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

In the back room of a bar in the South London suburb of New Cross, there’s a revolution happening. Or maybe it’s not so much a revolution as a de-volution, a rolling back to the backend of music production, where the possibilities of the encoded information inside computer software is open and endless. An artist with the simple stage name Joanne, is standing on a stage at the Amersham Arms, looking at her laptop and typing, immersed in dry ice and the creative process, as a projection plays behind her. Red, blue, green, yellow, purple text on a black background moves and changes; highlighted orange, and cut-and-pasted, in a flash, disappearing with the rhythm of a cursor. The music it conjures is bouncing out of several well-placed speakers. It ricochets from the corners of the dimmed room as a repetitive dull thud drops, then builds up through a crunching, incessant rhythm. Some of the audience squeals, the floor vibrating with a heavy beat that’s almost organic. This is the look and sound of live-coded electronic music, or the more recently (and craftily) coined music ‘genre’ now known as Algorave.

“Suddenly a lot more people started turning up and getting the idea. I think it’s from having a name which doesn't take itself too seriously but sort of gets across the idea that it’s somewhere you go to have fun,” chuckles Alex McLean through video chat, an ‘Algoraver’ himself called yaxu and the organizer of a recent Algorave ‘tour’ through London and Sheffield in England, as well as Karlsruhe in Germany. “Having a kind of identity has helped and, I guess, before there weren’t so many people doing it but through various efforts we’ve broadened the community, it’s become more of a community of practitioners.”

McLean is a 16-year veteran of this kind of live-coding performance, an event where producers – and quite possibly their audience – understand their instruments at the core, where the programming language of real-time audio synthesisers is pared down and revealed to all on a screen with a stark black or white background. “It’s kind of a Luddite’s approach, in a way, because it's stripping back away from graphical user interfaces and just getting back at the underlying text of all the stuff that's happening inside a computer, all it’s elements, and treating the computer like a language machine, or tool.”

When watching or engaging with an Algorave performance, there are a few things of which to take note. As an audience member, essentially what you’re doing is looking at a person looking at their computer with a straight face. It’s an unusual sight to behold. The sound that comes out of that is often something, coarse, lo-fi and erratic. Sometimes the beats can be hard for the inexperienced dancer to follow, oscillating between the fast breakbeats comparable to drum ‘n’ bass, other times evoking straight up four-to-the-floor rhythms. There’s real, visceral experimentation going on here, even if it’s typed out through a certain syntax. It makes one wonder about the patterns that drive both the human brain and a computer processor, where an intuitive approach to music – within genres like drum ‘n’ bass, even footwork, for example – deploys similar results to a process like live-coding, which is literally literal. “It is a strange experience making this stuff because it is so absorbing using the system,” says McLean. “You get completely absorbed in it and people are responding very physically. You're both locked into this sort of very abstract world of language structures, while also being tuned into this very physical response. So when you're mixing these very abstract linguistic structures with this very physical response, there is something very lateralized going on, you have this very spatial reasoning meshing with this very linguistic reasoning.”

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