Tom Hall

Recently Tom caught up over a Skype conversation with long-time Max user, Andreas Wetterberg.

When did you first get into Max, and what lead you to get into Max?

I'd been an Ableton user for a long time, many years, and then I started a work period at Ableton. I arrived at the same time as Jeremy Bernstein did.

That was enough. He got me into it. I'm super thankful. We had been doing a lot of almost hacking of Ableton, making it do all of these weird things. I was in a group called the Covert Operators, and apart from doing sound design and presets and stuff, we did weird things like, "Okay. We have midi. How can we build the step sequencer from stock Ableton?" We did stuff like, "All right. Let's set up a template that works like a step sequencer in Ableton," and all these weird things, which was basically programming just using the most obtuse kind of language.

I've never been a coder. I still remember the day I chose not to ... I was a kid, on my Amiga. I chose to stop programming; like "This is silly. When will I ever need that?" To this day, this is my most vivid computer memory from childhood. It was like Jeremy set me back on course.

That's unreal. I remember your Covert Operators Live packs, they were excellent. I was back in Australia then. You were doing that in 2005? Six?

You guys were in that first wave of people making custom packs outside of Ableton themselves, correct?

Yes. It was us, and then Track Team Audio. Essentially, at the beginning, it was people just bashing things together and putting them out for the community, and then it got serious. This first wave meant you could actually make money off it. Now the market is saturated. For a while, it expanded and morphed, and eventually we were actually making a small living out of it. I was working with my friend from Belgium, and then there was another loose crew around it. He moved to Denmark and we made sound design during the day. That's crazy.

It was a very unique thing back then. Now there's a market for Max For Live, which is insane. There are people who are actually making a living off that too! I think that's brilliant. I don't think I could ever do that again though, because I felt that somehow it was sacrificing my creativity for commercial gain. It's difficult to explain. I felt like it was zapping the very thing I needed in order to produce my own work. It was draining my creativity.

I'd rather make things for myself and be happy with that, and then release for a community later on. It would give me the same sense of helping out. Yes, there will be less financial "success", but it would make me feel a lot happier at the end of the day.

Was it a decision to stop Covert Operators at a certain time, or it just slowly faded away?

It slowly faded away. We could see that there were so many different participants on the scene that it outlived its usefulness in a sense. We started, "Okay. Let's clear out with these Max Tools," that would keep us going with some of those things.

That brought me on this whole journey which ended up with an Ableton user group in Denmark. Basically, the Kopenhagen Laptop Orchestra at the end of that. It's a long chain of events. It morphed through that. I've been teaching at a lot of different places in Denmark. I helped start a place called Sonic College. Originally, I had wanted to do an American-style laptop ensemble. It turned out that the school didn't have as much interest in that as I did, so I was like, "I'm going to start my own school. I'm going to start my own band."

I got together with a lot of the people who are involved with the Ableton scene in Copenhagen, because I figured, "Wow. That's a perfect fit." Then, we basically founded the group during lunch at one of the user group meetings.

Of course, there's a lot more to it. After that came this very long condensation period where we started to try to find out what we actually wanted to do.

How dogmatic we should be, because it's very easy to make a laptop ensemble. You just have a lot of people with Ableton Live, and back then, you'd just hit space bar at the same time. That's it.

I wanted to go a bit further beyond that, so that's what we started to do.

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When was this, that you formed the band originally over lunch? What year was that?

It was so good to meet you at LOOP Berlin last year (2016). You brought the party!!

Yes. I do try. It was really good. There were so many interesting people. There was some magic sauce in there. It wasn't any specific sort of people, it was the connection between them. There was this continuation down through all the different people. I really liked that.

Tell me about the Kopenhagen Laptop Orchestra at Loop – it seemed like the perfect event for you folks.

We totally felt it. We had this very specific idea of wanting to play in the round orchestra pit, boiler room style. That was on the table from the very, very beginning we talked to Ableton. It just felt so important to us, specifically because one of the difficult things to communicate while playing electronics, as I'm sure you know, is the presence and the performer behind the machines. One of the best ways to do it ... Even if you see the most techy fans, someone like Simian Mobile Disco, or somebody like that ... The closer you get to the performance, the more you see the person behind it. It really relates what's going on and the urgency a lot better once you get up close. Getting it down in the pit and playing like an orchestra ... That's where it started. Right? We want to play in the pit, because yes, we're a laptop orchestra. We're an orchestra. We want to play in the orchestra pit. It makes sense, right?

Turns out, the stage was enormous. It almost didn't happen because the room was designed from a different perspective, but I'm so happy it did.

I was not ready for how epic it was. It was freaking amazing, I saw a pretty excited and attentive audience for Suzanne Ciani, but you guys had this vibe in the room, it really was like a rave, boiler room. There was so much great energy. I could see that you all really fed off that during the performance.

We nearly didn't get off stage in time. Our poor stage manager. Oh, I feel so bad for him, because he really had a tough time getting us offstage.

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Right. Everyone saw you guys shred this awesome set, and of course you being so open with your technology, everyone wanted to come and see what you had on your laptop.

Do you feel that the open laptop audience surrounding you like that adds some pressure?

Most people didn't take any notice of it, but I had so many technical problems in the beginning. Of course, it's those high-tension, high-risk moments, with people standing right next to you. You can't fake anything, nor would I want to. It's part of the experience.

With high risk, high reward. If it goes well, of course, they feel it. When I get stressed, they will know as well. I call it the high wire.

That high wire effect. Yes, the results are perhaps the same, that magic thing isn't there if there's a net under you. Right?

This is very much running without a net. That's part of the reason why we improvise as well. I think this improvisational thing really helped us, because not only did I, the drummer, have technical problems in the beginning of that, dictates an empty beginning. Okay, we're feeding off the crowd. The crowd is getting hyped. All right, then we up the BPM a bit and we play something a bit more floor to the floor, because that's a natural progression. That liberation we get breaks outside of what we would have been able to do in Ableton Live only by simply using our own tools. I still wish we had had Live For Max, but someday down the road we might, because that's honestly, "Yes. We've got Max For Live. Now when we get Live For Max,"

So in an ideal world what would that be, Live for Max?

Audio and Midi Clip launching with Live functionality. I'd love that.

Playlist is very close, to be fair. It does the time stretching and it does a lot of the things I really need. Honestly, that was my thinking back when Max For Live came out. Now, I don't miss it as much. For sure. Not having it forced us to make all these little gadgets and stuff that we needed as a group. A lot of the thinking has gone. We had a lot of energy to put into a little taped delay typed thing that we could use for whatever we wanted.

Yeah. Stuff like that. I think we got a lot out of that, and I think, also ... We had this whole initial process of finding out, "How are we going to do timing?", and the "How are we going to do all these technical things." Now, we can focus on tweaking, and making these less urgent decisions. We've definitely worked ages and ages on timing, just because we wanted to make something that makes sense over a network.

That's been a strong focus of ours. Then, in the middle of all that, Ableton Link came out, and then now, of course, we have Link For Max as well. It was so satisfying, because it just couples so well with what we have ourselves, which is this weird ... It's like Ableton Link, but for musical timing instead.

Ableton Link is very much like ticks. They're very much like meter agnostic, and doesn't have a lot of ... It doesn't know much musical theory at all. Ours is a superset of that that you can still slop down on top of that, which is really nice.

That's the core of the performance system for us. A sequencer system that can drive everything from over the network. At the end of the day, if I need to produce something, I still open up Ableton Live, because managing mixes in sequences, and effects, and all of that stuff, in real time. It's really difficult if it's non-real time. Does that make sense? Once you have to move to non-real time, then you need a timeline. Then you need the whole ... Basically, you'd need the Ableton Live infrastructure at the end of it.

Do you have any fail safes in place for when you play live on the laptop?

We do, because Link is providing low level infrastructure, and it has redundancy built in to a degree. Normally, it's not necessary. Knock on wood. We aren't redundant. That would mean us bringing eight laptops instead of ... There is very little redundancy, but it's really robust, because if you're not getting a clock from somewhere else, then someone can open the clock module and press 'clock', and everything falls back into sync. It's not dumb timing like midi.

That really helps a lot. There's very little ... Once a laptop crashes, or a sound device like an audio interface dies mid-show ... We've had that happen.

Serves me right for using an aging machine, but it really does suck when it dies mid-show. There's really nothing you can do at that point. Yes, technically we could set up ... and I think we are plenty qualified to set up redundancy, but we're not a professional touring outfit. Not like that. We could make a little redundancy system. That would be fun to try sometime.

Gen!! and some of the scaling stuff, it's really central. For my work these days, it's got to be mainly B patchers and Gen. That's the two key things. B-patchers because everything I do as a ... I play drum sample a lot. Everything I do needs to happen six times, and things need to be different, different ways. It's like, "Alright. Have a lot of windows on your screen. Blah, blah. Show all your stuff, but the pack's just a hundred times bigger because you just see what you need to see," and all of that stuff. Then, Gen, for doing kick-ass delays and stuff.

Yeah. You'll be able to get a lot of your effects in Gen now.

Yeah. Everything that isn't basically some weirdly bastardized Max for Live device is more or less Gen right now, for me. A lot of the stuff I do ends up being some variant of the delay line anyway. I think the further you get into digital PSP, the more you realize that everything's a delay line, except delay lines which are filters. Is it the other way around? Yeah. That whole thing has really been fantastic.

Did you start working in Gen when it came out in Max 6?

I started out early, but my low level DSPs chops weren't as good, so I came running back to it for specific projects which forced you to learn it.

Yeah. My main effect thing is a looper/delay line thing that started from some of the work that Peter McCullough did.

I chopped it up, and that's basically a performance looper delay that I use for every set that I do.

It's all Gen. Apart from the interaction stuff, which is Lemur. We did some OSC, custom OSC abstractions for dealing with the Lemur specifically, which handles input/output.

Lights and colors, and all of that stuff, in a single object. That combined with the Gen is just a god-send. I think it was actually the EJ’s objects that, back in the day, that I got to know about variable delay buffers. That's the word. I fell head over heels with that stuff. Be able to jump around in delay lines, and do starters, and squeeze things together into a starter, and then you move back to a two-by loop. The starter is still there, caught inside a two-by loop. I found that really fascinating for live performance, because you could do these really weird chops that would hang somewhere between the real time and the non real time realm of interaction. It was like the interaction itself had a memory. I think that's really fascinating.

It's just so, so stunning. Even compared to big commercial products, it's really incredible. The cool thing is, you could do all the way up to chopper storm type effects. Really, really fast things. That is just not possible outside of Gen, because the vector size is too big for Gen.

I'm a bit of a script kitty in that sense. I love taking things apart and putting them back together. I'm not really good at making a Gen patch from the beginning. I completely admit to that. I do enjoy when I do it. I've done some amazing other things in it, but just being able to look inside and he's like, "Oh, if I put a distortion line inside of a filter, all of these things that really have some really nice aspects to it." That, and then Open GL. Screwing with Open GL through the Gen things is really fantastic. Doing things like mirroring, and I did some weird step ... Basically, you know if you down sample a matrix and you feed it into a thing, you get these weird squiggly lines, but if you double up the matrix and then you put it back together, and then you can have stair stepping in Open GL? I found that really, "All right, then you could take some bit crushing ... the look of a wave form and move that into Open GL."

Featuring: Andreas Wetterberg, Tobias Lukassen & Lasse Munk
Fra Illutron Midsommerfest - 23 juni 2016

Københavns Laptop Orkester (KLO)

We have our own - You saw him at the show - Lasse Munk. Our own visualist. There's very little urgency to get anything done with that, which is really good for me, because then I have this ... I can just play with it on my own time. There's no deadlines, and I can just play around with these visuals on my own for my own amusement. Some day down the line, it may become a thing that we use, but right now it really isn't something that's urgent for me. That could be cool.

What are you working on right now, and what's the next steps for your programming, and also the Laptop Orchestra?

Right now, Mira.Web has consumed me. I've been swallowed up in a deep, dark hole there, and it's so good. I wanted to do big touch screens for the Laptop Orchestra for the longest time, so this is just the perfect excuse to dive into that.

Andreas Wettweberg, Andreas Roeboe and Soufus Forsberg
Live performance in Copenhagen Denmark 8-18-10
I shot this on my camera phone. Better video coming soon.
Also I joined them later on Wetterberg's modular

Wetterberg, Roeboe and Forsberg-Modular synths in Copenhagen.

So the next step is seeing you all with laptops closed with big touchscreens?

Yeah. Exactly. That will probably be the next thing.

Otherwise I’m preparing us for doing workshops and shows around Denmark, with a lot in the next upcoming two or three months. There are quite a few jobs coming up. Then, I am also doing a duet setup with a pianist from Vietnam Tri Minh, which is basically based around a lot of the freezing and weird glitchy things that you can do to a piano with Max. It's very Max, but it's also very organic and nice.

The Circles

That's happening now. We start rehearsals real soon, and then hope to do the first show in less than a month.

Right now, that's it. Having a lot of fun with that. There's also some material coming out. Both from LOOP, but also from dance performances that we've done.

Yeah, but it's one of those great juggling acts where you go home at the end of the day and you're like, "I really juggled well today, didn't I?" That feels really good. That's special for sure.

Recently Tom caught up over a Skype conversation with long-time Max user, Andreas Wetterberg. 

Do you feel that the open laptop audience surrounding you like that adds some pressure? 

This is very much running without a net. That's part of the reason why we improvise as well. I think this improvisational thing really helped us, because not only did I, the drummer, have technical problems in the beginning of that, dictates an empty beginning. Okay, we're feeding off the crowd. The crowd is getting hyped. All right, then we up the BPM a bit and we play something a bit more floor to the floor, because that's a natural progression. That liberation we get breaks outside of what we would have been able to do in Ableton Live only by simply using our own tools. I still wish we had had Live For Max, but someday down the road we might, because that's honestly, "Yes. We've got Max For Live. Now when we get Live For Max," 

Right now, that's it. Having a lot of fun with that. There's also some material coming out. Both from LOOP, but also from dance performances that we've done. 

Artist Focus: Andreas Wetterberg