PhoneMrBiskov

http://www.slub.org/up/LMJ-Slub-Phone_Mr_Biskov.jpg

Description (target 750 words)

Time was short. Expectations were high. Source code was lost. Slub met in The Foundry pub in East London, UK, setting their laptops next to their pints. Audio was routed from laptops to a mixer and back to the improvisers via a headphone distribution amplifier. This was to be a private improvisation in very public surroundings. With the Foundry being accustomed to unusual events, and Slub being accustomed to The Foundry, this was a relaxed occasion in familiar, comfortable surroundings.

This is how three people met to drink beer whilst writing software to make music to drink beer to. Slub improvise music and video with the symbols of computer code, composing structures which are brought to life by dynamic interpreters of computer language. They are "live coders" in the sense of "live electricity", in that they modify their music generating programs while they are running. All three have built their own live coding systems, quite diverse in their operation but united through music.

Due to the comings and goings of life, Slub had not made music for some months, and so at the second pint and the third take, things started to happen. Processes collided, packets were broadcast, patches became overloaded. Suddenly, a field of cicadas appeared, sucked into an industrial electronic food processor ready for packaging and distribution to a city of clouds. Tiny slivers of cobalt alloy scrape from the surface of disk platters whilst patterns shift through registers to form samples, beats, bars and phrases. Runtime becomes devtime, and Slub is producing a track over beer.

Dave is using nearmiss, an exceedingly minimal take on an audio programming language written in Scheme. Bolted together over a weekend in an attempt to simplify sound generation for livecoding, it is a personal effort to return to the raw materials of sound - as it contains only the minimum of wave shapes, filters and sequencing constructs required to build rhythm and sound.

Alex is using feedback.pl, a text editor written in Perl, for live coding Perl. It has two threads, one is the editor, the other executes the code being edited. The executing code can make edits to its own sourcecode in the editor, particularly useful for adding and modifying comments to let the livecoding human know what's going on.

Ade is abusing Quartz Composer, an OpenGL based compositing environment that was never intended to make sounds. By exploiting the rendering engine's execute callback mechanism, he is able to build a plug-in that allows the playback head of a sound to be scrubbed back and forth using code, gently modulated by the subtle variances in the Quartz rendering pipeline.

Bio (target 150 words)

Slub are Dave Griffiths, Alex McLean and Adrian Ward. They have been making people dance to their software since 2000 at such places as Club Transmediale, Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Sonar Festival, Ultrasound Festival and The Foundry.

Their releases have featured on Mego digital sub-label Fals.ch, 8bitrecs and Fällt DIY digital do-it-yourself sub-label Fodder.