineering's six-voice virtual-analog synthesizer, released in November 2026. Instead of competing on raw circuit accuracy, it builds movement into the instrument: two independent slot systems sequence the oscillators and the filter through a short run of positions, so patches shift and breathe without any LFO wiring. A Discrepancies section then drifts the six voices apart in tune, filter, and envelope speed, modeling the voice-to-voice variation of real analog hardware.
The oscillators use a circuit-modeled saw core that developer Rasmus Nyåker originally designed for a hardware project, with saw, triangle, sine, and pulse shapes plus ring mod and folded-sum sources. The filter pairs a low-pass and high-pass with resonance. There is no modulation matrix and no hidden menu, which is the whole point: the synth reads at a glance.
Set against alternatives such as Diva, Repro-5, and OB-Xd, Currents & Nostalgia earns its place when you want analog character and self-animating patches more than deep routing or maximum polyphony. The full first look lives in our Currents & Nostalgia feature.