first up, what is emom? As far as I’m aware, the concept was first created by Martin Christie around 2017.
Electronic Music Open Mic. It does what it says on the tin, basically. Open mics have been a long standing mainstay of smaller venues such as pubs, giving an opportunity for anyone to get up and perform their craft. However, as Martin observed, they are dominated by singer/songwriter guitarists (I wouldn’t actually know, not having been to one in decades) so the emom gives an opportunity to quirky electronically enabled performers to shine. And shine they do. Every event I attend has really talented acts I’ve not seen before.
the golden age of hardware
years ago, circa early 2000’s, hardware was rare, and very few live acts (excepting established ones like eg. Orbital, A Guy Called Gerald) were using drum machines, sequencers, synths and the like. Bizarrely, as they were not great sound quality at the time, computers were widely perceived as the do-all and be-all if you wanted to write or perform electronic music.
This was highly frustrating for the few die-hards such as yours truly who loved knobs and buttons, flashing lights and all manner of cables.
Audiences often mistook you for a ‘DJ’. Or it was assumed you were just miming to a backing track. Any therapists specialising in millennial audio trauma please get in touch…
Fast-forward to the new era, of limitless grooveboxes, synths, modular gear, and the like. We now live in a golden age of electronic hardware!
An aside: I have chosen this as a good time to turn my back on gearlust and to produce and perform entirely in-the-box on my laptop, I am nothing if not a contrarian! 🤦
enter EMOM
So now, there is an army of nerds and enthusiasts streaming into your local emom event. And it’s amazing.
The audience, lot’s of whom are also the performers, are always very welcoming and positive. It’s the healthiest and most enjoyable scene I’ve ever come across.
Anyone can play, and everyone is supported.
And there is soo much talent. And variety too, every performer brings a unique approach, which keeps things really fresh.
From ambient beauty to raw noise, bedroom junglists to polished EDM, electropop to electroclash, bleepy modular to arcane tape manipulation. It’s all there, and probably lot’s more to discover.
The scene is healthy too, with regular events in Peckham, Camden, Croydon, Brighton, Chelmsford, Whitstable, in the South East alone.
Which brings me to…
what’s with the live-coding?
By contrast, the live-coding scene is languishing in obscurity. I have no insight as to how this can be. I first got into live coding because it felt like a new exciting frontier. The community seemed welcoming and positive, which was encouraging. The scene seemed burgeoning and going somewhere. School teachers in Harrogate were talking about algoraves (those notable barometers of public culture!) So I had visions of having a healthy flow of performances and workshops and generally having a lot of fun.
Except. There are no events. The toplap forum is almost completely dead. Not encouraging signs.
I joined the new toplap mastodon instance this year, which shows signs of being promising. Well done to the peeps who set it up.
But still, no gigs. Well, there is fakedac~ who do occasional events. Iklectik used to do coding events before they were sadly shut down :(
So another thing that is awesome about emom is that it fills this hole in my life.
Any ideas and suggestions about how to get live-coding - especially in London - kick started again will of course be gratefully received.
Alex Maclean and Lucy Cheeseman (Yaxu and Heavy Lifting) and others still maintain a healthy vibe in Sheffield, where I was first introduced to the scene. And they’ve been doing a radio show called Pattern Club which has a RSS feed now. So there are signs of life. And various events and even conferences pop up internationally. Midlands based(?) Hellocatfood always seems very busy and does both visuals and audio.
open call
If I had to give any suggestions myself on how to remedy this, I would notice two things:
- The scene can be a bit academic/obscure for the sake of it
- The ecosystem is quite limited and sometimes has a bit of a gatekeeper-y whiff
On the first point, this is completely unnecessary and just puts people off. It is really possible to say quite clever things in an open and accessible way. Live-coding can be really fun, let’s focus on that part.
The second point is probably a reflection of my own observer bias, and your mileage may very a lot. The popular tools available are very capable and you can do really cool things with them. There are newcomers like Glicol too. And older paradigms like Pure Data are still used.
The scene in the UK is also quite small, which puts a lot on the shoulders of a few dedicated individuals, who have their time commitments like everyone else.
So, to sum up with the following suggestions:
- academic language and obscurantism is unhealthy for the scene
- monocultures are unhealthy too, lets avoid that happening
- Openness is very healthy, publish as much as you can, whatever discussions/planning about the scene you may be having
Let’s make live-coding more open to everyone and fun!
Okay, I admit that doesn’t really drill down on what concrete actions we can take. And I generally avoid social media which doesn’t help. And the pandemic put a huge dent in the live-coding scene which it has barely recovered from.
Maybe in London live-coding will always be subsumed within the wider emom scene, breaking out for the occasional algorave. And that’s ok.
One obvious solution would be to organise an alograve myself, I’m not great at promoting, but it might come to that…
To be honest, I’m at a loss of how else to push things forward as much as anyone, so really at the moment I can only file under #help-needed :)
toodle pip