WILD FRIDAY – Algorave and Mothwasp

Supersonic Festival 2017 plays host to many stunning interdisciplinary showcases across the weekend. In particular, our Friday night at the Wild stage sees groundbreaking new AV work from Birmingham duo Mothwasp and Algorave – a live coding collective. And on Saturday, our partners at Vivid Projects also host a coding workshop with BAFTA-winning digital artist Dan Hett.

Kicking off on the Friday night at 10pm on the Wild stage, Mothwasp creates an unsettling kind of “pitch black broken funk.”

Mothwasp Intro from Beat13 on Vimeo.

Descending from the long line of leather-and-denim clad noise-mongers that post-industrial Birmingham is so fond of producing, yet remain the Midlands’ “least tattooed rock band”. Combining the brute force of drums and guitar, experimental film soundtrack techniques and audio-responsive video experiments derived from defunct analogue projection apparatus, the duo sculpt movies for the ears and soundtracks for the eyes.

Vintage tools used to orchestrate warped futurism.

Live Sci-fi ambience meets video nasty.

Heavy as an anvil with madly repetitive bass and sounds like a tolling bell scattered around fast, incessant beats.

After Mothwasp’s visual performance, the Wilde stage turns into an Algorave, brought to you by Supersonic and Vivid Projects curator Antonio Roberts. If you haven’t heard of or been to an algorave, be sure to check it out; an algorave is a party where electronic music and visuals are generated live from algorithms. The word was coined around 2012, initially as a joke, but has since taken hold with Algoraves taking place in over 40 cities around the world.

Supersonic’s Algorave features artists Heavy Lifting and Blood Sport, presenting a collision and mutation of their current work in a textural and improvisatory reinterpretation of the ‘B2B’ DJ set.

Heavy Lifting is Lucy writing confused live code in TidalCycles and FoxDot – divinely inspired by toads & pickled eggs she bends time signatures to create not-quite-techno rhythms. Also a member of algorave band TYPE and co-founder of the creative collective SONA.

Blood Sport are an aggro-beat trio based in Sheffield; consisting of Alex Keegan (guitar & octatrack), Sam Parkin (drums) and Nick Potter (baritone & vocals). Creating a fractured dancefloor, Blood Sport’s work mixes pre-recorded and live performance using live-coding program Tidal Cycles. 

Heavy Lifting will live-code textures and rhythms using the sample-pack (to be publicly released this year), and Blood Sport will respond with music. This set was originally born out of a request from Blood Sport for Heavy Lifting to create a remix of one of their tracks, using a micro-sample pack Blood Sport had created for live-coding program TidalCycles; and after an outing at the Algomech Festival closing party, both acts have begun to work together on regular live and DJ driven performances.

Miri Kat continues the algorave: an AV Noise Artist working with Max/MSP, processing & found sound. Focuses on the creation of unique sounds and immersive multimedia, equipped with a loved of hacking, cats and mocha.

Closing the Algorave is BITLIP; a veteran livecoder and part-time Algoraver who makes downtempo techno collages out of strange samples, analogue-sounding synths, and broken breakbeats straight out of the late 90s.

Supersonic’s Algorave is hosted by Vivid Projects, a collaborative space supporting media arts practice. Based in Birmingham, they encourage innovation, risk and experimentation in artistic practice and work with artists and producers across disciplines.

Algorave is curated by hellocatfood – the alias of Antonio Roberts, a New Media artist and Curator based in Birmingham at Vivid. His artwork uses glitch art, hacking and technology-driven processes to explore issues surrounding copyright, remixing and free culture. For his live visuals he (mis)uses a range of programming languages to create glitched, broken visuals. He has provided visuals for the likes of MTV, Com Truise, Elmo Sexwhistle, Steve Davis, Henry Homesweet and My Panda Shall Fly.

BUY TICKETS FOR SUPERSONIC FRIDAY OR WEEKEND PLUS TICKETS!

A post shared by Antonio Roberts (@hellocatfood) on

If Friday night sounds like just your kind of thing, on Saturday from 12:00-17:00 Vivid Projects brings you Creative Coding for Live Visual Workshops.

BAFTA-winning digital artist Dan Hett brings his computational creativity crash-course to Supersonic! Aimed at complete beginners, this course will take attendees on a colourful and interactive hands-on journey into making noise and colour with a computer. The course will firstly look at livecoding visuals and noise in the browser using the amazing LiveCodeLab, and then heads into creating unpredictable and colourful drawing tools using Processing. No previous coding experience is necessary, but you will need to bring a sparkling can-do attitude and a willingness to experiment.

You will need:

– A laptop that can connect to the internet (Windows, OSX and Linux are all fine)

– Google Chrome https://www.google.com/chrome/

– Processing, which can be downloaded for Windows, OSX and Linux https://processing.org/

Tickets £5 for Supersonic Tickets holders / £10 for general public

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