Last Saturday saw me play a live and improvised 20 minute set at the quirky experimental music fest known as Placard – the quietest 12 hours you could ever spend at a festival.

Think cushions on the floor and the hushness of a temple; great cables dangling from the ceiling to jack into; the room awash with headphones bobbing slowly to the beat of a silent musician.

I debuted the Cellular Automata project that has been bubbling under ever since I assumed this Curious handle, which i’ve been slowly working out  in between other musical experiments over the last couple of years.

I first discovered CA on the Nintendo DS, via the homebrew software Glitch, which uses Conway’s Game of Life to generate randomised sequences of sound. It was about the same time that I read Greg Egan’s Permutation City, a sci-fi novel that uses the mythical Eden State in Conway’s Game of Life to create an infinite, self sustaining virtual universe. Thus, I was inspired.

Glitch was ported to the Mac as a MIDI sequencer a couple of years ago, which I have tethered to Ableton Live after a brief experiment with Plogue’s Bidule. Although far less stable on my old Powerbook than the simpler DS iteration, it’s potential was apparent.

With two weeks notice, I had little time to stabilise the tech on my ageing laptop and build a fresh palette of sounds. Thankfully it all came together in time for the gig, and although I would have preferred a sound bank twice the size, it was ample enough to perform with.

A work long in progress, seeing some final progress.

I’m pretty happy with the results and learned a lot in the 20 minutes I had to play with – just need to finish building the sound bank, set Ableton up to have a more diverse suite of effects and prepare TouchOSC for some MIDI controlling of Live (on a diminutive phone screen). Then, i’ll really be ready.

Placard had a live video stream of the event, which was handily captured by my friend VDU and is posted below for all to hear. I’d not bother actually watching it (just listen), unless seeing a bearded man stare at a laptop for 20 minutes is your kinda thing.

For future gigs I hope to replace the beard/laptop combo with live visuals, either generative based or triggered by the very same MIDI data that is randomly spawning the music. How? I’m not sure yet…

Many thanks to Placard for the invite!

Curious Machine live @ Placard Sheffield from Visual Display Unit on Vimeo.