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'Algorave' Is the Future of Dance Music (if You're a Nerd)
- oxalo 13y agoI 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 13y agoThere's plenty of live aspects in electronic music, see for example Robert Delong, Beardyman, Booka Shade, Pretty Light's current tour, etc.
- bananacurve 13y agoBeardyman isn't strictly electronic, more beatbox but he is amazing. Check him out live in Edinburgh http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qciVXUHTN10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qciVXUHTN10
- ryanthejuggler 13y agoMy 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 13y agoYeah, before it was actually saying something about "coding in HTML".
- CalRobert 13y agoAbout 5 of us left incredulous comments in response to the line "live HTML coding" - you can still see this in the URL I believe.
- CalRobert 13y agoAnd 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.
- yaxu 13y agoNo these comments are still there. It seems vice put their content on different sites, with different sets of facebook comments, so you're probably looking at a different url.
- saraid216 13y agoCould you please link the URL that gives these comments, or reproduce the comments here? I was curious about them and could not find them.
- yaxu 13y agohttp://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/algorave-is-the-future-of-dance-music-if-youre-an-html-coder http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/algorave-is-the-future-of-dan...
- lewispollard 13y agoAwesome - I live in Sheffield and actually attended this event (though I don't seem to be in any of the photos!)
- phreeza 13y agoWhat was the atmosphere like in your opinion?
- lewispollard 13y agoA 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 13y agoThis looks very familiar: http://overtone.github.io/ http://overtone.github.io/ http://vimeo.com/groups/82430/videos/21956071 http://vimeo.com/groups/82430/videos/21956071
- yaxu 13y agoYep the creators of both of these are involved in algorave
- lowmagnet 13y agoThis one is even better, though it takes a sharp eye to see what's happening without narration: http://vimeo.com/groups/82430/videos/70016164 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 13y agoThat'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 13y agoIt looks like they're using tidal. http://yaxu.org/tidal/ http://yaxu.org/tidal/
- lelandbatey 13y agoThis 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".
- dragonwriter 13y 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 13y agoJust 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.
- tokenizer 13y agoI'd go even farther than you are. By claiming "if you're a nerd", they're creating a class distinction where one group can and does ascertain truth, while the "others" cannot and will not. So not only is it the future of dance music, but you'll only know if your privilege and knowledge can allow you to. A modern day hermetics of sorts. But you know, thats just, my opinion man...
- tesseractive 13y agoOne possible interpretation is that the scene is completely awesome as long as you're capable of coding and thus being one of the real participants, but that it's less interesting for pure spectators. Thus, for music coders -- "nerds" -- it is the future, but for non-nerds, there are more appealing alternatives.
- swalsh 13y agoI'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 13y agoSame boat. That was awful.
- bonestamp2 13y agoThere 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.
- yaxu 13y agoYes it was a relaxed noodley experiment. More video is on http://algorave.com/ http://algorave.com/ around the artist pages
- fyolnish 13y agoYeah, there's good live coding, but that definitely wasn't an example of it.
- 001sky 13y agoThe photos seem to not look like much fun, either... http://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/123487/_DSC3011_016.jpg http://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/123487/_D...
- cheeseprocedure 13y agoPictured here: nobody dancing.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Aardwolf 13y agoURL 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 13y agoFrom 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.
- yaxu 13y agoI think this was more sub ed mangling
- icesoldier 13y agoI 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.
- joebo 13y agoAny 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?
- cheeseprocedure 13y agoCheck out SuperCollider [1] and Csound [2] as well. [1] http://supercollider.sourceforge.net http://supercollider.sourceforge.net [2] http://www.csounds.com/ http://www.csounds.com/
- Globz 13y agoThis is very neat, I will give it a try for sure!
- agentultra 13y agoAlex, referenced in the article, introduced me to live-coding when he wrote http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/08/31/livecode.html 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. :)
- JonnieCache 13y agoNick Collins rides again! He was one of my tutors at uni. We made drum machines and talked about autechre. Interesting guy.
- diydsp 13y agoAh 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 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 13y agoActually not the same person. http://www.nicolascollins.com/texts/nicvsnick666.pdf http://www.nicolascollins.com/texts/nicvsnick666.pdf
- yaxu 13y agoYes the two nic[k] collinses had a big fight once. http://www.nicolascollins.com/collinscup.htm http://www.nicolascollins.com/collinscup.htm
- peteforde 13y agoGiles 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 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 13y agoThat talk capture the feeling of the entire conference so well. If only more conferences were as good as that one.
- adw 13y agoI'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.
- yaxu 13y agoYes we've been doing it since 2000 (http://slub.org 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..
- lewispollard 13y agoJust want to say you were awesome at algorave - wish I was good enough/fast enough in emacs to start doing stuff like this!
- yaxu 13y agoThanks, it went pretty well although I wasn't expecting to play solo, was supposed to be working with a live drummer but he had troubles finding the venue.
- qzxvwt 13y agoAlright, 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.
- yaxu 13y agoAbsolutely, credit given here: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/09/play/algorave http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/09/play/algorav...
- jc_dntn 13y agoNot all good music is made in Ableton or on MPCs. Not all intelligent music is played on a Monome.
- yaxu 13y agoOops wrong link, I meant here http://algorave.com/about http://algorave.com/about
- jamesbritt 13y agoGot no love the first time around https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6795624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6795624 Anyways, interesting and fun, not new but so what; new for some people is still good.
- scrumper 13y 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.
- anigbrowl 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_EP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_EP
- anigbrowl 13y agoMusically 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.