Algorave: The live coding movement that makes next-level electronic music

As a scene or categorization, the Algorave network is broad. It exists somewhere around DIY production using mostly open-source live coding environments like SuperCollider, TidalCycles, Gibber, ixi lang and Extempore. “It tends to involve describing music by writing text using a computer,” says McLean about these elusive elements of what it means to be an Algoraver. “But if you talk to other musicians they each have quite a different approach”.

McLean is just one of many in this growing community clustered around 40 different cities around the world, including the UK, the United States, Australia, and Mexico City. The artists involved feature the likes of Lil Data, Heavy Lifting, and Kindohm, as well as Joanne Armitage (mentioned earlier) and her own alluringly-titled Algobabez project with collaborator Shelly Knotts. In a long list of people responding to questions about Algorave via email, these different approaches to the technique also include Alexandra Cárdenas – born in Colombia, cutting her live-coding teeth In Mexico City and now living in Berlin – and Renick Bell, based in Tokyo. Then there’s Antonio Roberts in Birmingham, who doesn’t produce music but has been making art with glitch aesthetics since 2009, generating responsive visuals that keep in line with the coding aspect of Algorave. As he writes, “the main point is that it's all crafted live.” Meanwhile, London’s Dane Law doesn’t program in real-time at all but prerecords his improvisations using algorithms and what he calls “aleatoric processes.” Algorave covers a lot of bases.

“In terms of algorithmic music, the more you look at it the less it really has any meaning,” says McLean, getting down to the semantics of what constitutes the genre. “Because any sort of musical score is an algorithm, in a way. It's just a set of instructions on how to produce a piece. But algorithmic music in practice is about abstraction – not just writing down the notes but coming up with some kind of procedure on how to generate those notes or sounds.” That means live performances by Kindohm with screen text that announces “sound”, “sound”, “sound” (among other less recognizable inputs) to the intense, accelerating syncopations of his rhythms. Or Renick Bell’s “PlayLowend” and “conductor2 was bored” while a volatile thumping beat finds form in an assemblage of metallic, resonating sonic articulations.

“Being able to change the guts of the tool can fundamentally change the tool and therefore the range of possibilities,” offers Bell about the importance of understanding the mechanisms that underlie any kind of software or program a performer uses. “Exposing process is part of the solution to our societies' problems. Our approaches, such as projecting our screens, or opening the source of our software, are a symbolic call for process to be exposed.”

Alexandra Cárdenas, often working under the CyberID tiemposdelruido, also sees live coding as something revealing, where it frees music “aesthetically and technically from consumerism.” As a composer of a classical music background, Cárdenas grew tired of the limitations of commercial software, moving on to open-source environments for creative production. In doing so she became a part of a vital live-coding scene in Mexico City, where she organised two festivals. The relative accessibility of using open-source software was an important factor, among others, for its embrace by the new economy of the capital city, in turn becoming a social force that resonates with many Mexican artists. “Identity, resistance, interest, curiosity, respect,” writes Cárdenas about the host country of the next International Conference on Live Coding. “Live coders are quite an inclusive and transparent community, and this is very important in such a troubled country with so much discrimination against women, and with such racial and other social issues. It opens a safe space to create. This is the hacker philosophy. And generally speaking, the mix of artists and hackers tend to be a happy mix.”

That happy mix of inclusivity extends to Huddersfield in England, where Shelly Knotts and Joanne Armitage have previously worked with Yorkshire Sound Women Network & AHRC Live Coding Research Network to offer workshops for women open to learning about how to get involved. “There is often a misperception of live coding as a hyper-technical form,” offers Armitage, “Languages like ixi Lang and Tidal allow us to present live coding as accessible and easy to those with little to no experience of coding.” YSWN is just one part of an open community that also includes Orchestra for Females and/at Laptops collective (OFFAL). It too boast Knotts and Armitage as members, as well as self-described “computer witch” Ada Adhiyatma’s Madam Data project from Philadelphia and Libertad Figueroa of Mexico, among others. “Now we have quite a few music and visuals performers,” writes Knotts, “I think it's really important to have a visibly diverse scene in terms of new people feeling like it would be a welcoming community to them.”

Lil Data, on the other hand, looks at live-coding as a purely aesthetic experience. Not only an Algoraver but also a part of London’s PC Music label roster, he presented his clattering bundles of clean and clipped sound objects alongside the soaring live-coded graphics of noise artist Miri Kat at Amersham Arms. “There's no big realisation to be had by coding, other than that it's not magic, nor a panacea,” writes Lil Data, otherwise known as Jack Armitage. “Education is a political imperative but these things shouldn't be confused.”

Yet it’s confusion, or at least opacity, that Algorave itself attempts to dispel – for performer and audience member alike – while producing something fresh and idiosyncratic in the mean time. “It's always a matter of taste, of aesthetics, of personal preference,” writes Cárdenas. “The power of art is not determined by the tools you use to make it, but by what you have to say.”

Visit the Algorave website here. Listen to a mix of Algorave tunes below (there's a YouTube playlist here too)

Steph Kretowicz is a freelance journalist based in London. Visit her website here

Patch Keyes is a freelance illustrator based in Bristol. Visit his website here