I just happened on a pandemic-era article about algorave from 2022. It’s really nicely written and researched, and I especially enjoyed this mini-review in it of a performance I did with hellocatfood. I’m not sure which one, I thought we’d maybe done two, but with a quick search I just found four of them: 1 2 3 4 – it was a strange time but I remember being really happy with some of these performances.
“I stumbled into an algorave in the depths of the pandemic eighteen months ago, when the world felt like a mirage I sometimes viewed from the interior of my computer screen. It was a streamed event, billed yaxu + hellocatfood, with their faces in either bottom corner and a programming terminal behind them. yaxu, the alias of Alex McLean, a primary founder of the algorave movement, mumbled something in an English accent and began typing. A simple drum pattern emerged, but after one or two cycles it shifted into a challenging tempo. The sound turned jagged, waveforms crawling out of an acid bath, then the sample dropped and the background lit up. hellocatfood (Antonio Roberts, a Birmingham-based visual artist) nodded as the screen populated with warped geometries, flashing between colors on the beat as the shapes collided with each other and skewed across dimensions like an abstract painting in constant revision. I don’t like dance music, but I couldn’t stop watching. The song never settled for long; its intricate patterns broke down into bare simplicity almost as soon as they emerged, and then drove immediately at the next idea, and the next. The graphics morphed with the carnage, but before long the distinction between the sound and the image and the two faces in intense focus disappeared; the whole thing moved together in a heaving synthesis. Somehow the performance had conjured life from the materials of zoom purgatory. After forty minutes of this, I was exhausted. And happy.”