Coder Cosplay, a Lil Data moment

Lil Data is PC Music’s resident live coding musician, one of many projects of the Reykjavik-based designer and technologist Jack Armitage. Jack’s work spans experimental concerts, club sets, multimedia installations, interface design, and more. Jack is the founder of Afverhju Ekki – The Absolutely Everything Studio, a postdoc researcher at the Intelligent Instruments Lab, University of Iceland, and has a PhD in Media & Arts Technologies from Queen Mary University of London. On top of their Lil Data releases on PC Music, they’re behind the production of Charli XCX’s ‘Track 10’ and Jónsi’s ‘Kórall’ and the voice of Danny L Harle’s MC Boing. For ‘Coder Cosplay’, Data utilized their extensive set of live code and audio research tools to turn a small set of source sounds into a massive range of unique audio permutations— now anyone can cosplay as a Live Code artist! Umru-designed drum one shots and original Lil Data compositions are finely minced, deconstructed, and recoded into exponential noise sweeps, long-form rhythmic evolutions, and impossibly sequenced arpeggios. In addition to capturing their famous TidalCycles improvisations, Lil Data also employs Strudel, LiveCore, RAVE Neural Synthesis Models, Tölvera and SignalFlow, all of which have never been used before on Splice as far as we know. We asked Data about the process and received a PhD level thesis in response. When we asked for…ummmm English, please…they chimed: “I hacked myself so you don’t have to!”