RjDj to me is the unexpected point of culmination of several years working with Pure Data. You may already know, that RjDj scenes are written with Pd, so let me talk a bit about it: When I started with Pd – I guess that was in 2002 – it seemed to be a cool music application, but one, that would take years to master. At that time I didn’t know a single Pd user in my town (although that’s Cologne, so it’s not a small village), so it was only possible to get in contact with other users far away by using the net to communicate. The open source nature of Pd helped immensely with that as well as the spirit of sharing that makes the community: Unlike in the traditional music tool industry, Pd is defined by its users and developers. Quite often the users are the developers. It is their work, that makes Pd what it is today.

I gathered a lot of knowledge and advice through the Pd mailing list and I also spent a lot of time giving back this knowledge by publishing my work freely as well, by spreading the word in workshops as a teacher, by writing articles for magazines. But while the Pd core community keeps growing and attracts artists from various fields, “normal” people still were left out.

RjDj suddenly changed that. Now music made with Pd – reactive, renewable music, which responds to the listener’s environment and actions – this music can reach people, who have no knowledge of the past 30 years of computer music, of algorithmic composition or new media art.

I just stumbled accross a quote by Speedy J: “Twenty years ago the majority of the music fans would never listen to abstract electronic music, and now the entire world is dancing to abstract repetitive non narrative electronic music performed by guys behind laptops!”

RjDj pushes this an important step further: It gets rid of the “guys behind laptops” and it redefines the meaning of “performing”. A new unknown area has been entered and now has to be explored.

My Scenes

Here’s what Michael wrote about my scene Gridwalker, which is included in the 1st RjDj album release:

Frank presented a project he did ages ago, where he generated melodies based on different grids. When we listened to it we came up with the idea of hooking it into amaury’s acoustic energy analysis tools and the result is really amazing. Gridwalker is like a fish that swims next to you. When the environment is more hectic, gridwalker swims and dances all around you, jumps forth and back and when it is more quiet it simply swims along your side. When i discussed RjDj with Kai Krause he was imagining a scene exactly like gridwalker. He said it would be cool to have something that just plays along and after a while you start to recognize that it is alive and reacts to you and your environment…. can’t wait to send this scene to Kai.