i have long been meaning to kick off this blog with an in-depth post about SuperCollider 2, but it is taking me forever to finish. so instead, ive decided to open with something easier: my 2024 in review! it has been an eventful year for me, with many new experiences and developments in my artistic work and otherwise.

there will be quite a few pictures in this post, and i apologize for the crude formatting which makes them take up a lot of space. i intend to add some kind of nice gallery component eventually!

trip to Tokyo

in January i spent a week in Tokyo with my partner. i recorded my only Jamuary piece on the plane, a relatively minimal TidalCycles jam playing a single Reason Radical Piano plugin.

we spent most of the time around Shibuya and enjoyed attractions such as

• an amazing dubby, space rock-y live gig by Arakajimekimeraretakoibitotachie at Shibuya WWW
• a show about Johannes Kepler in Cosmo Planetarium Shibuya
• flora and fauna in Yoyogi Park
• light artworks at Shibuya Stream Light Trail 2023
• Genshin Impact event at Tokyo Skytree
• vegan food at various places, with my favorite being the Komaki Shokudo zen cuisine restaurant in Akihabara

data leap

in March i organized (in collaboration with Algorave Helsinki and WHS Teatteri Union) data leap, a celebration of audio-visual art created with idiosyncratic technological methods. there were live performances by codepage, CASSALPOPOLO & julesvisuaalinen, OH3SD, Trauma Responses, Forces, pulu (thats me!) & Twilight Courier and Eilien. in addition, Kalle Rasinkangas' interactive installation "Temporal Passage" was exhibited.

considering the fairly niche type of art, data leap was a success — in fact, we sold out! although i have participated in organizing various music events in the past, this was the first time i took lead responsibility for one. achievement unlocked!

KTK XIV

also in March, i played a set of algorithmic trance / techno / drum n bass at Kotimaan Teknokatsaus (Domestic Techno Inspection) XIV, with visuals by Marko Vierimaa. i set up my performance system to send live event data over OSC to Marko's laptop for visual sync. unfortunately i was so focused on performing that i never actually saw any of the visuals, but i trust they were excellent :)

i also stayed the whole night to dance to the other artists' performances! some of my favorites were the sets by Gender / VJ KOSK and Vx Eno / VJ Solu. it was a wonderful event organized by very nice people, and im definitely going again — to dance, if nothing else.

Hibernation

Hibernation is an archive of trans dreams built inside a liminal blanket fort; a place to do nothing; a collection of mundane utopias. this is a project by m2f2m, a collective founded in 2019 Mira Eskelinen, Frank Stankiewicz and me. Hibernation transforms the venue into a dreamlike experience using fabrics and a variety of installations.

in 2024 we were selected to be part of the Kulkue project, which meant taking Hibernation to three Finnish art festivals in different cities: Hangö Teaterträff (Hanko) in June, ANTI Festival (Kuopio) in September and Baltic Circle (Helsinki) in November.

my contributions to Hibernation have been:

• cocoon, the 6-part, 4-channel generative soundscape that envelops most of the venue
• acting as the dream jockey, controlling the cocoon soundscape and sporadically blending ambient livecoding performances into it
• the transmission room, an installation exploring themes of gender, transhumanism, dreams and escapism through a soundscape transmitted to four radios
• co-producing the soundscape for Frank's death room installation
• an interactive abstract projection controlled by pressure sensors
• various other tech related tasks

this has been one of the most meaningful projects i have worked on and i am so happy we got the chance to be part of Kulkue. massive thanks to our Kulkue producer Sanna Ritvanen, all the festival organizers and the volunteers who helped us build Hibernation!

autocrap

while doing some cleaning in June, i dug up my old Novation Nocturn MIDI controller. actually, this is not really a MIDI controller, but rather an Automap controller. instead of speaking class-compliant USB MIDI, it communicates with a proprietary app macOS/Windows app called Automap. Automap then creates virtual MIDI ports that can be used by DAWs and whatnot. except, Automap is long out of support, and without it the controller is useless.

frustrated by the prospect of having a perfectly good piece of hardware become a paperweight, i decided to learn about how USB works and figure out the Nocturn's protocol. over a few livestreams (part 1, part 2, part 3) i developed a free, open-source replacement for Automap in Rust that runs on macOS, Windows, Linux and theoretically anything with libusb support. it is called autocrap!

Heart of Clojure

in September, i was kindly invited by Arne Brasseur to play a livecoding set at the Heart of Clojure conference in Leuven, Belgium. i also did a lightning talk about how i built a live performance setup around SuperCollider 2.

aside from that, i had a wonderful time meeting new friendly people and chatting, despite not really being an active Clojure user at all :)

looptober

on Mastodon, i found out for the first time about looptober, a music challenge that involves creating and posting a short piece on each day of October. kinda like Jamuary, but not. i had the idea to add an extra bit of challenge for myself: i would use a different tool every day.

i expected to run out of tools and/or motivation within a week or two, but somehow this constraint really inspired me. despite also coming down with a really rough case of pneumonia, i did in fact manage to complete 31 pieces with 31 tools! i had to dig quite deep at times — here are some examples of tools i used:

• HoustonTracker 2 on the Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus calculator
• RingMasterPro ringtone composer app on the Nokia 3660 phone
• obscure Mac OS 9 apps such as CellSynth and OutOfPhase

all the pieces are collected in my looptober 2024 playlist on youtube!

Alternative Party

also in October, the Alternative Party demoparty returned after a decade-long hiatus. together with Joonas Siren (Forces), we organized a two-part Algorave Helsinki program at the party, consisting of live performances as well as workshops on SuperCollider and TidalCycles.

live sets were performed by Viktor Toikkanen, sofi, Forces and me. a recording is available on SceneSat; performances start at 3h 26min.

i had the pleasure of meeting Sam Aaron, creator of Sonic Pi, who also had a workshop and a live performance at the party. in addition, the party organized a specialized music competition for tracks made with Sonic Pi. i decided to spend a night learning it and made an entry, but unfortunately i was the only participant and the competition got cancelled. perhaps contributing to the lack of entries was the fact that the competition deadline was before Sam's workshop — the other way around might have made more sense. but i know scheduling is not always easy.

anyway, my entry was moved to the Obscure Music competition… and won!!! i can call myself an award-winning musician now ;) the track is on (spoilers) my album "nested"!

another thing i enjoyed was exploring the Canon Cat word processor from 1987, exhibited at the party by Hannu Aronsson and Tero Kivinen from iki.fi. the Canon Cat features a neat search-based navigation system instead of arrow keys, but the more interesting part for me is that it comes with a Forth interpreter. the exhibitors had written some small Forth demos for the system; stuff like rendering patterned rectangles at random screen positions by writing to the video memory. but the system had no working persistent storage, and since it crashed at some point, the programs were gone from memory. i had the pleasure of typing in some of the demo programs from paper printouts to get them running again!

(not) bonk wave

i have been a fan of the bonk wave compilations for a while, and this year i finally caught the call for submissions for Not What I Call Bonk Wave - Volume 003 :) i wrote origami universe, a drumfunk and Puella Magi Madoka Magica inspired piece which was published on volume A!

by the way, Key 13 recently published That's Not Bonk Wave!, a look into the history of the compilations and the community. very informative, i learned many new things!

nested

as the year was nearing its end, i realized i had a decent collection of algorithmic tunes that i had been playing at live shows. so i decided i would do proper recordings of them and release an EP. the EP grew into a (mini) album nested which i released in December.

subsequently, i did a 4 hour livestream where i went through the code for each track. the recording is on youtube, if youre interested :)

worlds first PHP livecoding performance?

ever since i got a job that has made me return to writing PHP (in the form of Wordpress plugins) after a long long break, ive been idly wondering how hard it would be to do music livecoding in PHP. from what i can tell, nobody has done this before (but i am open to being proven wrong), so of course i had to try it!

i wrote a livecoding system called phunky, which currently consists of a command-line application and an Emacs mode for quickly sending code blocks to it. it is still early days, but i managed to put together a performance for the Eulerroom end of cycle solstice stream on 21st December. you can watch the recording on my youtube!

phunky is not publicly released yet, but i am aiming to publish it in 2025. stay tuned :)

and more

finally, there were a few more live performances, livestreams and other small projects that i didnt cover here. but feel free to explore the links on my home page!

that is all for this time. happy new year!