I've started down the same path that Autechre has gone recently - just using Sonic Pi as the live-looper to build up a library of part-players and a conductor.

I've started down the same path that Autechre has gone recently - just using Sonic Pi as the live-looper to build up a library of part-players and a conductor. Then output MIDI to a DAW to use plugins and make further arrangement and mix decisions. The thing is, the sound design is, in a sense, the easy part. You can buy the sound you want, with the substantial exception of some acoustic and vocal performances. You can feed it into a tremendous number of processing effects and get artistically interesting results by turning the knobs. This has been commodified: you can buy up software bundles for holiday sales right now and have an absolutely vast kit of professional production tools for perhaps $500 USD; less, going to zero, if you focus just on essentials and make good use of freebies, more if you aim for high-effort multisampled instruments and certain high-end plugins. And so we have a golden age for the improvisational electronic jam session. There's no need to build your own patches, though it helps from a sound engineering perspective to have those skills. But compositions aren't jam sessions, they're a tighter, more directed layer of structure than that. And the problem that rears its head with algorithmic approaches is that it isn't reducable to one algorithm with different values, rather, a different piece is a different algorithm, and the final result is assembled most easily by switching between layers of intentional, hand-picked sequences and automations that extend upon them. But if you go in agnostic to the principles driving that material, as it seems the author did, the result doesn't go in any coherent direction, and so it doesn't sound musical. Many people like the old chiptunes on the C64. One of the distinguishing features of many of them is the fact that the sequences are, in fact, algorithmic in this way. They were not composed entirely on the piano and then painstakingly input as a sequence of events. Some were, of course, but memory constraints drove many more towards compression, if only at the level of "loop this pattern", and the lengthiest tunes leaned heavily on algorithms(one example: Times of Lore). There is no requirement for algorithmic approaches to also be academic experiments and these tunes often demonstrate that. Somehow this fact gets very little representation in the modern DAW environment. Sequences are uniformly multitrack tapes, printed scores, piano rolls, tracker grids, or lists of events. If they're particularly cheeky they might think to use divisions of a circle. But you can define an interesting sequence in a few lines of code, really: you just need to tap into a pattern that has some intrinsic chaos(predictable, but in a difficult-to-compute way - cellular automata, double pendulums, fractals or even just a polyrhythm all work) and subsequently shape it to the needs of the larger structure. It's the use of the mathematics that matters, and traditional theory is kind of burdensome in this way, because it often obscures the mathematics in trying to convert it into something that can be muscle-memory trained and called out verbally.