CHAPTER 14
"Algorave?"
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Skewed male, white and Asian at first, the group diversified over the months: On my first night I counted 28 people, of whom six were women and two were Black, with a couple of experienced retired coders present, too. By the time I moved to the bigger San Francisco group, the Oakland group had grown at least fifty percent and the proportions of women and people of color had roughly doubled.
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my poet daughter, Lotte: Her and others' work is at Red Herring Press.
Wheeling around Toplap: There was a nice symmetry to this new electronic art form being based in Sheffield, one of the most notable centers of the UK synth-pop, still taken to define the sonic landscape of the early 1980s through groups like Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League, ABC and Heaven 17.
live coding proved to be cultish and yet impressively global: On a trip to Mexico City I found a scene there, too, and even interviewed Malitzin Cortez, who performs under the monicker CNDSD and is very worth checking out on YouTube.
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the spooky-sounding theremin: whose sound is best known from The Beach Boys' classic "Good Vibrations" or Portishead's "Mysterons." Film buffs will also know it from the soundtrack of the 1950s sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, which made Neil Armstrong's choice to take a personally-recorded cassette of theremin music by Dr. Samuel Hoffman to the moon with him in 1969 all the more amusing.
artists like Delia Derbyshire (arranger of the groundbreaking theme from Doctor Who): As per computer programming in general, the high proportion of female computer music pioneers faded as the music grew commercial, but by the 2020s was in the process of being reclaimed. A secret history recently excavated in books like David Stubbs' excellent Mars by 1980 and on a monthly basis in Electronic Sound magazine.
the Dutchman Tom Dissevelt: Who I first heard about from the English guitarist Jeff Beck, when he recalled his friend and then (Yardbirds) bandmate Jimmy Page, later of Led Zeppelin, rushing a Dissevelt single to his flat in a fit of excitement in the early 1960s, when the two guitarists were both unknown. David Bowie later cited Dissevelt and Dick Raaijmakers' 1959 LP The Fascinating World of Electronic Music as one of his 25 all-time favorite albums, in Vanity Fair.
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The first widely-used digital synthesizer, the Yamaha DX7, appeared in 1983: The DX7 was based on a patent for Frequency Modulation (or FM) synthesis owned by Stanford University since the 1960s and said to have been among their most lucrative in the years following the DX7.
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almost everyone used the same sounds, and records made in 1984 can be easy for a trained ear to spot: An accessible example is the percussive bassline from the Norwegian trio A-ha's huge global hit single Take on Me, which would have been hard to produce by analog means (as with almost everything on that tune, save the sweet melody line, which is analog). A-ha fans craving more detail will find it in Sound on Sound magazine, March 2011, "Classic Tracks: A-ha 'Take on Me." The song has a surprisingly dramatic story.
it was excessively hard to program with its small digital display: The only person I know of who succeeded in finding a use for their own programmed DX7 patches is Brian Eno. Like almost everyone in England at that time I played in a band and owned a DX7 relatively early, spent weeks working out how to program it, came up with a similar roster of bubbly, farty, dribbly sounds to the ones Eno found. The difference is that where I said "Can't see much use for these," he used them to make one of his best-loved albums, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, as a soundtrack for Al Reinert's stirring documentary For All Mankind.
"you watch the record spin and it's like you're sitting around a campfire—it's hypnotic": Jack White quoted in Billboard, March 6, 2015.
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Lanier sees the stripping of nuance we first felt in music as a feature of most classical computing: Some of the people who understand this best are within Silicon Valley. In his 2016 book The Revenge of Analog, author David Sax speaks to an executive at the software giant Adobe, who introduced a tool called the Adobe Kickbox, a cardboard box containing coffee, chocolate, pens, pencils and a notebook—an "intentionally a very hands-on, tactile, nondigital thing." The Kickbox's purpose is to stop coders being distracted by the peculiar demands of the machine during the gestation of an idea; to delay their urge to jump into code and start building, at which point an idea becomes fixed and they become attached to it, narrowing their view.
the limitations and circumscriptions we need to be alert to yet seldom are: In her digitally-themed show at the Guggenheim in New York, in the fall of 2022, the artist Sarah Sze had a river of images flowing up the spiraling inner walkway toward the top of the building. In the notes she wrote that after reaching the top, "All of the images in the river crash and die, becoming a kind of digital dust. I wanted to remind you that the digital is actually physical. I think the most powerful effect of the digital is to invoke longing. You always are left with a sense of wanting more." More on her take here.
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a new kind of music that is hard to imagine being made any other way: I later learned this was Graham Dunning, incidentally the only live coder to leave the code screen blank that night.
his interest arose from exposure to the German kosmische musik fountainheads Tangerine Dream: As also prominently featured in the hit Netflix series Stranger Things. For anyone interested, a good place to start with Tangerine Dream is the compilation album of their works with Virgin Records from the mid-1970s, The Virgin Years.