A few days ago I made a banner;
To explain for international readers ; “bouwt” means “builds”, though in Dutch, at the end of a sentence it could also be read as a order; “build!”. I made this impulsively in the then freshly squatted Asta (a former cinema, now a unused dance club here in The Hague, lately squatted,in protest, by a group of local cultural organisations). I’d like to talk for a moment about the process of making it.
Two days ago I was taking a mid-night walk with my friend Dusk. In returning home we walked along a canal as it had interesting public art that he hadn’t seen yet and a petting zoo (closed for the winter still,it turned out. This also happened to be one of the poorer neighbourhoods around here.
> Sweet, you’re trying it with LuaJIT! In the README where I say “try
> LuaJIT for extra speed” I really mean it. If you TRY it, I’m very
> interested in how it works out.
Ok, so this is “bleeding edge” in the sense that actual cutting will
be done. Ok, got that. And I don’t know Lua. And I only understand the
bits of C++ that work like ChucK. Great, business as usual, then. I’ll
try this normally first and if that doesn’t work we’ll add fire to the
situation and see whether that improves anything.
Walked home this morning, close to dawn.
That’s not so unusual for me, but I kept wondering why the mixture of party-goers on their way home and especially the early religious people were giving me so wide a bow.
Last night I once again joined Sami (Bangkok Impact) in his liveset at a Electro-nation event in the new room at the Melkweg (one of the more prominent performance spaces here) and learned some lessons. See inside for details on improvised dance music, experimental turntablism and breakneck development.
Bad deadline, lots of code to write… Then the screen of my music laptop went black.
This makes for a nice afternoon today.
New Creme office is great and far closer to The Mess, I proposed it be named “Trainspotter’s Heaven”. Vrijhaven PA sounds pritty good now and can certainly go loud enough; the main limiting factor was turntable feedback. Just in time for Tapes/Jahtari on Saturday which I’ll have to miss due to supporting master Sami that night in Amsterdam. More updates on the plans for Saturday soon, assuming we don’t run into another case of documentational slackage….
Yesterday there was a demonstration against the proposed anti-squatting law here. To summarise for the non-Dutch; currently squatting is legal here, provided the building has been unused for over a year. This is meant to address housing shortages and prevent artificial price inflation. Aside from people living in squats this has led to a lively culture where larger squats fill roles like performance space, exhibition space, vegan restaurant, artist work-space, “give away shops” etc. Much of The Hague’s alternative culture takes place in these places. The new law would change this, so that led to protests.
Catching up on undocumented stuff done in the “hackpact” month part1; a old draft.
Today I got my boards from Nescivi, these are little development boards that can turn the signal from sensors into a signal send to a computer using the HID standard, they can also do some processing on these signals, control leds/motors and probably more things as well. This needs development in C. I liked writing C in the past because I know nothing about it aside from how it looks like ChucK, so that added excitement. That excitement may or may not scale towards larger projects…. With these I plan to build my own turntable controller and I’d like to track my progress here.
The toy turntables I use now (from the PS1 version of Beatmania) only detect one of three states (standing still, forwards & backwards) and while that can still be loads of fun I think more fun could be had with more nuanced control. I’d also like to add a crossfader; I’m not sure I’m all that I’d like to get closer to literal turntablism I would like to borrow more of the gestural vocabulary. I first got inspired to look in that direction by some talks at the STEIM Jamboree then I joined a forum on “alternative turntablism” that made me believe this is a viable direction for me to take. I think that there is already a big overlap between what I with my live setup and “beat juggling” so why not explore that more? Another big source of inspiration was getting to try out a proper Beatmania arcade machine in Melbourne. This made it clear that a more solid controler feels much better and that lights under buttons do add something; they make me happy like a little boy and if those machines use them to attract players I might steal that idea to create a more attractive performance setup. Commercial turntable controlers have some annoying issues; often they use a custom protocol and when they don’t they tend to have buttons that are too small and too dencely placed for my style of performance. I need something more arcade like, something toy-like in the sense of kids playing but also in the sense of being able to survive a kid of 2 meters.
So; the first part is in. TODO; figure out the SDK, code for the pic, get parts, solder, build, practice. I probably need a new soldering iron as well. This might take a while…
Off to The Villa for a BBQ and night of music organised by friends from Vrijhaven now. Must remember not to get lost/wasted/both as tomorrow #hackpact starts. I’m planning to spend my hour tomorrow exploring the technique of rappidly resetting the ChucK RNG, turning normally noisy sound sources into tonal ones. This leads to a complete inability to also use randomness elsewhere because all ChucK randomness depends on a single RNG so that places higher demands on our ability to write functions that create a varied musical output or bordom will ensue.
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