NEW SHOW - ALPACA FESTIVAL

Who doesn't like patterns?

After all, what is life if not an ongoing, desperate effort to sculpt vague shapes of understanding out of the howling chaos that is being alive and being aware of it?

And what is peace if not the feeling of clinging with all our hearts to these imaginary structures as if they were actual concrete, anchors of meaning and purpose that stand firm in this vast, endless blizzard of existence?

Pattern-making! I love it, you love it, making and then investing meaning in patterns is really all that keeps us from the abyss. What would life be like without them? There'd be a lot less techno, for a start.

Alpaca Festival in Sheffield is all about patterns of the algorithmic kind. And as anybody who isn't a delusional AI tech bro understands, algorithms are only as useful as the intentions and biases that are put into designing and using them. Algorithmic does not mean magic or imply any kind of computer or artificial intelligence. (Fuck AI music). It's still just us humans, waving our tools around, carving things out of the unknowable future, casting them into the past and then examining their ruins to see how they make us feel.

Alpaca Festival is running from 12th-13th September and features all the usual live-coded algorave-ish kick drum chaos. Also, happily, I am playing a live show there too.

This was the proposal I submitted to their call for performances:

Some Bangers in Lesser-used Time Signatures

A primarily laptop-based live performance, possibly with a little bit of hardware, using a work-in-progress custom live system.

An evolution of 65daysofstatic’s ‘Wreckage Systems’ project, this current live framework is designed to host a suite of smaller generative systems (‘systems-as-songs’). Unlike Wreckage Systems, rather than being designed to run autonomously, these systems look to find a sweet spot between generative output and human curation.

Although this live system is still in development, there’s plenty of material to deliver a selection of bangers in lesser-used time signatures, for an audience fond of untangling tangled patterns. 29/16? 11/8? 15/4? Take your pick!

Now it comes to it, I cannot promise that there won't be a healthy amount of regular, old-fashioned 4/4 kick drums too.

Also, despite what it says, the new live system isn't so much an evolution of Wreckage Systems, but more the result of me starting to prototype Wreckage Systems in Max to see if it was possible, which quickly veered off the rails into somewhere quite different. But not entirely different. It is still a way to imagine songs more like systems than fixed recordings, but it's quite early days. So far I haven't taken any one song off fairly structured rails in-so-far as they all have pretty fixed arrangements.

Whatevs. Ultimately it's just a vehicle for banger-delivery. No need to overthink it. (Ha!) Tickets are available now for the whole weekend conference and also for individual events. It looks great. I think some of it is online, but I don't know if that includes my set. Probably not? But if it is then I'll be sure to mention it here.

FEDI-KNRU

The K.N.R.U. is hosted on Ghost and thanks to a recent upgrade, it is now federated. I'll be honest, despite technically being on Mastodon, I don't fully understand what this means, beyond it allowing you to integrate The K.N.R.U. into your federated stream of choice. Or something like that. In any case: if you like you can follow @noise@knru.polin.ski over at your Bluesky/Masto/Threads account, and then reply to it as you would reply to people there. Somehow. If you like. Or don't.

If you do, then please feel free to reply to this and explain to me how any of it actually works.

[EDIT - If you wanna follow on Bluesky, try this: @noise.knru.polin.ski.ap.brid.gy]

That's it for now. Come to Sheffield in September if you're close by!