A video montage of Crackbits 2.5 in Tilburg with Flex Busterman, me & Raquel, Rioteer, Gameboys A Gogo and DJ Carebear with Razorblades. I’m just doing the good ol’ Spit, but check out the other ones. Flex Busterman was pure eggzelenze.

A short part of the mega C64-jam is featured in this video about Hacknight, made by Northern Lights.

A re-destruction of the Dutch national anthem, meant to be performed at Hacking At Random 2009 for Bits of Freedom, the Dutch digital rights organization. Unfortunately I got sick and couldn’t attend, but this is the video of the rehearsal. The software is Defmon, and you can’t copy it. Wuao wuao wuao wuao wuuuaaaooo. Not so much improvisation in this one, except for the trashy solo at the end, but I’ll post more of those things later on.

At Hatebit in London I improvised live with Dan Stowell, who used his own neat setup. His voice is translated into the Spectrum AY-soundchip in real-time, giving it a truly crunchy dialect (like this). There are rumours about a recording all around the internets, but we’ll see. There are some bits of video here. Update 100507:

An excerpt of POLYBIUS 2.0 by Raquel Meyers + Goto80
Recorded at fh.meppen, Berlin 100113.
Presented by Visual Berlin

I used the Arp 2500 and a Commodore 64. I sequenced, played the keyboards and tried different ways of synchronizing them. Eventhough the studio has so many machines to use, I deliberately focused on one in order to gradually improve my trial and error methods (being somewhat inexperienced with modular monsters).

The C64 has analogue filters and is not as deterministic as other computers – something I always appreciated. I saw this residency as an opportunity to amplify and recontextualize these characteristics, in order to take the C64 into a new ultra dimension.

Neither of these machines are optimum for setting exact tempos. Unlike today’s standards they are influenced or even determined by electric currents. On the 10-step sequencer of the Arp, you have a knob to set the tempo, and every millimeter counts. To me it also seemed to fluctuate a bit in the tempo, possibly caused by other signals leaking into the clock signal. (This can be solved, but I like to encourage these things)

On the C64, you normally have predetermined tempo-settings to choose from. If you hear a C64-song, it will likely be in either 125.31 or 150.37 BPM. In European PAL-country that is, because the tempos are derived from the electric current.

However, with my dear Defmon software I can set the tempo with maximum precision – down to a tick of the processor. Going out of the inherent tempos however, has consequences for the sound. You can no longer be sure that envelopes and loops sound the same. To avoid this, I usually have the C64 as master, but this time I adjusted the tempo after the Arp.

The process was this: output the clock signal of the Arp as audio, sample 2 minutes of it, analyze the BPM, convert the BPM into hex-values according to the other speed settings of Defmon, and you got it synchronized. Sort of.

I can hear all you tech-geeks sighing over this lamer solution. But it was wonderful to leave the machines running, hearing them mutate by themselves since they were slightly out of sync, or due to electrical leakages in the Arp and uncontrolled bugs in the C64. From a technical point of view, this might be possible to do with a laptop, but this was sometihng profoundly different from working with über-data-control.

All this amounted to several hours of recordings. Some of these 30 minute improvisations can be cut up in parts, and overdubbed with more C64, to create songs that also relate to eachother quite specifically. But we will see what happens. I already miss that studio with tropical heat and sparkling beats!

update: torrent of the video is here (thanks rosamannen!)
update2: complete song here
update3:

Goto80 – Ponky my C64-song, got #3 in the competition. It’s some kind of dub-blues-rock, or something? Made on a 6581 but sounds best on 8580. The C64-emulator VICE does a pretty good job with this. Or, you can check out the ultra-sloppy remixes: MP3#1 and MP3#2.

Made music for two Amiga releases: Otro’s announcement intro for Mazemod – which is an online Amiga radio channel. (not yet really online though, hehe) And yeah, also made a quick’n'dirty module for the new DUREX release: The Message.

Me and Frantik also did a live-set that might pop up online sooner than Pat Boone. Or Bryan Adams. In the meantime you should definitely check out this youtube-clip – recorded in the middle of the first night of LCP… while you were sleeping, losers! Goto80 + Frantik – Summer of 64

More about LCP here

BLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLA
BLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLABLA

Some pretty trashy uploads to internet2008.se:

Goto80 – Bull i Bit
Goto80 – Baggis (8kbps Doublespeed Error)
Goto80 – Fishbabe
Goto80 – Foros (Volume Rimixi)
Goto80 – g80raggatest1b