Algorave DJs Crack the Code in Silicon Valley

The newest electronic music experience is half rave, half computer science class.

Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to attend a dance music festival that isn’t replete with bass drops and more than a handful of DJs imploring the masses to “put their f*cking hands up,” but new Silicon Valley happenings called “algoraves” are harkening back to the erstwhile days of IDM (intelligent dance music) and the producers who built a foundation of noise on the back of modular synthesis.

At the Algorithmic Art Assembly, a recent two-day festival in San Francisco dedicated to algorithmic music and art, a mix of visual artists, coders, hackers and software designers talked shop during the day in a series of demonstrations, then danced the night away to falling lines of code straight out of The Matrix. For fans of producers like Aphex Twin, Richard Devine and Phoenecia, the algorave aesthetic is a welcome return to the frenetic, on-the-fly live music environment that has more in common with avant-garde performance art than it does the pantomime of today’s low-hanging EDM fruit.

Learn more about algoraves and the Algorithmic Art Assembly’s two-day festival here.