Thinking about 2017

2017 had it’s ups and downs, many friends made but also some enemies, hoping to improve on that front next year.

I probably did more performances than ever before, a whole load in Sheffield plus Berlin, Huddersfield, Leeds, Newcastle, London, Brighton, Morelia, Guadalajara and some big festivals Transmediale, Green Man, Shambala, Blue Dot, No bounds, Unconscious Archives.. It was good to focus on UK performances, and in particular Sheffield, the scene is getting stronger here now with interest in live coding from proper local promoters like Off Me Nut and Hope Works.

I didn’t do so many talks, I’ve shrunk away from going to conferences etc for various reasons. I did do a few of these ‘punchy’ public talks though, a TEDx talk in Hull, and similar things in Bump Festival in Belgium and Thinking Digital Arts up in Newcastle. It felt good to force myself to get better in explaining things. It was a real honour+pleasure to finish up the year with a keynote talk at ICLC 2017 in Morelia, as I said at the time, if you want to be invited to give a keynote all you have to do is start an international conference then wait two years.

The big thing was leaving Unviersity academia to join the PENELOPE project as post-doc in the Deutsches Museum in Munich (think MASSIVE science museum). I’m still based in Sheffield but visit Munich regularly as part of this five-year project. It’s a part-time position, so in theory I’ve can spend 50% of my time on music. It’s not quite worked out that way but hopefully will get closer to that next year.

The other big thing was AlgoMech festival (part-organised by PENELOPE), five days in November that took months on end of planning and fundraising to pull off. In the end it went pretty damn well, great exhibition+symposium and all the performances were totally amazing. We got some nice coverage in Makery, The Wire, The Guardian and from this nice blogger.. It destroyed me (as you can witness in the Guardian video) but a few fine people want to get involved to make it a collaboratively organised thing and we’re looking at May 2019 for the next one.

I’ve got involved in some lovely collaborations, e.g. TidalClub with Lucy, and most recently a techno collab Class Compliant Audio Interfaces with Sam/Damu. I’ve also done some great collabs with Joanne, Alexandra (who has found her way into Slub) and a/v shows with Miri.

With the afore-linked Guardian video and a couple of mixmag articles, and appearances in Electronic Music magazine, Vice and even Mary Anne Hobbs’s show on BBC Radio 6 it feels like we made a breakthrough with Algorave in 2017. It feels like this has brought many positives but also negatives, it’s kind of easier doing something that no-one knows about, and I’ve always enjoyed small communities. I’m still definitely on for the ride, but looking for ways of keeping things interesting+fun.. AlgoMech was a big part of that, and I’m looking to broaden things out a bit with EulerRoom next year too.

Towards the end of 2017 I’ve managed to finish a couple of huge projects that are exciting in their own right but together were perhaps a little too much to take on. A real biggie was editing The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music with Roger Dean, now with the printers and hitting the shelves February 2018.

I didn’t do much writing in 2017, but was happy to contribute a piece to Furtherfield on Lessons from the Luddites, and to collaborate with Kate Sicchio on an article and interactive online thingie about our Sound Choreographer <> Body Code project.

My crowdfunded album ‘spicule’ is now ridiculously over-schedule but I have a clear path now.. and a lot of material built up from these live streams:

It was great to start working with the Childrens’ Media Conference this year, running a tanglebots workshop with the amazing kids at Wybourn community primary school, the results contributing to the Playground digital art exhibition. At one point I asked the children to put their hands up if they’d hurt themselves, almost all immediately did.. Oops!

https://twitter.com/yaxu/status/879387043830345728

Amongst it all I’ve managed to put some work into TidalCycles, with the community around it growing really nicely with some people making music with it which is really far too good. I’ve done a whole load of TidalCycles workshops, next year planning to do one big one every month, to make tidal development more sustainable.. As well as helping run the free tidalclub meetups. One really nice thing was running a TidalCycles summer school, great fun and included an excusion into the nearby peak district for a group jam, check the below video..

That’ll do for now, although will likely drop back to add things I’ve forgotten, as I chew things over.. Plus the year isn’t over yet, really looking forward to the TidalCycles winter solstice party on 21st Dec!