Project Focus: Down the Rabbit Hole - Acid House In A Rail Station

Mikkel Meyer’s installation piece Down the Rabbit Hole is an eternal composing machine inspired of the 1980s evolving of Acid House in Detroit, the randomness of old analog machinery, and a fascination with coincidences. He was kind enough to sit down for a little remote chat.

Where is this piece installed? Maybe I should ask where it is exhibited….

It is currently exhibited at DIAS Kunsthal - a gallery that focuses on digital and interactive art situated at the Vallensbæk train station. The site for the installation is located in a suburb south of Copenhagen and the station consists largely of a tunnel and staircase area for the station that’s open for the public 24/7.

That sounds like a pretty challenging place to put up an interactive installation.

Putting up artworks in a public area like this involves quite a few constraints when it comes to designing a physical interface - it has to stand up to groups of kids passing by, drunken teenagers, commuters, and all kinds of other people. So it became obvious that the interesting part of the installation would be the actual content that should be playable in a really sturdy and dependable way.

In terms of the content, I wanted to make an installation which touches on that feeling of diving into the unknown when making music, so Down the Rabbit Hole enables the audience to generate unknown acid-tracks for their own little party, right on the spot.

Song structure, rhythms, chords and effects - everything that usually defines and characterizes a piece of music - is guided by a series of random generators that are central to the self-generating music machines that I create and use all the time. The piece welcomes members of the public to enter into a dialogue with the machine by turning knobs and pressing button that continues to the next track until they find one that matches the time, the day, and the listener’s mood.

It’s interesting that you chose Acid House rather than the ambient stuff I usually hear in public installations. Why Acid House?

I’m inspired by early electronic music - especially the sound of Roland's legendary bass line TB-303 from the early 1980s. Although it was a cool analogue machine with a readily repetitive sound, it was difficult to work with and – when the power and batteries failed, all your programmed sequences were converted into random compositions. After just a year and a half, the production of the device stopped and the devices and prices for the discontinued box dropped. Creative DJs and budding electronic musicians fell in love with the machine's possibilities and in Detroit at the end of the decade, the music genre Acid House was born, With the 303s as its signature sound.

Acid House is considered to be the first real electronic pop / dance / modern music and has since developed into a myriad of styles and subgenres. I’ve been inspired by several of those styles and dialects, and have implemented them as composing algorithms I use when I create – algorithms that are used in Down the Rabbit Hole. The way that the individual elements are generated and mixed is impossible to predict, but one thing is certain - you will never be able to find the same track again. So I hope the audience will just enjoy their own personal trip through the rabbit hole.

Did you use Max when creating this piece?

Down the Rabbit Hole is prototyped in Ableton Live, which serves as a timeline and mixing platform for combining a lot of autonomous Max for Live patches that I have made over several years as part of my own music creation.

I like the use of random generators where randomness is filtered thru a framework that relates the different values to each other – a little bit like pulling the battery out of those old sequencers and filling their memory with garbage, but where the framework sets a structure for the data. I make a lot of these frameworks as Max for Live modules to control parameters of other effects and instruments in a certain way which relates to the underlying ideas behind a musical genres and style.

So, Down the Rabbit Hole is a condensation of how I usually make my own music – it’s a digitized hairball of me making music.

The system is controlled by two central pieces. The first portion involves controlling effects by sending internal MAX commands (send and receive objects) to effects and control modules for other effects and instruments. It’s really one big mess, but the result of a process where I have developed and modificed all my patches and routed different tracks and commands in Ableton until I just found most of the generated compositions appealing and sounding like something I could have made by hand.

The other central portion involves controlling the sound structure by sending commands to Ableton that replicate the build of house tracks with breaks and so on. On the single tracks in Ableton, I have made some long effect chains that consist of M4L arpeggiators, filters and spatial effects and randomizers controlling Ableton’s internal effects. To keep everything in balance in the overall mix, I use compressors on every single track with slow attack and release times, so the tracks volume stays in place. Every time the user pulls a new track, a chord is generated and shared by the pad-synth, an arpegiator feeds the tune of some of the drums, and finally a MIDI filter generates the length of the notes, accent and glide to the 303-bassline.

That’s a lot of work. What does the interface look like?

To make the Down the Rabbit Hole as user-friendly as possible and give users a strong feeling of control, I gave the physical interface all the fun buttons of the 303-bassline - the 303 has some very audible action when you turn the knobs, and for me it’s fun to turn these knobs for hours.

I have a DIY history of building my own gear, and have built several 303s over the years. I find the circuit interesting, because the sound really lies in its physical components. In fact, I currently have a machine containing three 303s built with the cheapest and crappiest components I could find, and they sound very different, but nice.

I use Max a lot to prototype the machinery I want to build as hardware. I do that to make sure it fits my needs and that it’s fun and compelling to use. But for me, something happens when these digital prototypes evolve into physical hardware, where it’s split out to both digital and analogue circuits.

I really love the early sequencers, where digital and analog worlds are very closely combined and where it’s nearly impossible to tell precisely where the analog ends and digital begins. For me, this combination of both the digital and analog gives the software side of digital world a quirkiness of the analog.

What did the installation actually look like, then?

Here’s a photograph of it, taken when it was installed :

One of the challenges when you’re doing artwork like this out in the open has to do with the amount of space. The installation has to be a certain size to be to be present – to be noticed in the first place – by the public. So, how do you make pocket size interface of four knobs and a button to be spacious?

First off, you go with large buttons and dials. I also added a large wooden framed metal plate so the whole instrument seems big and picturesque. I’d hoped that the large empty metal plate would have attracted some stickers and graffiti so that the installation itself would eventually end up looking like the 909 of Teenage Atari Riot, but it never happened - it has been at the station for some months now and It’s still glossy... only attracting the tracks of a lot of messy fingers!