Video exclusive - performance commentary w/ hellocatfood

Learning Tidalcycles course Live streams, discussion, etc
#1

Hi @cycle0, here's a nice exclusive for you - a chat with @hellocatfood aka Antonio about a performance we did a couple of days ago. Antonio also performs with Tidal but for this was livecoding visuals with puredata. It was a nice opportunity to chat about collaboration between a visualist and musician, and what we were getting up to and thinking about during the performance.

As usual, I've edited the subtitles to be (hopefully) accurate.. It might be worth putting them on as I get a bit quiet at times, underneath the music.

Here's the commentary:

Here's the original:

Feel free to ask us more questions below !

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Thoughts on the course
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#2

Nice stuff, thanks for sharing!

I really like how it all starts with a single note (and a cube) and then builds up layer after layer after layer...

I've seen this in other @yaxu performances and it's quite exciting to see how a basic rhythm/sound evolves into something much more complex and musically interesting.

I wonder if when doing this do you ever get stuck? As in, you start with a basic idea, start tweaking, adding layers, but eventually realise it just doesn't work? Maybe to the point where you decide to abandon that idea completely? And if so what do you do? Has it ever happened live?

When you added the "algorave generation" loop and its speed wasn't matching you tried to recover by increasing the tempo, which led to something unexpected and took the performance to a new direction. Would you maybe attempt something similar in case you realise you are stuck with the current idea? (not necessarily a tempo change, but something quite drastic to completely change the groove...)

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#3

Yes definitely, things often aren't developing and start feeling a bit stuck, several times a performance. Sometimes you get stuck in a 'groove' which feels great but it's hard to get out of it. Deleting things is usually the answer, to play / search around a bit to find something new of interest to start developing.. Changing the tempo/cps is another great way of doing that. I'll have to do some more reflection to find out what else I do!

2 Likes
#4

Really nice, thank you for this.

Sorry for a boring question but what editor are you using @yaxu? That fact that it gives you some indication of location within the patter seems useful.

#5

I think he's using this: https://github.com/yaxu/feedforward

1 Like
#6

Nice, thanks.

#7

Yes that's the one! It's very experimental, I.e. crashy

2 Likes
#8

it's amazing :wink: Has anyone tried to install it on Mac?

#9

I think so, there's a thread here Getting experimental FeedForward editor to work

1 Like
#10

Gorgeous. Great insight too. Now inspired to dive into gem for the first time since 2012.

2 Likes
#11

Love this. It really helps me to watch commentary on a live set. Thanks for sharing! Curious how @hellocatfood is using Gem. I tried to install it awhile back and I think it was deprecated?

#12

I'm running Gem on Ubuntu Linux via Purr Data https://www.purrdata.net/ Gem can still be installed in Pd Vanilla via Deken (its built in package manager). I know that there's been problems in Gem with video on OSX but, in my experience, Gem works fine on Windows and Linux.

4 Likes
#13

Yeah I have a mac. It was running on extended for awhile. I'll try on my windows machine. Thanks!

#14

Seems like it was updated last year sometime, which is great! I had a bit of a play around but figured it might have to wait until I have an actual project to do with visuals and can try gem instead of Jitter for some visuals or something.

#15

I've published a bunch of tutorials on how I use Pure Data and Gem https://www.hellocatfood.com/?s=pure+data

Hope they're useful!

3 Likes
#16

Awesome! Thanks : )