Alex McLean

SmoothDirt programme notes

I’m doing a few solo performances over the next days, in Cambridge, Uxbridge and Birmingbridge.  Here’s the programme notes/rationale;

Yaxu – SmoothDirt

From a linear perspective of time, live coding will always be somewhat distant from human experience.  As computer programming is a fundamentally indirect manipulation of sound, is live coding really live?  If we consider the flow of time from past to future, the time necessary to modify an algorithm acts as an impenetrable barrier between coder and experience.  An alternative perspective is to think of time in terms of cycles. From this perspective, if a coder’s actions lag behind the present moment, then they are also ahead of it.  They are inside time, the cycle of development enmeshed with rhythmic cycles of music, in mutual resonance.  Smoothdirt is a simple language built around this simple idea, allowing extremes of repetition at multiple scales to be explored as musical performance.

Yaxu will produce broken techno from his laptop for around twenty minutes.