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July 6th - 12th was a self-directed Week of Patching, initiated by Paloma Kop.

Week of Patching is a playful invitation to spend a week, in parallel with other people across the internet, engaging with a patching-based practice.

[…]

Each day, create a patch and then make a recording of its output.

At the end of the week, take pieces of all of those recordings and edit them together into a single composition. (It doesn’t have to be long; for example, you could take 30 seconds of each patch in series to create a 3.5 minute composition.)

From my earliest days of doing creative coding I have been really interested in patching environments, specifically Pure Data. I like how I can trace the flow of data by simply looking at patch cable, even if the actual patch ends up being a mess!

Since 2023 I’ve also been into hardware video synthesis via LZX/Syntonie Eurorack modules, which I really love for the same reason, but also because, unlike software, you can really just plug something in and see what happens. As long as you’re not literally giving something too much electricity it’s pretty hard to generate no output.

I go through phases of being really into patching and then not touching it for weeks or months. Seeing the announcement of Week of Patching I was excited to get the motivation to do it again. Alas, life always finds a way to interfere with plans, so in the end I only did day #2.

The tl;dr is that I wish I dedicated more time to experimenting and not try and rush something to meet a deadline. I should also try and decide on a recording setup ahead of time. And finally, I also think the heatwave massively affected my ability to think and deal with technical issues.

Cardinal (VCV Rack), TidalCycles, monome grid

Creating the Cardinal patch was initially quite challenging. I had big ideas but hadn’t patched in a month or two so spent most of time was spent remembering what modules do. Eventually I settled on a very simple but effective ambient pad sound with some modulation.

To create melody I had a couple of options. In most situations I would just use TidalCycles to generate a melody and send midi to Cardinal, but in the spirit of experimentation and using things I already own I opted to use the monome grid. Early in 2026 they released iii, which basically turns the grid into a standalone instrument. I loaded it with the wake script (a standalone variation of awake) which let me play some nice generative melodies.

Next I wanted to add some percussion and granular sounds using TidalCycles. On paper this was very simple but in trying to keep everything in sync I resurfaced a bug that I discovered in 2020. TidalCycles can use AbletonLink for its clock and bpm syncing. Carla is a plugin host (think virtual pedalboard) which can also use AbletonLink. What this means is that any vsts/lv2s that you load in Carla that use clock/bpm will now all be in sync with TidalCycles. Great!

I used Carla to host the Cardinal lv2 plugin. In Cardinal I used delay modules which used the host’s (Carla) bpm. So far no issues. I then wanted to send the clock, bpm and transport information to the monome grid so that it’s melody (generated via wake) would be in sync with everything else. x42 had made a very useful plugin for sending clock, transport, and bpm over midi called mclk.

There is, however, one massive catch: The moment you enable “Use Ableton Link” in Carla the mclk plugin stops working. Or maybe it’s Carla that stops working. Either way, the result is that the clock/bpm doesn’t get sent to the monome grid. When I reported this “bug” in 2020 a fix for mclk was proposed but ultimately not implemented, with x42 saying that it’s an issue with Carla. Yay. With time running out and the heatwave reducing my patience for tech issues to zero I just ditched the idea of integrating TidalCycles.

Video patching

I similarly had quite big ambitions for creating visuals with the video synth which failed to materialise. What I wanted to do was control my video synth modules with either the monome grid or Cardinal. I would have achieved this by using the Univer Inter module to convert usb midi to CV, and then the SCA-5 Voltage Scaler to scale those voltages down to 0-1v.

I didn’t want to do audio-reactive visuals, but instead have the visuals be closely tied to the audio. In reality, like the audio, I rushed and put a bit too much pressure on myself to create something interesting. A thing that I have learnt about my creative process is that some of my best or most fun work comes out of free experimentation. The moment that I am faced with any deadlines and expectations I essentially freeze up.

I remember reading an interview with Sarah GHP where she talks about her process and has a similar outlook:

So have a goal, have a bunch of happy accidents, and then try to understand things so you can recreate the accidents. You will have more accidents and grow your list of things to understand.

[…]

So, I guess my advice is:

• Look for your starting point. What do you actually like? What do you like that isn’t what everyone else likes? Being a bit of a hater (in your head!) is also a good way to find a starting point. Don’t be mean, but it is useful to know what you do not want to do, especially if you aren’t sure what you want to do.
• Go out and fuck up a lot.
• Find a balance between exploration and deliberation. Don’t try to save everything because you will drive yourself mad.
• Focus on understanding and avenues will open up around that.

The video patch I created was still really nice and gave me room to play, but there’s definitely some playfulness missing.

Patching it together

I haven’t done many at-home recordings of synth jams but this seemed like a good opportunity to do so even if the conditions were not ideal. An issue that I, and many others living in small apartments, faced is I don’t have a dedicated space where I can leave all of my equipment permanently set up. I have to wait for any shared space to become available and then reconstruct my setup each time. It’s inconvenient and takes time away from creating.

Eventually I found a spot on the dining table to film. I spent more time than I should have arranging the synths and laptop so that everything was in shot.

The layout meant that using the video synth was actually kinda difficult. I couldn’t see all of the modules and had to reach over quite far to turn some knobs.

After about 30 minutes of arranging I settled on a setup, sat down and hit record! Enjoy 8ish minutes of me pressing buttons and twiddling knobs.

I should do this more often

The result was quite pleasant though not musically or visually very interesting. In an ideal world this would have served as day 0 of the Week of Patching, a day to make sure all of the hardware and software was working as expected and create an environment that I could comfortably create in. But, as the saying goes, life… finds a way to mess up your plans!

Hopefully this will serve as a reminder to me to do more experiments so that I’m not caught off guard for the next Week of Patching. Thanks to Paloma Kop for starting this initiative, it was still a fun learning experience!

On Friday 4th December Charles Céleste Hutchins released a new EP, Basic Waveforms, and I was happy to create the artwork for it! Charles had already had a go at creating artwork for it but I jumped in and said I could probably create something based on it.

Before I get into how I made the artwork you should definitely listen to and buy the EP.

I already knew that I wanted to use analog video synthesis to create the artwork. For those not in the know, video synthesis is similar to audio synthesis, but instead of +1 to -1 doing amplitude things, think of it as going from white (+1) to black (0) to white (-1). This creates vertical lines on a screen. The higher the frequency, the more lines there are. The higher the amplitude the more visible the lines are. Of course there’s a lot more to this but that basic explanation should suffice for now.

I have a modular video synthesiser featuring a bunch of modules primarily from LZX and Syntonie. Check out my full setup on Modulargrid if you’re interested.

Hydra alternative

Side note, you can always take a step into video synthesis without shelling out a lot of money by using Hydra from Olivia Jack. Here’s an example of a few waveforms with help from a plugin by kandid.

Back to video synthesis

The first stage was building the video patch for each waveform. LZX’s DWO3 module is responsible for most of it. I just modulated some vertical square waves with either a horizontal sine, square, or triangle wave.

I also created a video for each track. The Univer Inter midi to CV module made creating a timeline for the video really easy as I could create a midi sequence using any software on that could output midi.

Originally I wanted to use Ossia to send out midi values but I couldn’t get it to work exactly how I wanted so instead I used Ardour which might sound like a surprising choice!

In Ardour I created a CC automation track and tried to make the values reflect the intensity of the music. This was sent to Univer Inter over USB and then to the CV input of a few different eurorack modules.

With all the automation set up I hit play and recorded the video using OBS. I also controlled the video synthesiser manually for some parts to avoid it feeling too robotic. Here’s a bit of me recording the Squares track.

So that’s everything done, right? Nope! I really liked the output but felt it looked a bit too clean despite it being the output of a noisy analog setup. I wanted to have a few more subtle imperfections, similar to the CRT shaders that you get on things like Retroarch. I could have used the brilliant ntsc-rs plugin to achieve this but even that didn’t feel right.

Here’s a section of the Sines track as captured from OBS from a cheap composite capture card.

A common practice in the video synth world is something called rescanning, which is basically pointing a camera at a screen and recording the output. There’s a few reasons that you might want to do this including upscaling and for glitch art, but for my purpose the screen itself would introduce some hopefully subtle artefacts and make it look more authentically analog. One small problem: I don’t own a CRT! They’re getting expensive to buy (even second hand) and I needed one by the next day. Luckily Vivid Projects have several so I ventured there to use one.

Using a HDMI to composite adaptor I sent my laptop video out to an old Trinitron TV. Aaaand then the TV exploded! It was actually quite dramatic. It made a poof sound and then the magic smoke was released from the back. After apologies were given and the smoke cleared I opted to instead use a much smaller black and white CCTV monitor. I again loaded up the video into OBS and used a combination of Stable and CVB001 eurorack modules to have some control over contrast and saturation.

Once home I finally brought in all of the footage and did some basic cropping and perspective editing. A last-minute change I made was to show the TV frame. I think it helped to give context and show that it really is a CRT and not just a filter. There’s also a little bit of ghosting and screen flickering due to refresh rates of the camera and screen, but again I like it!

For the final EP cover I put the artist and title text on separately using GIMP as it was too blurry from the CRT rescan.

Overall I’m really happy with how it all turned out and I enjoyed the multi-part process of making it!

You should definitely go support Charles and buy his EP!

After four editions of the programme, (Algo|Afro) Futures has come to an end.

We started the programme in 2021 as a way to address the lack of diversity that myself and co-founder Alex McLean had noticed within the UK live coding scene.

Since then, the live coding scene has changed a lot. New tools have been built, more people are finding out about live coding through their own means, and bringing their own take on what can be done with live coding.

I’m proud of the impact that this programme has had - we’ve been able to give 25 early-career Black artists the time, space, and support for them to learn live coding. It certainly hasn’t solved the problem of diversity and racism within the live coding scene, nor was that ever the intention, but I also feel it’s time to give space for this new generations of live coders to develop a programme that reflects who they are and how they work.

Vivid Projects, the project partner and host organisation, is committed to supporting artists and creatives from under represented communities through a dedicated programme. They would love to hear from anyone who wanted to take the lead on starting a similar project. Get in touch!

Thanks to co-founder Alex McLean for supporting the programme from the very beginning. Thanks to guest mentors Gary Stewart and Tyger Blue. Thanks to Designer Philly for our awesome logo. Thanks to the various organisations that have provided additional support: Then Try This, Birmingham Open Media, University of Birmingham, and Brum Radio. Thanks also to Arts Council England for their support.

Thanks to all of the participants on the programme, it was a joy watching your skills develop and I hope you continue to make great things.

Thanks once again to Yasmeen Baig-Clifford and Vivid Projects for everything ❤️ And finally, thank you, the audience, for attending the showcase events, watching the live streams, listening to the radio show, and being enthusiastic about this programme and live coding. There’s still so much work to do to recognise the Black and Queer history of digital art, dance and electronic music, and having the support of people helps validate these efforts.

Thanks and goodbye!

(Algo|Afro) Futures
2021 - 2025