Secret Weapon

Secret Weapon is a work in progress performance that combines live coding and DJing.

In developing this performance I took inspiration from pioneers such as The Belleville Three (Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson) who essentially created techno in the 1980s and were important figures in the development of similar genres such as House and Techno. I learnt a lot about this history in the book Assembling a Black Counter Culture by DeForrest Brown Jr in which I was particularly drawn to an excerpt from an interview with Atkins in 1988 where he describes his mixing techniques:

As I was already making my own music, I had the idea that Derrick and me could bring a drum machine into a party for mixing in between records." […] “We unveiled our secret weapon, which was that we’d brought a Roland 808 to the party to play live rhythm tracks between the records.

This inspired me to explore how I could bring new experiments to DJing by combining it with live coding. In these initial experiments the live coding software, TidalCycles, is used not only as a complex rhythm track, but also as a controller for the DJ software itself. Using MIDI messages TidalCycles communicates with the Mixxx DJ software, creating unpredictable cuts and edits, high-pitched scratches, and stuttery glitches. Through using a physical DJ controller I also perform “normal” DJing on top of all of the chaos.

I will be further developing this performance to make careful selection of the tracks, aiming to delve into the Afrofuturist influences of the early days of techno and electronic music (Sun Ra, Afrika Bambaataa, Drexciya) whilst also looking forward to artists who are experimenting with new sounds and techniques (Nkisi, clipping, NikNak, Nū, Mariam Rezaei).