A period of about five weeks passed between blog entries. What was I doing? Sitting right here at the laptop, arranging songs for a space-themed party. For five weeks. Obviously (he said, noting to himself that one of his supervisors reads this blog now and then) not all the time. Obviously, didn't neglect university work... entirely.

(Since Battlestar Galactica's come up recently, here's a Galactica-themed track that resulted...)

My housemate sent me a link to this song by Suburban Kids with Biblical Names -

Tonight I'm gonna stay in all by myself / I've found a reason not to go out tonight / I'm making out tonight with my computer / and there's really so many interesting effects / I wanna try them all on you / the neighbours can't complain coz I've got my headphones on...

That last line is spot on. I'd get some decent German monitor speakers, but I'd never dare use them. Someone might hear. Now, if I had a house in the country, maybe things would be different...

I was prompted to write after getting an e-mail from some list or other I signed up for: 4002 new tracks. Wow. There are a lot of busy little boys out there. Well, mostly boys - I put a post up on the Ableton forum (Ableton being the program that's largely responsible for my recent incarceration) with a poll question: are you male or female? Thus far, with admittedly not a huge sample, its 91% to 8%. My two pet theories on why: computer music, like gaming, produces dopamine, and does it more in males than females. Or perhaps all the little flashy buttons remind the inner seven year old of the inside of the Millennium Falcon.

Ableton are going to be working with another company, cycle74, who produce modular software for controlling and processing anything, though audio and video particularly. I'm hoping - along with a few others in the self-loathing 30-something laptop geek junkie club - that this will include a full scripting language. This would raise the real possibility of the following:

• A vast underground club - actually underground, by about a mile
• The club broken into cuboid units
• The units each with different music in
• The whole building populated with an array of human beings, given places to recuperate at convenient points within the space, but otherwise compelled to wander, ingest chemicals and react to the stimuli.
• The music to be created through a genetic algorithm acting on various defined components of the sound and temporal structure, crossing with other cuboids and using the kinetic energy of the humans as its environment.

Less fancifully, I am actually curious about how hard it would be to create an entirely algorithmic set. Or more interestingly, one that had some way of reacting to its club environment, and could learn how to wind people up into a crazed techno yelping effectively.

Which is a) all good stuff to spend my time on, given - as the last post mentions - that I have as much autonomy as I do and b) da footcha, which is going to be, as has been noted by one or two people, dee-gee-taaall. Oh yes indeedy, there shall be a small sub-section of lab-humans locked in a dry-ice-lubricated black grimy grid of techno-evolution, unable to escape, breeding for generations until eventually no-one remembers anything else but the constant moment-to-moment of gurning burn out, rest, movement and stimulus-response, the music genes co-evolving with the human DNA in as yet impossible to foresee feedback loops. Until eventually the machines discover the perfect set. And then they'll go, 'oo look'.

Reminds me of something I wrote in a burst of clarity when I first started getting addicted to this computer music malarkey back in, er, 2001 I think. Not saying its me, but you can extrapolate from a current trajectory. Always a fun thing to do:

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So I’m living in this place down by the pub we went to the other week, you know… you know where I live, don’t you? Yeah, course ya do. Anyway, what the fuck was I talking about? Er… so, there’s this guy just moved in to the room above me, right? And, y’know, the fucking house is a cashcow for some twat, lives in London, couldn’t give a shit about small details like walls. Thin plaster, is what I’m saying, in my roundabout way. Fuck.

And this guy is in there, night and day, into his computer. What he says he’s doing is making music. Sure, you do hear the odd burst of… um, noise, but most of the time he’s just plonked in front of the monitor, in a dark room, staring at this series of bizarre swirling patterns. Sealed in his headphones, the music he’s listening to is pumping those patterns with rhythms… and… yeah. He reckon’s he ‘studying’ the music. Taking note of its finer points of construction. Always makes a loud point of the fact that computer music is really elaborate, a true musical form, and unique, with its own idiosyncratic rules of cadence and melody, and not, in any way, a deeply pitiful attempt to desperately maintain some link to youth, relevance, something, some line in the sand between him and a Mondeo.

And, Christ, the saddest thing is the musical result. If you can picture the meeting at Bon Tempi where they decide which funky ditties to include with their new synth… fuck, this guy’s would wouldn’t get past go. And the worst thing is, judging by what he plays me that he’s aiming for, everyone else making this music is exactly the same. But still they potter through from day to day, nervously darting there feral eyes about, but domesticated between the walls of their little high-tech nests, headphones on, nibbling at a big spliff like a techno-gerbil sucking from its little hanging bottle.

And that drug, man, or ‘a few mushies’, I swear, man, that’s the bridge between the real and the virtual for this guy. If he’s got those phones on and he’s smoking, that man has gone right through the wardrobe and into Narnia, he’s down that rabbit hole and playing croquet already. When he must, and only when he must, he comes out to eat and piss. If he could I reckon he’d have a catheter. He gives his body its minimum requirements and he’s back in there, wafting his incense and worshipping at the lightly humming altar of ever changing colours.

Seen the cables in the guts of these machines? Some devices are slaves, some are masters, and the relationship can change on a whim. Its permanent revolution, man. And I know for a fact that sometimes, when this guy is plugged in, the switcher on the back of his head is set to Slave, coz he’s gone, he’s given himself up, he’s part of something, I’m telling you.

The people who make them colourful patterns, they reckon its an art-form too. There’s a lot of this forcibly poncing about with chest and chin stuck out, goin’ ‘it’s an aaartform y’know’. So, there they all are, a global community, a twenty first century planetary innerconnection of utter fucking losers, all scrabbling about in the corner of their drugged-up little boxes for the trap door out into somewhere, anywhere, just not here… They see themselves as radical, man, but they are the fucking archetypal drowsy, bovine consumer. They’re trying to make political music on machines with parts made in Exporting Processing Zones in South East Asia. Fuck, these machines can’t function without Coltan, and folks in the Congo are killing each other to see who’ll get to sell it to European buying consortiums to feed the computers so that some dick can write a song about how, like, really bad there being poor people in the world is.

He sits there saying that, and he’s the lynch-pin, no different to the Mondeo man he’s so scared of. Worse, coz he incapable of being honest with himself. But none of that matters now coz he’s got his techno-God and he’s never looking back. Just keep the Coltan flowing and the oil too to keep the power stations doing what they do and he’ll not lift his head from the trough. Hate to mix metaphors, but that music is like the pied piper, I’m telling you. Picture em all, thousands of 'em in a great virtual church somewhere, bouncing their index fingers at the music, pulling that ‘I’ve just eaten a really nasty lemon, but actually its really nice’ face, all following.

The thing is, late at night, he’s in there and he sometimes rocks about to the music on his chair, and the chair squeaks, man. He’s having his own private rave in his head, and all I can hear is ‘eek eek eek eek.’ And I get a nasty picture in my head. I try and shake it but every time it's there. I see him humping away at that computer – the computer’s on top, mind, he’s still sat in his chair – in some fucked up tangle of flesh and wires and electrons and master-slave connections and male female in outs. I get to thinkin’, is it consensual? Is it rape? Who’s raping who?