'Algorave' Is the Future of Dance Music (if You're a Nerd)

http://www.vice.com/read/algorave-is-the-future-of-dance-music-if-youre-an-html-coder

by lelf • 13 years ago

69 82 13 years ago

oxalo• 13 years ago

I think it'd be cool if this somehow merged with the current club scene to bring more of a 'live' aspect back to electronic music.

Tossrock• 13 years ago

There's plenty of live aspects in electronic music, see for example Robert Delong, Beardyman, Booka Shade, Pretty Light's current tour, etc.

bananacurve• 13 years ago

Beardyman isn't strictly electronic, more beatbox but he is amazing. Check him out live in Edinburgh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qciVXUHTN10

ryanthejuggler• 13 years ago

My favorite line in the whole thing was the final line: This article was amended to represent the fact that the artists mentioned weren't creating music with HTML.

Kiro• 13 years ago

Yeah, before it was actually saying something about "coding in HTML".

CalRobert2• 13 years ago

About 5 of us left incredulous comments in response to the line "live HTML coding" - you can still see this in the URL I believe.

CalRobert2• 13 years ago

And I see they deleted all of those, including some interesting discussion of the merits of Haskell, Processing, etc. Poor form on Vice's part, in my view.

lewispollard5• 13 years ago

Awesome - I live in Sheffield and actually attended this event (though I don't seem to be in any of the photos!)

phreeza• 13 years ago

What was the atmosphere like in your opinion?

lewispollard5• 13 years ago

A little awkward I guess, it felt much more like a hacker meeting than a rave. I've been to a lot of experimental music performances in the city and they all have a similar feeling - much less partying and good times and much more introspective in a way, absorbing the music and enjoying it individually. You got a sense that everyone was sort of on the same wavelength even if we didn't interact with each other much.

That said it was REALLY enjoyable for me as part of my dissertation at uni was about generative music and live coding, it was really cool to see it properly in action with a crowd of people enjoying it.

toolslive• 13 years ago

This looks very familiar: http://overtone.github.io/

http://vimeo.com/groups/82430/videos/21956071

yaxu16• 13 years ago

Yep the creators of both of these are involved in algorave

lowmagnet• 13 years ago

This one is even better, though it takes a sharp eye to see what's happening without narration:

http://vimeo.com/groups/82430/videos/70016164

That's two players side by side: Andrew Sorensen, and Ben Swift. It is a thoroughly entertaining 20 minute set. Plus reading how they are modifying the code is really neat. I only have a passing familiarity with scheme so I only get the gist of what's happening.

thinkpad20• 13 years ago

That's cool; I had heard of overtone, but I didn't realize there was any kind of equivalent for Haskell. What's the name of the library?

pfeyz• 13 years ago

It looks like they're using tidal.

http://yaxu.org/tidal/

lelandbatey• 13 years ago

This is very much an annoying off topic observation, but seeing this title makes me think:

    'Algorave' Is the Future of Dance Music (if You're a True Scotsman)

Why can't we just have it be the future of Dance music, why does it have to be "if you're a Nerd".

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

Why can't we just have it be the future of Dance music

Because that's a stronger claim -- that it is the future of Dance music for everyone.

why does it have to be "if you're a Nerd".

Because with that qualification, its a weaker claim -- for the rest of the universe, it may not be the future of dance music.

yodsanklai• 13 years ago

Just nitpicking here, but it's not really a weaker claim. Either it's the future of dance music, or it's not. The future of dance music is the same for everyone.

Or maybe they mean, what nerds think the future of dance music is.

yaxu16• 13 years ago

Because titles aren't written by journalists, they're written by sub editors, and so tend to be totally out of step with the rest of the article.

JonnieCache2• 13 years ago

why does it have to be "if you're a Nerd"

Because, as mentioned upthread, it's not really good enough to stand alone as dance music. It's only worth listening to if you're interested in the generative aspect.

kazagistar• 13 years ago

Because the music does not sound as good as most music to most people... unless you find the tech interesting, you are likely to not enjoy it that much.

JanezStupar2• 13 years ago

Because it sucks. Its sucks even more than IDM. It sucks so hard that no sane person would listen to it.

To listen to and to create algorave you need to be an absolute hopeless nerd.

That much is implied by the title and it is true.

They are just creating electronic music using a horrible user interface. And its not cool.

yid• 13 years ago

I agree, but it's early days yet for the genre. You're looking at the Netscape of algorithmic music. Most people qualified to innovate in that algorithms space are busy writing programs to improvise jazz solos (i.e., they're generally a bit on the...older...side of electronic music).

swalsh• 13 years ago

I'm a nerd, and i love repetitive techno... so this in theory should have been for me, but that youtube link was really hard to listen too.

ohashi• 13 years ago

Same boat. That was awful.

bonestamp2• 13 years ago

There were some good parts near the end. I think it was more of a demo than a polished set. A polished set would be nice to see.

fyolnish• 13 years ago

Yeah, there's good live coding, but that definitely wasn't an example of it.

001sky• 13 years ago

The photos seem to not look like much fun, either...

http://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/123487/_D...

cheeseprocedure2• 13 years ago

Pictured here: nobody dancing.

rotw• 13 years ago

I was actually there. It was more of a laid back atmosphere of drinks and chatter, and not all of the music was danceable. Me and a friend caught 3 sets: Benoît and the Mandelbrots were not much about dancing, but had a mesmerising set that sounded like an overgrown Boards of Canada, if that makes sense? The guy afterwards continually built up and stripped down his beats, which quite a few people actually danced to a bit, and sounded quite a bit like a more energetic Andy Stott (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTOsBk-V9uA). We left during the set of the guy after that which wasn't too great, but the whole experience was pretty cool, as you had to be patient and really engage with the music, but were rewarded with completely unexpected and beautifully serendipitous sounds.

Zarathust• 13 years ago

It was very painful to listen to. I don't get how you can "dance" to that

Aardwolf• 13 years ago

URL currently is: www.vice.com/read/algorave-is-the-future-of-dance-music-if-youre-an-html-coder

Article title currently is: 'Algorave' Is the Future of Dance Music (if You're a Nerd)

So html coders are nerds?

lambda• 13 years ago

From the bottom of the article: "This article was amended to represent the fact that the artists mentioned weren't creating music with HTML."

Based on the screenshots, they seem to doing this in Haskell, which is a far cry from HTML. I guess the article authors have no idea about what programming actually consists of, so used "HTML" to mean any kind of code.

yaxu16• 13 years ago

I think this was more sub ed mangling

icesoldier• 13 years ago

I would love to hear this writer's take on chiptune, since he seemed way too amused that it was a "dance club"-type setting without any of the "dance club" stereotypes. I don't think most chip shows have the live generation like this, but there is a component of live-editing there.

Globz• 13 years ago

This is very neat, I will give it a try for sure!

agentultra• 13 years ago

Alex, referenced in the article, introduced me to live-coding when he wrote http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/08/31/livecode.html

I'm not a huge fan of the "algorave" moniker but I can attest to the experience of the author at such events. It's pretty tepid. There's not much to dance to. The "future" it is not but perhaps an alternate history or sub-culture it perhaps is (or once was... not sure if coverage in Vice lets you keep that status).

That being said I love it. :)

JonnieCache2• 13 years ago

Nick Collins rides again! He was one of my tutors at uni. We made drum machines and talked about autechre. Interesting guy.

diydsp• 13 years ago

Ah yes, i was wondering if that was the same Nick Collins who wrote the awesome books on Handmade Electronic Music :)

I wonder how the author of the article missed that, heh.

Anyway, obviously, this live-coding is not "The Future" any more than anything else is, nor is it 100% new; There have been experiments since the beginning of computer music trying to make live compositions---

NEVERTHELESS, I think this article is great because it documents and celebrates how much technology we've leveraged w/r/t to music. We can now analyze and compose with great effect and detail. I mean, there are over 160 APIs for music on the web alone now: http://www.programmableweb.com/apitag/music

Now that understanding of parsing and programming and algorithms is growing, we should expect to see our knowledge reflected in the field of music! Yay!

surgesg• 13 years ago

Actually not the same person.

http://www.nicolascollins.com/texts/nicvsnick666.pdf

peteforde• 13 years ago

Giles Bowkett gave a standing-ovation receiving talk at RubyFringe in 2008 on his Ruby-based algorithmic MIDI generation framework, Archaeopteryx.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/archaeopteryx-bowkett

I cannot recommend this talk enough. First off, he was way ahead of the curve on this, tech-wise. For this article to not mention him is frustrating.

Secondly, Giles was both hilarious and inspiring. His presentation kept people in rapture; 10 minutes into lunch, not one person in the room left.

xutopia• 13 years ago

That talk capture the feeling of the entire conference so well. If only more conferences were as good as that one.

adw2• 13 years ago

I've met one of the performers in the article; he was doing this (in SuperCollider, largely) back in at least 2004 if not earlier.

Not diminishing how awesome Giles is, but it wasn't original in '08. It may not have been original in '98.

yaxu16• 13 years ago

Yes we've been doing it since 2000 (http://slub.org), I haven't actually used supercollider in performance though I don't think, I just used it for a perl.com article once. This is not the future of electronic music, but now we've given it a stupid name people seem to be more interested..

AlgoBLAH6• 13 years ago

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~blackrse/algorithm.html

Oh please; there is a very long history of algorithmic derived music before computers and just after they appeared up to present day.... "All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again."

The YouTube audio links in that article sound just like what it sounded like 10 years ago. I ralphed when the live coding manifesto was released... I've been a long time SuperCollider user too....

I mean continue... It's just nothing new or that compelling in this format / live coding, etc..

edit: Giles can be fun though, but it's been a while.. I attended a presentation of his back around then on his efforts.. :)

jamesbritt2• 13 years ago

* It's just nothing new or that compelling in this format / live coding, etc..*

It's interesting because some things have changed. There are more tools like SuperCollider, and they have become easier to install and on more platforms. And devices have become more powerful, reducing latency and unintended glitches due to processing requirements.

There also seems to be more languages people can use for this.

And more people seem to know about it.

So with all that you would expect to hear of more interesting things being done.

It feels, though, that the practitioners are prone to getting caught up in the pseudo-novelty (novel, at least, to them) of how it is done at the expense of creating music that presents some engaging development arc.

Reminds me of music created by some aleatoric process (Cage's I Ching stuff, perhaps). Interesting to think about and to discuss, less interesting to actually listen to for very long.

qzxvwt• 13 years ago

Alright, pretentious techno lover here. This is digital music production without a GUI. Fun idea and all, but it's pure novelty. And to motion that this specifically is "for nerds" implies that there aren't currently plenty of artists in the various realms of electronic music already geeking up a storm. They're just not headlining the shitty surface world of commercialized "EDM". I guess I just want to remind people to respect this art form and to remember to give credit where it's due.

yaxu16• 13 years ago

Absolutely, credit given here: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/09/play/algorav...

jc_dntn• 13 years ago

Not all good music is made in Ableton or on MPCs. Not all intelligent music is played on a Monome.

yaxu16• 13 years ago

Oops wrong link, I meant here http://algorave.com/about

jamesbritt2• 13 years ago

Got no love the first time around https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6795624

Anyways, interesting and fun, not new but so what; new for some people is still good.

scrumper• 13 years ago

"Sounds wholly or partly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive conditionals."

This is a fun play on the words of the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, which criminalized the huge underground rave scene in the UK. (It's 'repetitive beats' in the text of the Act).

Knowing that wouldn't really have changed the article much, but it's not as po-faced a definition as the author might have thought.

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_EP

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

Musically yes, code-as-performance no. Indeed, this mainly demonstrates a) what a bad interface text is and b) how heavily some proponents are leaning on using samples of other music. I think it's significant that Autechre (generally acknowledged as the the kings of experimental electronic music) compose mainly within Max and build their live performances around a mix of their own sample library and abstractions of their Max tools to the rather simpler patching of the Nord Modular G2.

joebo• 13 years ago

Any recommendations on how to inexpensively (free) experiment in making techno music? I downloaded some synth programs on my iPad (HexASound, Synth) to play with. Would something like Algorave, Archaeopteryx, or Overtone be better?

cheeseprocedure2• 13 years ago

Check out SuperCollider [1] and Csound [2] as well.

[1] http://supercollider.sourceforge.net [2] http://www.csounds.com/

'Algorave' Is the Future of Dance Music (if You're a Nerd)

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