Review: ‘Algorave India Compilation One’ Marks a Milestone for India’s Creative Coders

For about 7 years now, a thriving pocket of Algoravers has existed in India. For the uninitiated, since the beginning of the last decade and with roots far beyond, creative coders have gathered for events called Algoraves where they generate music and visuals live through coding.

Enter one such event and you are likely to see a musician sitting behind their laptop, typing code that is projected for everyone to see take shape and inform the sound. Good chance it’s shared in conjunction with visual art being generated by another (or sometimes the same) coder. Commonly, this performance might be organised alongside workshops to initiate new creative coders on their journey.

Sprouting through more and more pockets of it across continents, it soon evolved into a connected global community. It’s a world without gatekeeping: most of its tools are open-source, and skill-sharing is as central as performance itself. All in all, and however niche it may be, it’s undoubtedly a movement onboarding more and more people to its fold. In India, it has been spearheaded by the likes of Dhanya Pilo, Abhinay Khoparzi and Akash Sharma since they created Algorave India back in 2018.

7 years on, the collective has released its first-ever compilation in collaboration with New Delhi’s Antariksh Records, offering a timestamp on how the movement has developed in India.

While an event or workshop would require active participation and online performances would feature the creative meandering inevitable in the creative process (a definingly present and desired feature of creative coding, which we will address later), recorded music offers a rare chance to focus purely on the sonic results. That is where ‘Algorave India Compilation One’ comes in.

The 10-track release sees this global movement married with distinctly Indian influences that give the compilation a defining mark that separates it from algorave outputs across the world. The opener ‘Past/Lives’ by nanditi marries sound recordings of the ambience in the music school she attended as a kid in Jaipur and her own rehearsals of Hindustani classical singing with complementary textures. Essentially, she creates a uniquely ambient work that leverages Indian classical music’s immersive nature while expressing her own upbringing and nostalgia – proving a point that, just like any other form, algorithmic music is ripe as a mode of personal expression.

The following number ‘hyperbole samosa’ by Sangarshanan aka roguentropy swaps introspection for satire, turning meme culture into music. Narendra Modi’s bizarre soundbite on AI is spliced into a playful, chaotic soundscape of digital absurdity. Later, Moscow-based Satyarth Mishra aka trophallaxis pays homage to his tabla teacher with ‘taal summit’, a composition built on looping rhythmic patterns that spiral into intricate subdivisions – a seamless meeting point between the cyclical systems of Indian classical music and the generative logic of coding.

A big win for the compilation is that, unlike most modern musical works, which only borrow sounds and textures from traditional music and remove them from their original context, both nanditi and trophallaxis actively engage with the systems of Indian classical music. The works find common ground, whether in their meditative nature or cyclical structures. It’s the most future-facing musicality snuggly fitting with the most ancient one.

A static shot from the dynamic mini-zine by Avani accompanying 'Past/Lives' || See the full dynamic zine here.

Some compilations keep their entries focused on a singular result, while others are about showing the diversity within a connecting theme. ‘Algorave India Compilation One’ comes in the latter.

After the marriage with heritage and local influences, Pratyush aka ashlands’ ‘the winterscapes’ and Kaldi Moss’ ‘Insectual’ arrive with the purpose of creating evolving, even dramatic, soundscapes. The former uses washes of noise and icy synth melodies to take one in a snow storm with the compilation’s most sonically monochromatic take, while the latter mimics the crittering of a deep forest, full of its serenity and discomforting fear alike. The most technologically-contained musical output shows that its results don’t have to be limited to futuristic or dystopian, but can be about the most natural of places.

Dramatic in a different way, eardrummerman creates a setup that translates text to audio by synthesising his own voice to read out a musically-backed poem on ‘ItLies’ while Tig3rbabu, a frequent member of Algorave India, remains equally dramatic – but instead of spoken word, it’s with light-hearted growling shimmering melodies.

Lastly, Spiralynk, Khoparzi himself and beatnyk offer tracks that most centrally place functionality. Khoparzi himself addresses in the concept note of his track: “We are positioning this whole album as "algorithmic music" but also dance music, where a bridge between human emotion and machine creation is key.” On his track ‘Gulf Of Hypernerds’, he guides a system that constantly remixes bits from d’n’b breaks, ritualistic vocals and sound design material to create a pounding club track, while beatnyk attempts to create for a similar setting but free from a procedural concept.

Spiralynk, on the other hand, underpins his glitching fractured beats, which remind one of the most popular pioneers of algorithmic music: Autechre, with the concept of organised chaos. Enjoyable already to anyone with a taste for dance music abstractions, the track ‘infract[ion]’ compels further when one reads the accompanying note and understands the process going on behind the work. It brings to mind a feature of algoraves that passively listening to the record (like most of us now do with most music) leaves out: witnessing the concept and process unfold in real-time.

A static shot from the dynamic mini-zine by Roshini accompanying 'Taal Summit' || See the full dynamic zine here.

To allay that and also represent the visual counterpart of the culture, each track comes accompanied with a short dynamic zine – which actually makes half of the release and warrants its own deep dive – and notes on the process behind both. Even within that, a track like ‘taal summit’ stands tall by inherently demonstrating its concept through the composition itself (and arguably having the most standout visual counterpart besides ‘insectual’ and Beatnyk’s ‘D:$!n+(-)’).

However, it may be a disservice to compare the tracks on the compilation on how well they serve the various functions of usual musical records: intriguing with a concept, self-expression, immersing the listener, making them dance etc. ‘Algorave India Compilation One’ is more like a gallery exhibition, where each piece stands beside the others to expand a shared theme rather than compete for the same purpose. That it manages to do all of that to some degree on top of presenting most of the facets unique to the algorave experience makes it one of the most complete and confident records in its nascent subculture.

Words: Amaan Khan

Artwork by Anushka Trivedi