Crash Server - The Art of Live Coding Music - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)

Tom Ray: Hi, I’m Tom Ray from Lorenzo’s Music, and this is another Lorenzo’s Music podcast. And this is a show where I talk with musicians, people that create things for musicians, and also with a spin on open source and technology and things like that, plus Creative Commons, and I have a combination of a lot of that on today’s show. So why don’t you tell the people who you are and what it is you do.

Sebastian 1: All right. Who are we? We are both Sebastian’s

Sebastian A: That’s our name.

Sebastian 1: Yeah. So we play as a band called, Crash Server. And basically we use live, coding. So we’ll get more on that later, I guess. we code, make music with it, make video with it. Live video also. And we. Yeah, I don’t know, we play music with it. Yeah, let’s. I don’t know if we should get more in. More in details.

Tom Ray: introduce yourselves personally, too. So who are you and who. The other person?

Sebastian A: Yeah.

Sebastian 1: Okay, so I’ll go first. Yeah. So the first Sebastian. I’m from Strasbourg. We both are from France. Strasbourg. I work as a musician, but also I do live, vjing, so video improvisation. I’ve been involved in live coding for, like, I guess, 10 years or something like that. what else? I don’t know. It’s difficult to find. So many things to tell.

Tom Ray: But more stuff will come to you as we go on. This isn’t just like an intro and then we’re done. We’ll learn more.

Sebastian 1: Sure, sure. And, yeah, pretty involved in open source also. Yeah, for a while. Yeah, sure. All right.

Sebastian A: I’m the other Sebastian, also come from.

Tom Ray: Are you really both named Sebastian?

Sebastian 1: Yeah.

Tom Ray: Oh, nice.

Sebastian 1: Exactly.

Sebastian A: It’s easy to remember.

Tom Ray: It was on purpose.

Sebastian A: So also live in, Strasbourg in France. I’m a web developer. Make a website, some sort of thing. I’m also a, guitarist for about. I play guitar for about, 30 years. Musician, and all stuff. I also enjoy, open source and Linux, audio stuff and.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a big part for both of us. Yeah.

Tom Ray: Which is kind of how we. Or how I learned about you. And also so I’m going to get started in that. So you have a background playing guitar. you’re both developers now, as musicians. What made you suddenly get into live coding? what it is you do. And we’ll explain more what live coding is, too. God, I have so many questions to ask. How did you get into live coding?

Sebastian 1: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think. Yeah. I should start maybe on this.

Sebastian A: Yeah. Because I rely on you.

Sebastian 1: Yeah. A little bit for that. Yeah. So I always been playing like with a super collider for a long time. Like, if people don’t know, Super Collider is like the Odo engine, really used in a lot of software. I’ve been playing for it for a while before starting live coding, actually, and just basically playing with sounds and generative program process and stuff like that. Also with my link to video generation. So that goes hand in hand. And I went and I. I met like, Samaron from Sonic PI. Don’t know if you’re. Yeah, it’s Sonic PI.

Tom Ray: No, I don’t know.

Sebastian 1: Sonic PI is a quite well known live coding environment. And then I. Yeah. And I began teaching live coding to children and beginning also playing live and organizing workshops in Strasbourg.

Sebastian A: And.

Sebastian 1: Yeah.

Sebastian A: That’s my part.

Sebastian 1: That’s Yoki. You’re here.

Sebastian A: Okay. Yeah. So. Because I met him in, a workshop. Okay. He was doing a workshop about life coding. And, I go there and say, okay, what’s happening? Okay. Seems cool.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Sebastian A: Okay. And now, we are playing and.

Tom Ray: You guys just kind of got together based on that or like you just made a connection. Like you didn’t know each other before, this is what you’re saying.

Sebastian 1: We did not. We met over live coding and. Yeah. And then we had an opportunity to play a, gig and we went for it. And. Yeah, that’s the whole story. So why. We are called Crash Server. And we could go into that later maybe. Yeah.

Tom Ray: Okay. So you started teaching live coding now for me, this is what’s interesting. So while you. I learned about live coding because of a submission you did for the Ubuntu Summit Music, stream, companion stream that I ran just recently. And I had never heard of it before. Once I saw it, I’m like, of course it exists. You know, how have I not heard of this? But it was my introduction to it. What was your introduction to it? What was your introduction to? Go, oh, what’s this thing? What’s going on there? You know, like, how. What was the first thing. What was your first introduction to seeing or hearing or learning about live coding?

Sebastian 1: Really? I’m not sure the real first time I saw it, I think it was really life because live coding can be used for music and also for visuals. And I think m. My really first performance I saw, I think it was in Budapest, like in 2007, four or something like that, and someone playing Fluxus and Improvising visuals on live coding. And it seems like a really interesting way to do stuff, like, really reactive. It was the main part for me. Like, you can change thing on the fly. You can adapt quickly. I don’t know if I’m answering the question correctly or if I’m.

Tom Ray: So you saw. Basically you saw an example of it and was, in much like me going, what is that? What’s going on there?

Sebastian 1: Yeah.

Tom Ray: All right. So it was just. You happened to be in a place, saw, it was happening. Only yours was. You were saying it was working more for visuals.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, I think the first time I thought it was. Yeah. And after that, it’s like it’s a rabbit hole because you see that, you can, hey, what’s going on? And then you discover that there’s. There’s a whole scene going on and like different. Different languages, different techniques, and you can apply it to sound and visuals both at the same time. It’s a really powerful tool for improvisation. So, yeah, that got me going, yeah, all right.

Tom Ray: And then so I’m going to go Sebastian on my. Right. The other Sebastian. the. You said you had been playing guitar. Now when you saw what he was doing with live coding, did you also see it as like, oh, I could do guitar with that or no, I want to do that. Like, I guess. How much. How much instrumentation do you still do with this live coding team effort that you guys have?

Sebastian A: Yeah. First, when I start looking after life coding, I was more into electronic stuff and it was more my, electronic per. You.

Sebastian 1: Yeah. You went for bending also?

Sebastian A: Yeah, yeah, I do circuit bending, like toy bending. You know, when you. Oh, when you open up a toys, electronic toys, and you different wire and make okay, strange sound. So that’s one thing. That’s another scene. DI y scene and hacking.

Tom Ray: That I’ve never heard of either. That’s also a new one to me. No, I mean, as you explain it once again, I’m going, of course it exists. Okay.

Sebastian A: So I was looking for a, way to sample, this noise in this sound. and playing with. Okay, with code, this looks. Looks nice. And I just googled live coding and Strasbourg and I saw that was, a workshop today after. So I go there. Okay.

Sebastian 1: Lucky for me, I didn’t know the full story.

Sebastian A: The full story was, okay, you guys.

Tom Ray: Are still like, who are you again?

Sebastian 1: Yeah, what’s going right here?

Sebastian A: All right, so and for the guitar, yeah, we use it. We use. We introduce guitar. But, maybe two years ago we tried to play, with my life.

Sebastian 1: Coding with guitar at the same time.

Sebastian A: Mine sounds good.

Sebastian 1: Which is. Yeah. Something we’ll enhance probably in the future. For the moment, it’s still a question of, Doing both at the same time can be challenging. Yeah. How to. That’s. That’s another question. I don’t know. I can just talk forever if you want. On stuff.

Tom Ray: I’ll just interrupt you when I want to learn something else. So continue to talk.

Sebastian 1: Yes. Yeah. Maybe we can talk about what’s typical. Like life coding concerts. What is it?

Tom Ray: I was actually going to kind of ask that because. So the background would normally be or at least what seen or can relate, to just because the history I have seen of it is there will be people who will have. Maybe they’ll set up a sequencer or a loop or something like that, and then they’ll play with live instruments off of that. Or they’ll switch it and they have a button.

Sebastian 1: They do.

Tom Ray: Now you guys are doing that, except you’re writing it in an idea. Entirely different thing involved. And there’s way more like, you know, talk about juggling. You guys are juggling and doing math. You know, it’s. It’s basically.

Sebastian 1: Well, to be honest, the computer does the most of the nuffs. Yes.

Tom Ray: Yes. But you still have to. Yeah, it’s like tiny. Like, you know, you have to put the pieces in the little place there with. And use the keyboard. Yeah. So there is an added thing involved. It’s not just, then you let this run and play an instrument. But you can. But tell me more about it. Basically, I only have my understanding of watching the video that you sent and then also looking at videos that you’ve done since I learned about you.

Sebastian 1: So. Yeah.

Tom Ray: So tell me about the live setup.

Sebastian 1: So basically in our, let’s say, minimal configuration, we’ve got two laptops. Each one has a laptop. We connect by network together. And it’s like if we write a shared document, like a Google Doc or something with two writes at the same time. So I see what he writes is he. What I write. I can modify what he writes. Ah. Which also makes some fun situations. But yeah. And then basically every time we write this, let’s say a musical sentence, we evaluate it, we send it to the audio service, which then produces sounds. Right. so that’s typically it. We write stuff on and on from a blank page and then we arrive at music at some point.

Tom Ray: Audio service would be what most people would consider the. The daw or the. The daw that’s where your sounds are located.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, that’s Yeah, more or less. We, yeah, we, we connect. So, yeah, on the software part. So we use a software which has now been heavily modified by ourselves, but basically it’s called Troop, which was webtrup, which allows a multiplayer to function. We connect it to foxdots, which is our Python library, to generate, which is a language we use more or less the way we code. And that connects to SuperCollider, which is the audio engine which transforms the, let’s say the computer code into musical synthesizer, oscillators. So that you can. So that you hear something. Basically. Yeah, yeah. Okay. My explanation is correct.

Tom Ray: And that, and that was what, doing my research and going down the rabbit hole. That was my understanding of how it worked. But also my main thing is. And then once it’s one of those things where once you get it, it’s like, oh, of course. And you can’t unlearn it. But right now I’m going, but how does one do the other? That makes the thing happen. That does the thing. I’m connecting the dots is the part that I’m having trouble with. Like, I get the concept and what each thing does, but I’m like, but how does it know the sound? How does it. Like let’s say, for example, and I’m jumping ahead here a little bit to what I wanted to talk about. But so for the Ubuntu summit in the beginning, which this part I thought was brilliant for doing not only a live setup, but a video setup, you introduced yourself in the IDE by typing out who you were and what you were going to be doing. And that was great. And you said you were using Ubuntu, sound samples, so people might recognize that. Now that means not only is it generating it, but you were using actual samples that you were triggering and making do things. So it can create the audio, much like a MIDI or a synthesizer, right?

Sebastian 1: Yeah.

Tom Ray: It also can use samples itself and you’re able to trigger that and you’re writing that in the code, correct?

Sebastian 1: Yeah, basically. Basically we’ve got, let’s say four or five audio sources we can use, which are samples, like you said, like a pre recorded audio samples. If they’re longer, we just call them loops. But it’s basically, let’s say the same thing, just.

Sebastian A: One shot or loop samples.

Sebastian 1: Then the main, the most important, I guess is the synthesizers, which are written in supercollider code, which we can call in our software and then there we can specify like, nodes Degrees, octaves, sustains, release, whatever, and put effects on it like reverb distortion or whatever else. Then what do we have else? like the text generator. The voice generator.

Sebastian A: Yeah, we can generate Voice generator. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Tell me about that.

Tom Ray: What’s that?

Sebastian A: What’s that?

Sebastian 1: So it’s basically.

Sebastian A: It’s a text to speech library.

Tom Ray: All right.

Sebastian A: Okay.

Sebastian 1: So which is. Can be fun in the concert, like if you want to talk to the people in the crowd or something. Can be quite fun.

Tom Ray: yeah, sorry, I just got this image because my favorite thing is when bands are on stage and. And they go, could somebody bring me another beer? You know, because they can’t get off stage. So you guys could be typing in, bring me another beer.

Sebastian 1: It has been done. It has been done. Of course.

Sebastian A: Yeah.

Sebastian 1: Okay. Yeah.

Sebastian A: Ah.

Tom Ray: I’ve always just loved that when people do that. And it’s like, really just. You got like a half hour left. You can survive.

Tom Ray: All right, now. So the. When you guys are doing this type of stuff, you’re like, you clearly have to prepare if you’re going to be doing something. But, if. I mean, do you guys. How do you write songs? How do you go, okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Or do you just riff it and like, keep the ones you, like, get rid of? Like, do you have an actual process? Because you have released albums that have songs on them, so you probably reproduce them. I guess. Tell me the difference between, like, I get. When bands get together, they go, okay, we’ve recorded an album, now we have to play it live. And then you go, let’s get it right. But it’s hard for me to think of that in a. Okay, we’re programming it.

Sebastian 1: So I guess the process is a bit different.

Tom Ray: Questions? Yeah, how do you write a song? Go into that one.

Sebastian 1: Should I go right for.

Sebastian A: Yeah, when, we don’t write. See, we write, we write song. But it’s mostly, with jam a lot, we’ll jump twice or twice.

Sebastian 1: Three times a week.

Sebastian A: Twice a week. And, sometimes we have something cool and say, okay, that’s a song. Okay, so it’s improvisation and to become songs.

Sebastian 1: Yeah. And then after a while, if this part we like it, we, let’s say, store this piece of code and then we can recall it later and just continue working on it. And the code evolves until it gets to, to a point where we like it. And when we record it, let’s say for an album or for, recording Whatever. we just play this live and we try to play it the best we can and maybe we do a few takes, but there’s no, like, production really, like, classic, like, moving sound around and trying to adjust. And so it’s always live recorded.

Tom Ray: Yeah, yeah, I guess. You know, I do. As you’re explaining that, I actually kind of made a distinction, like, with what I was talking about before, where most people, like, they have a DJ or they have samples or loops, they are able to program it so that it does the exact same thing every time. But you guys are more like jazz in the sense where jazz artists too, will be like, okay, we have a thing we do. But then it’s going to be kind of like what happens, happens in between, and it’s never going to be recreated. So there is a distinction in that sense because you are doing it by hand every time.

Sebastian 1: Yes.

Sebastian A: Yeah.

Sebastian 1: Every. Yeah.

Sebastian A: Okay.

Sebastian 1: It’s going to be always different.

Sebastian A: Yeah, we use a lot of random, and stuff. So it’s never the same or we.

Sebastian 1: Play at a different speed, bpm or like, we played Friday concerts, we played a track we know quite well and played quite a lot of times, and we played it really differently. And it was. Yeah, it was like rediscovering all the time. there are some hooks you always find and you can. Yeah, but it’s. It’s different.

Sebastian A: Yeah, the code is the same.

Sebastian 1: The code is the same, but the way you.

Sebastian A: The way you play is never the same.

Sebastian 1: And because of what you have played before, it can influence what you play after because there are some variables and some things that has changed. So it’s not.

Sebastian A: It’s always chaotic. You have to play with chaos. So.

Tom Ray: Well, I mean, it’s. You know what, you can write code a million times and you can still see that it worked. But then when you. When you go back and look at it, you’re like, oh, whoops.

Sebastian 1: Of course.

Tom Ray: Of course it’s always the same. But it doesn’t mean you did it the same. It’s. Sometimes it passes through bug testing, even though it shouldn’t. which. That is kind of your thing, the glitches and the. I mean, you guys are passing the buck back and forth. You’re saying you can see each other’s screen. You’re writing in an environment where you can see each other typing. How do you pass that off? Do you guys take turns? Do you go, okay, you’re. Is it like. Is it like, tennis? You know, you volley back and forth? Or do you do stuff at the same time. Like, what’s the concept?

Sebastian 1: A bit of everything. Because, yeah, it’s like, let’s. It’s an organic process now. We. We know each other quite well. And so usually, yeah, it’s. I, I write. Let’s say I go for some drums or something. And he tries to go like a. For a baseline. And we, we share the workload, but not in an already organized fashion. It’s more like. Yeah, it’s. It’s how we feel it. Yeah, I don’t know.

Sebastian A: Yeah, sometimes we write exactly the same line. It happens too, at the same time and say, okay, no, that’s my line.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, it’s really weird. That’s really weird. Like, that’s really weird at the same second. We write exactly the same thing.

Sebastian A: What?

Sebastian 1: That’s. That’s weird. so it’s. It’s a disorganized mess, but it’s. Yeah, we know each plate.

Sebastian A: It’s more like feeding, you know. Okay, what’s.

Sebastian 1: And as I can say, see, exactly. Because of some, new modifications, I can see exactly what he’s writing when I’m writing something. So I can, like, anticipate he’s going to do this. And this is going. This count is going to arrive in like a few minutes or a few seconds. I can anticipate and try to synchronize with what he’s doing. So it’s like. Yeah, we’ve got to monitor what the other one is doing also. Yeah. Yep.

Sebastian A: Right.

Tom Ray: Yeah. So you have to pay attention and at the same time think about what you’re doing and listen to what you’re doing. Now. Now, when you do it, it’s clearly. I mean, it’s doing it to a tempo, otherwise there’d be no rhyme or reason to it. But how do you determine when you make the changes? They don’t go live the second you write them, because, one, you’re writing them. So nothing can be done. It’s not completed, and it actually could break what you’ve written if it pays attention in real time. Because as you’re writing, you’ll write a bracket or something and it’ll go, well, that’s not closed. So does it wait for a measure? Do you have a thing. Do you have to tell it how many measures to wait before it implements the change? Like, how does that come about?

Sebastian A: Yeah, you can.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, yeah. So the first thing is when we write a line, it, like you said, it does nothing until we decide it does something. So we have a combination, of Keys, which sends the line we wrote to the audio server and then it makes sounds. It waits to the next synchronization of the clock. The clock. Okay, we can say, wait until like, a future clock in. Yeah, in a time. We can decide. Okay, usually 90 is, We don’t do that. We do it like, on the moment, on the fly. But sometimes we can, like, especially if we want to prepare like a transition or something, we say, okay, in 64 bits, I want this sound to stop, or I want this to start, or I want this filter to go in effect or something like that. M. That allows to do some structuring.

Tom Ray: Oh, that’s actually kind of interesting. So you’re going along, you’re going at a good clip, and then all of a sudden you go, now I want to do a drop, you know.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Tom Ray: And the other person has no idea that you were just about to do that.

Sebastian A: Yeah.

Sebastian 1: Yes.

Sebastian A: That’s.

Sebastian 1: Okay.

Tom Ray: All right, that’s fun. Now what about different time signatures? Have you guys ever done any strange time signatures? Like, you know, 11, four or things like that? Or do you work mostly in the four. Four time signatures?

Sebastian 1: I think live. We do. Yeah, we do mostly. Not always.

Sebastian A: Not always, but M. It’s not like time signature. You. We cannot adjust the time signature, but we can play with polyrhythm. Okay. Really, really easily. We can make some polyrhythm.

Sebastian 1: yeah. Or oxygen rhythms or stuff like that. Definitely. yeah, indeed. But then live here, we mostly play for on the floor. I guess it depends. It really depends, actually. Depends on the mood, depends on the club, depends where we play, depends where it is and how we feel about it.

Tom Ray: But yeah, now actually speaking of depends on the club, I realized. So we’ve been referring to this as live coding. Now, live coding music is a concept, but if you were to go and research it, like I did on Wikipedia, the live coding example they give from. I think what they say is the person that invented it, invented it. It’s like classical piano and, you know, so there’s clearly genres. so not live coding is more like. That’s just like saying a band. You know, like live coding is really just. That’s the musicians. So what genre of live coding would you say you are? What would you guys actually call your style?

Sebastian 1: Yeah, we always. We wrote for a while. It’s post mayhem life coding, but it doesn’t mean anything. It was because of. Because of a lack of better definition, I guess. Yeah, okay. But yeah, I don’t know It’s m. It’s still a way to. Complicated question because it’s. We go in different directions.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Sebastian 1: So yeah, I don’t know, we can.

Sebastian A: Start ambience, go to the jungle, next go to the punk.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, we had like, ah, we had like a Dutch gabber phase for a while. Then we. We can go hip hop for a while. Oh, really?

Tom Ray: Okay.

Sebastian 1: Okay. So. So, so yeah, it depends on our mood. And it depends like always, like playing live is always different because. Yeah. We have to. Yeah. We can also maybe start about it. We started playing in. In between.

Tom Ray: I just had a funny thought pop in my head. No. Okay, so this is always. I never know if these jokes are going to land because you’re in a different country. So you’re aware of south park over there, right?

Sebastian A: The.

Tom Ray: The cartoon South Park.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah.

Tom Ray: Yeah. Okay. All right. Have you ever seen the episode where they play Guitar Hero and they get really into playing Guitar Hero, as if. Okay, so I was just thinking if you guys were an acoustic version, like there’s that one where he goes acoustic and he’s just clickety clacking on the guitar and he’s not actually hooked up. So you guys, it would just be. If you ever did an acoustic version, it would just be you, guys typing. I’m sorry, that was a really long description.

Sebastian A: Yeah, we plan to play on a typewriter.

Sebastian 1: Oh yeah.

Sebastian A: Maybe one day that’s

Sebastian 1: With an amplifier or something. I don’t know how, but always find a way. Yeah.

Tom Ray: and so is there a big live coding scene where you are. Are you guys the only people around that do it where you’re located?

Sebastian 1: We’re not the only ones. No. There is a small scene, let’s say locally in Strasbourg. yeah, France. Yeah, in France there is a scene like emerging at the moment, which is really interesting. And then there’s a, Germany, which is Strasbourg, is located just near the border from Germany. Okay. So there are quite some people doing live coding in here. since. For a while. Actually it’s been a big movement in Germany for a while.

Sebastian A: Yeah. Mostly UK and Germany.

Sebastian 1: Yeah.

Sebastian A: The big scene.

Sebastian 1: Yeah. In Europe at least.

Sebastian A: In Europe.

Sebastian 1: Yeah.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Sebastian 1: So. So yeah, Strasbourg had a little scene. We have some live coders.

Sebastian A: What, maybe 10.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, maybe if we’re generous. 10.

Tom Ray: 10 people that I know of. That’s. That’s what I’m saying is it’s like this is a brand new thing to me. When I posted a clip of your performance for the Ubuntu Summit Music stream. And I was just like, you know, I had never heard of this before. And, somebody responded on Mastodon. They’re like, well, there’s a huge scene of it on the Fediverse here. And I’m like, I’m not surprised. I’m just saying this is the first time I’ve heard of it.

Sebastian 1: Right.

Tom Ray: So, and the other thing too. So this is what I really liked about that, getting into that performance. So not only was I just super impressed with what you guys were doing, but the video was also just excellent. Your guys, live stream. Well, live, I guess. Do you do a lot of live streaming? Because it seemed like you had a whole setup that was prepared specifically for that, or did you just do that for the performance that you did?

Sebastian 1: So we, we did a lot. Quite a lot of streams especially. Well, we started just before the COVID So. Yeah, so Covid was our main stage for quite a while. So streaming live in 3D environments and organizing concerts in virtual places. So we did quite a lot of streaming.

Sebastian A: because we can do that, we can do that remote just. Yeah, that’s, that’s.

Sebastian 1: That’s cool because we. We just send code between each,

Tom Ray: Oh, you guys didn’t even have to be in the same room, you’re saying?

Sebastian 1: No, exactly. Yeah.

Sebastian A: Oh, yeah.

Tom Ray: You guys were one of the few musicians that could benefit from that from performing in different places.

Sebastian 1: Still some latencies issues and stuff like that, but, yeah, mostly doable. Yeah. and to answer for your question, for the setup for Ubuntu, it was mostly.

Sebastian A: It was a new.

Sebastian 1: It wasn’t. Another setup.

Sebastian A: Yeah, another setup.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, not used before, not used after. It uses some. Some tools we use for other live.

Sebastian A: Gigs, like the video. Video we have, the projected video. Yeah, yeah, Projected video was, was quite new.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, it was an Alpha 0.001, version.

Tom Ray: Okay, tell me about that. Okay, so my band does live streaming too, and we’re always trying to improve our setup. And we’re. We’re still like, we’re better at it now, but it’s one of those things where it’s like, once you get to that point, you’re like, okay, now I can see the flaws. Even though you’re like, oh, if I could only get it to do this. And then you do, and you’re like, well, that’s not good enough anymore, because I know how it’s done now. I need to do more. And with the projection you were doing, like, what are you using for that? You’re saying it’s the alpha version.

Sebastian 1: But how are you doing that projection of this project? but like I think you, you put a finger exactly. On something that has driven cross server since the beginning. That’s always evolving thing. I mean we are never static. Our setup has changed so many times and each time we have something like you said, okay, now it works. Okay, what do we do next and how do we change it completely? So that’s an never ending quest to something else. So for the visual especially we worked first with something running on Windows which was vvvv. Then we moved to open frameworks for.

Sebastian A: A while which was a C library, which is open source and

Sebastian 1: Quite more difficult to work with. Right. And now we migrated to Cable Glass.

Sebastian A: It’S a web based visual editor. Yeah.

Sebastian 1: Nodal.

Sebastian A: Nodal.

Sebastian 1: Yeah.

Sebastian A: Oh yeah.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Sebastian 1: Which works well. but we don’t always have to. We don’t, don’t always use it. Sometimes we just just show the code to the public and we don’t show visuals. Sometimes we have other tools for the visuals as well. So it always changes. Yeah.

Tom Ray: And what kind of. So you are projecting it like you, it was projecting in front of you and on you guys like as if you were standing in front of a projector and like what kind of camera projector are you using to do that? I mean I’m really getting down to the like what’s your equipment? So because my first thing is always like oh, you do that with a green screen. And it’s like. But I hate green screens. They’re never big enough. You can always see the cracks in it, you know, or the flaws in like oh, it’s only this big. And then now it’s gone sort of frame. So what, what are you using projector wise? Because I liked that.

Sebastian 1: So it depends on the, on the situation. But for this particular venue, and it was not really enough venue, it was my, my room actually.

Tom Ray: Yeah.

Sebastian 1: Yeah. So nothing special. We just used a wide angle beamer which projected behind us. Okay. And a second beamer which projected on the left. The

Tom Ray: Black and white square screen with the blips and glitches and stuff. Yeah.

Sebastian 1: But the whole setup was quite improvised. We were really short on time. So it was like okay, let’s put that here, let’s put it here. Let’s put my video projector on a coffee cup and see if it holds.

Sebastian A: We also have a, an analog camera.

Sebastian 1: Oh yeah, yeah. Which doesn’t work yeah, there was like an old TV on stage also, which was more or less there. I don’t know. Right. But yeah, it was.

Tom Ray: And you had like the coil of Christmas lights or something that was on top of the mannequin head.

Sebastian 1: Which serves, which serves a purpose actually. the lights have a meaning for us.

Sebastian A: Well, they do something, they react to the cpu. Yeah. The more your processor is burning, the more the light are glitching.

Sebastian 1: Yes.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Sebastian 1: And each time he evaluates code, or he evaluates code, it sends a lead string to the along the LEDs, let’s say, so you can see which one is evaluating code at each time. You know, I don’t know.

Tom Ray: I love that even while you’re making music, you still have to do the damn code evaluation.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, we used to it now.

Tom Ray: Right. And then when you’re done, do you guys have a stand up meeting and you know, and go over, you know, the. Do a retrospective and I’m trying to think of Scrum Topics right now, so. Sorry, never mind.

Sebastian 1: usually we do a sort of after. Much after. How do you say? It doesn’t have to match like after a concert. Yeah, yeah, we do sometimes.

Sebastian A: Like.

Sebastian 1: Hey, you remember you say you wrote that’s. And that’s.

Sebastian A: Yeah, yeah.

Tom Ray: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re gonna have to write you up for that. That wasn’t a pre approved code that you wrote that you wrote. and also so, with the projectors and all that now with the videos you make, I really do love the aesthetic that you have. You do go with, ah, as you were saying, like the TV screen. I’m actually redesigning our site that’s using the same sort of, aesthetic, which is like the cathode ray sort of tube screen, the you know, VHS sort of thing. And you do a lot of that in your videos and with the code and all that. Basically what I’m getting at is how do you make your videos? Because they look fantastic.

Sebastian 1: So many techniques. Okay. All right. I don’t know. There is There was so many things. Yeah, so much stuff. So basically, I don’t know if I can say something with basically, but, we use some. Sometimes we use like real, analog TV or stuff like that. Like VHS for example. So we really used it. So it’s not faked or something like that. for the rest, I don’t know, it’s lots of how do we do it.

Tom Ray: But you’re saying that you do actually film some stuff with a VHS camera and then Use it and then play it in a television through a VHS player and then record that.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, stuff like that. Yeah. All right.

Tom Ray: So there’s no, like, trick or, like, effect or special filter that you have on some sort of video editor? You’re actually doing the effect that people are trying to do?

Sebastian 1: Yeah, we have some filter, in some videos we use the classic, how do you say, like, montage software.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Sebastian 1: Yeah. And with some filters might happen also. Yeah.

Tom Ray: All right, all right, shoot.

Sebastian 1: All right.

Tom Ray: I was gonna go like, what video editor of choice do you use and everything? But it’s like. No, it sounds like you’re, you’re like a legit creating it from the ground.

Sebastian 1: No, we use quite a lot of Cadoor in life.

Sebastian A: We use Cadoon live.

Sebastian 1: Yeah.

Tom Ray: Oh, you do? Oh, I’m actually a fan of that too. It’s like the one that’s stuck around there have been. It’s the one thing. I actually just had a conversation recently with, Eric from the Ubuntu Studio project about that because I was talking about the history of, the video editors, and I’ve tried so many, and the only one that’s become the most stable and actually become the most Robust has been KDENLive. Exactly.

Sebastian 1: Yeah.

Tom Ray: Yeah. I tried so many other ones and just none of them did anything or they would just crash repeatedly.

Sebastian 1: So. No, it works, it’s stable. You did a lot of production last time, so. Yeah, with kda. Good.

Tom Ray: You’re the only other people I’ve run into that use it.

Sebastian 1: Well, we use also a lot of FFmpeg, basically, which you can write in.

Tom Ray: The terminal and make that do stuff. I don’t know enough about that stuff to do it. Like, I can use it if I absolutely need to, to like, encode something or re render something. But if I have another option, I’m going to use handbrake, you know?

Sebastian 1: Yeah, yeah. We use it sometimes to generate videos or stuff like that. Like, take random images, scramble them, put some glitches, put everything together. That way we can do it. FFmpeg, for example.

Tom Ray: Yeah. Like, you have that one video, I can’t remember the name of it off the top of my head right now, but there’s. It’s got faces that kind of swap out in a digital background. I want to say it’s the second video on site. possibly for the music videos. I don’t know.

Sebastian 1: I, I. Oh, yeah, okay. I think, It’s a really old one. Yeah, it’s a really old one, I.

Tom Ray: Think was it really old.

Sebastian 1: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something about digital identities, like a stolen identity. Right.

Tom Ray: In green background.

Sebastian 1: Yeah. So how was that made? I think that was quite a long way. You asking me? That was made, I think, generating, faces with AI Like a long time ago.

Tom Ray: Okay. That’s what makes me ask. Because the way they swapped out was so slick. And I was like, how are you doing that? Because I was watching it, and I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on here.

Sebastian 1: And you might have been that with a.

Tom Ray: With a VHS camera.

Sebastian 1: It might have been with FFmpeg and the generated phases or something like that, I guess. Okay. All right.

Tom Ray: Yeah, I do need to mess around with FFMPEG more. I just. It’s one of those things where it’s like, do I want to spend my time doing that or just make something the way I know how to make it? But then I see videos like yours, and I’m like, oh, oh, that’s what I could be doing. You know, back to that whole thing, like, sure, I’m editing videos, but I look at yours, and it’s like, that’s better.

Sebastian 1: We. We still don’t know exactly how it works. You know, it’s always quite. Uh-huh.

Tom Ray: Well, I mean, your background is throwing stuff, trying to break stuff, you know, I mean, that’s. That’s your mo. That’s your. That’s.

Sebastian 1: I. Like, that’s quite true. Yeah.

Tom Ray: Yeah. So now with, With making the music and all this kind of stuff, I know you said you were able to do it over Covid from, different locations, but what is your studio setup when you do get together? Like, is it. Is it really. You can just do it anywhere? Do you have a specific spot that you do it in?

Sebastian 1: Yeah, we mostly. We play at his place. Yeah, he’s got, like, a full setup in place. So we just have. Can plug and play and it works directly. which was not always the case for a long while because it’s quite technical to put in place. We had. Every time we wanted to play it, we had to play to set it up for an hour or something. Was not. Not so practical. Now we have a full setup. We can just plug and play. So basically, it’s like a sound card, speakers, we use external pedal effects, like a guitar effects or stuff like that. Okay. Really? Yeah. And. Yeah, that’s it, basically. Yeah.

Tom Ray: So you’re running those, and now I want to know how you’re getting them. Okay. So you’re running through your live coding, which goes into the server. How are you using pedal effects? How’s that happening? Where is that being put in the.

Sebastian A: adjust an fx. you can say, okay, go through the pedals and, go this line. You can, output to a different output of.

Tom Ray: And then does it loop back in? Or that’s just what goes into the speaker. Okay.

Sebastian 1: All right.

Tom Ray: That’s what I was confused about. I was only seeing it as one link. Like, okay, send it here, but then also send it here, and that’s what comes out the speaker. But you’re saying it can. All right, you guys are going to make my head explode.

Sebastian A: Now.

Tom Ray: We have.

Sebastian A: No, no, we have, four outputs. Yeah. So we have a main output which is stereo, and, another not put. Which is also stereo for the fx. So we have a mixer, a real mixer, like physical. Physical mixer. So we can adjust, the amount of effects we put on M. When.

Tom Ray: You play live shows, do the sound people even know what to do when you’re getting set up? Like, I know they’ll sit there and you have to listen to the drummer go boom, boom, boom, while they said all that. Like, what do they do when you guys hook up? Do you just send them a mix and they’re like, okay, sounds good. Like you control everything. Do they do anything?

Sebastian 1: Usually we control most, I think. Yeah. We do some, some checks and they can adjust a little bit. the main parts we have to check always is like the main sound without the effects, and then isolated the effects to see how they mix together correctly. So the, the relative amount of sound on each channel. for the rest, yes, we do. We do some. We have to take care about, filtering the sound in life. So we rely more on the equalization on our side than technical guys working there.

Tom Ray: It makes sense. Yeah.

Sebastian 1: We have to. To listen to ourselves, more or less. Yeah.

Tom Ray: It’s just. It’s so funny. I mean, I. I apologize to anybody, like any other live coders that are listening to this episode at my ignorance, just because this is all very new to me. So if I’m asking stupid questions.

Sebastian 1: No, they’re not. They’re not.

Sebastian A: Absolutely not so stupid.

Tom Ray: Good, good. and then, so, coming up, what sort of plans do you guys have? Do you have new, releases coming out? Are you just constantly releasing things like, what is your, what is your process as far as putting out new material and promoting yourself? Great response.

Sebastian 1: Did you talk about a plan or something?

Tom Ray: Exactly.

Sebastian 1: So, yeah, we released, some albums. The first one, then the second one was more, or Less a concepts album, which made it like really high BPM. So starting at, 1024 BPMs and then finish at 8,000, 8,000 here, which was the limit a bit. the third one was, like old tracks we didn’t release. And I think now the next step is because our setup has changed so much and we have changed so much. I think the next step is really making a new album, which is our new version of ourselves, let’s say. So we started working on some stuff for the moment, and no exact plans on release, the date or exact content, but it’s going to be quite different.

Sebastian A: Maybe in two weeks, maybe in two years.

Tom Ray: We’ve all been there. Yeah, yeah. What about, like, album artwork and stuff? Do you guys also do that yourself? Do you have artists, that you work with?

Sebastian 1: So we’ve done everything ourselves for the moment, I think. Yeah. yeah, we, we could work with other people. I don’t know if it’s. Yeah, we open to it. We open to it, that’s for sure.

Tom Ray: No, I’m open to it too. And I always end up doing it myself because it’s like, oh, that’s right. We need an album cover. I don’t know, maybe I can find some photos or something. Maybe I can take a photo of something. Maybe I’ll draw something. I don’t know.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Sebastian A: Yeah.

Tom Ray: Okay.

Sebastian 1: All right.

Tom Ray: So. So you’re thinking you have a new album coming out sometime soon? Yeah, yeah, it’s in the works. All right. And what about, live streaming sessions? How often do you guys still do those?

Sebastian 1: The streaming on the Internet? Not so much at the moment. We play quite a lot live.

Sebastian A: Yeah.

Tom Ray: You guys were actually pretty busy leading up to when I was trying to get the video.

Sebastian 1: Yeah, exactly.

Tom Ray: Which I still really appreciate you taking the time to do it. It was so great that you did it.

Sebastian 1: Our pleasure. But yeah, it was a bit of a full week. We had a few gigs. One in the middle of France, which was quite a long travel to go to because it’s a region in France which is not so well connected to the rest of the whole country. So it’s really more countryside. Ish. So, yeah, quite some travels and quite some.

Sebastian A: And live streaming we do every two, two times a year. There’s, a. There’s a big community of live coding. non stop, non stop streaming during two, two or three days.

Sebastian 1: Yeah.

Tom Ray: Oh, so like another sort of live streaming event. Where, where does that take place?

Sebastian A: I know, yeah, it’s top lab. It’s a Top Lab community, which is a big community of live coding.

Tom Ray: Is it on, like, YouTube or like.

Sebastian A: yeah, it’s mostly on your YouTube.

Tom Ray: Okay. Yeah.

Sebastian A: and, on every source. This.

Sebastian 1: Every solstice here.

Sebastian A: Yeah, every sources.

Tom Ray: That would be the. Okay, that makes sense then. All right.

Sebastian A: It’s, really interesting to see this because, there’s every approach of live coding. Yeah. Wow.

Sebastian 1: Yeah. Because life coding is not a unified thing. And usually what happens after a while is each live coding starts to make its own software or at least modify some software. So it’s really interesting because there are so many branches of life coding ways to do it. Some are doing, like, slow coding and just modifying values. Some are starting from scratch, some are using compositions, some are using, I don’t know, like, instruments. Yeah, there’s really a lot of approaches.

Sebastian A: Some are doing also visual live coding because, this exists too.

Tom Ray: Yeah, like you said in the beginning, like, you were seeing somebody doing the visual live coding, but yeah, the mixture of music and visual. Yeah. Damn, I gotta look up more live coding stuff. I mean, I’m just fascinated by the whole thing. And it just. Every time you guys mention something, I just start thinking about, like, oh, that would be like. And then I’m like, okay, pay attention.

Sebastian 1: I wouldn’t be surprised if for next solstice, I see your name pop up and you do a live cake, you know.

Sebastian A: Maybe.

Tom Ray: Who knows? But I do want to thank you so much for talking with me today. Also, thank you so much for being part of the Ubuntu Summit cc, music event that we did. And, just for reaching out in general. Like, I’m really glad that I. That I got to meet you guys and learn about you and connect with you guys.

Sebastian 1: It’s cool. It was interesting questions too. So, yeah, lovely.