This is the story of why my pasta boiled over
~ a tale of collaborative creation ~
Many years ago, I started work on a new project called Arroost.
Its goals hadn’t quite— hadn’t figured themselves out yet, but one of them was to promote open practice. So Arroost was always going to be a nonsense machine. It was always going to be a toy instrument, a toy musical instrument, like the otomatone.
I finished Arroost and I told this story before but I finished Arroost and I [presented it] at [London futures of code]. And afterwards, some people from the live coding world came up to to me and they were like “That’s a live coding tool” and then I was like “What’s a live coding?”
It was always my intention to submit Arroost to various conferences and whatnot / whatever you’re supposed to do / wherever you’re supposed to submit creative tools nowadays And I couldn’t do that if I didn’t understand what I had made / apparently I made a live coding tool and I didn’t know what a live coding was
so I had to learn(!)
Fast forwards many months, and I began to know / feel what a live coding was
[Strudel] became a / my live coding machine of choice and no I’m not very good at it but it’s a lot of fun and I’m using it A LOT
like really I am doing [LOADS OF STRUDEL]
when I was building Arroost, I used it A LOT too
i did LOADS OF ARROOST and it ended up changing me
quite a lot
it strongly affected the kind of music i naturally made, even on / especially on other instruments
the music i made became a lot free-er / looser much more a-rhythmic / lacking rhythm consistency or sense and it made me
yes i let go of certain things that were holding me back / much more free as a person
the main point is / when you use a tool / instrument / machine / it ends up shaping / changing you / you control the tool / the tool controls you
one could ask / how did / how does strudel change / shape / control me
when— i went to [causal islands] in berlin to talk about the [death of the tadi web] and a group of people ended up in my room quite late at night. i showed them how strudel works, with its cycles and patterns and stuff
at like stupid-o-clock in the morning, my friend [orion reed] turned up at my room too and he was like “live coding?” and then he whipped out his laptop as well
on some other live coding tool / not strudel / i don’t know what it was / it sounded good / our sounds combined / we picked the same tempo / key / it matched up / i recorded a sample into his phone / “anything can be voice training” / it turned into a keyboard / “ANYTHING CAN BE VOICE TRAINING” / it sounded like that
I’ve been making and sharing lots of little strudel scribbles / scrappy fiddles / I’ve been sharing the process of me being “a little bit better than before”
this involves sharing a link to a single strudel, a single moment in time from my practice
but as I’ve learned and got a little bit better, I’ve realised that when you “play” strudel it’s more of a live performance than a song-creator. you don’t end up with a track. you end up with a performance
therefore, sharing one single strudel link at the end of that process is a very bad way of sharing some strudeling
“delete delete!”
“embrace death!”
“let code die!”
these are some of the—
I used [flok] once before, at a [workshop] run by [Alex McLean]
Sorry to interrupt. This blog post became too esoteric and I’m putting it in the bin. You just read it in its final state.
I’ll try to write a more sensible version another time.
Back to the sky.