Speaker A: Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a very special interview episode this week. We're joined today By Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez and Andreas Rau, who both collaborated on the project Toccata recently, a project that we've talked a lot about on the show. It's been talked a lot about on Discord and on Twitter. Everyone really loved it.

Speaker B: Continue to love it.

Speaker A: Everyone continues to love it, which is why we're so pleased to have them on the show today to kind of talk more about that process. Obviously, Trinity's here. You just heard her. Marcelo, Andreas, thank you so much for Thank you for having us.

Speaker D: Thank you for having us.

Speaker A: A special thanks to Andreas too for coming straight from the hospital to here. It's much appreciated. Congrats on the birth and joining the daughter crew. It's very exciting.

Speaker B: It's amazing. That's also extreme dedication to your craft to come here to talk about it later. We could have pushed this probably, but we appreciate you coming here.

Speaker A: And it's really exciting for us. I mean, it's, we've never been able to do an interview like this where it's come like so closely aligned to a release and just, we've never really worked out the timing like that. So it's really exciting. You know, I would assume that most listeners are probably at least familiar with your work on fx hash and what you've released there, but perhaps each of you could in turn do a brief intro of your background and art, or in this case, also music, and how you came to be NFT artists or generative artists and releasing on Tezos and fx hash.

Speaker D: So Andreas?

Speaker B: Well, I can go ahead.

Speaker C: Sure. Yeah, Andreas, my name. I'm a generative artist, as most of you probably know, but I'm also a jazz musician. That's something that probably less people from the Twitter sphere kind of know about. Well, this is where my creative journey began, actually. It's music. Jazz music came later, but it's all like based on this. Well, I'm from a musical family, so I started playing the piano really early on. And so this is kind of where my creative journey started. And the visual side of things basically came in with my studies. I studied design and I've been working as an interaction designer for a while. And always like pursuing some generative experiments at the site, basically. So like using generative systems in my design work and creating generative artworks. I've been doing a lot of like digital and physical things like installations, kinetic stuff, things that move and behave when people move in rooms. These kind of things. And when I first heard about like Hic Et Nunc and Tezos and NFTs and all these kind of things, I got really interested in these new mechanisms of distributing your artwork to like a broader audience in the entire world. This is something that like caught me immediately. And I found it really interesting to see how people were Like dealing with that new medium basically, and how people were using it and how people were like so active in the Tezos art scene in the beginning of Hic Et Nunc. Yeah, and this is basically where my journey into crypto started. So I was reading a lot about NFTs and a bit like about the technology as far as I could wrap my mind around it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Well, then I kind of decided very actively to mint my first NFT on Tezos and on Hic Et Nunc. Because I, like, on the one hand side, I decided to go with the proof of stake blockchain. Because it's such a nice, it has been such a nice alternative to Ethereum for such a long while already. A much lower cost, basically environmental cost. And that is what kind of brought me to Tezos. But the community was the reason that I then actually started to do, to mint and to actively participate in all this conversation and all this, well, in this entire sphere, basically. So that's how I got onto Tezos. Yeah. There's like this one event that kind of was the turning point for me, I would say. And that was the Creative Coding Meetup in Berlin. In March, I believe, last year, March or April, something like that. And talking to Raphael and the other people from there. And like, there was a lot of discussions about NFTs. Everyone was talking about it at the time. And so this is where I really, really started to kind of investigate it and put some time into just finding out what I could do with that.

Speaker B: Were you a part of any online communities before that? I know that a lot of the people that we've talked to You know, they'd been very active, like on Instagram or Twitter and just sharing works in progress. Was that like a sphere that you operated in at all? Or was it just like, Berlin meetup? Wow, this is really cool. Let's go.

Speaker C: Yeah, it was, it was more like, I mean, like, I've never been really active on social media. So this is kind of, it's, I literally created my Twitter account when I minted my first NFT, because I figured it's like, oh yeah, if you, if you want to engage with a crowd, then you got to have a Twitter account. So this is what I did. And before that, it was like, it was basically very much focused on these like interpersonal relationships to people from these creative coding meetups, specifically in Berlin, actually. And also a couple of people around here in Oslo where I'm living now. So that's basically, that was my community before I joined Hic Et Nunc.

Speaker A: Marcelo, if you want to Do your intro.

Speaker D: Yeah, so my name is Marcelo and I am currently a generative artist. My creative endeavors, trying to follow a little bit the same order that we just did. My creative endeavors kind of have been there in the back of my mind for always, more or less. Like when I was a little kid, I wanted to be an architect or a car designer or something like that. And somehow I ended up being an engineer by training. But along the way, I had always had an interest in photography, in music. I actually started music also before anything else, even though I never had any proper formal training and basically didn't also dedicate enough time to learn it properly, let's say. So, well, I kind of play the piano a little bit, but, you know, simple things. And I like to compose my little music and so on. And I have been doing that. For a long time. And then I took on photography, and then I took on little digital art experiments that I was doing, like, I don't know, 3D stuff, ray tracing stuff a long time ago. And then as I studied engineering and computer programming, then I started doing my little experiments with code, with MATLAB, which is the software that I used for my engineering things. And then I kind of, you know, went on developing things for image processing and so on, which is kind of Something that really attracted me very much. I ended up working in the data analysis field for a large financial multinational. And well, at some point it kind of was evident to me that I wanted to, you know, just dedicate more time to these things. I quit my job at the bank, tried to set up my own consultancy, kind of consultancy firm, but it was more like an excuse to find a proper field to develop certain projects like on my own. And then at some point, the lockdown came along, COVID came along. And then, you know, trying to set up your own company, trying to sell services to other companies wouldn't make that much sense back then because everything was kind of frozen. So I started dedicating more time to my coding things at night. And that's when I started actually building my first large generative system, which ended up being Entretiempos, the release that I did on Art Blocks. I didn't have any intention to dedicate myself full-time to that, or I want— I would like to, but let's say I wouldn't allow me the idea of thinking, oh, I might be an artist. It was more like, I like to do this thing, but who is going to be interested? And then by the end of 2020, I got to know about NFTs. Of course, I had been in touch with the blockchain for a long time, but I didn't know that this was, again, like Andreas said, this new way of distributing content and so on. I got interested in that. I started reading. I spent a couple of months totally lost trying to understand all the terminology and all the jargon and all these things. I ended up trying my luck and saying, why not? I'm gonna share my work as well. My first NFT that I released was on actually on OpenSea in January 2021. I still didn't know about Tezos, but then when I got to know about Tezos and Hic Et Nunc, like 3, 4 days after it launched, I went in there and just stayed there because the art was amazing. The community was amazing. The feeling was absolutely phenomenal. And that's where I have been most of my time since.

Speaker A: We love having both of you here dropping on FX Hash. It's always a big moment whenever either of you releases, which I guess is a nice segue into talking now about the collaboration, which was extremely exciting for everyone. Perhaps both of you can share a little bit about how you came together to collaborate. Were you aware of each other's interests and background in music? Is that what caused you to pair up or was that just kind of a happy discovery as you met for the collaboration? And like, how did you even begin to conceptualize Cicada?

Speaker D: Andreas? Or shall I?

Speaker C: I don't know. I mean, it's clearly, clearly it is based around this whole idea of music. And I remember, I don't know if that actually is true, but I remember me being the one taking contact to you, Marcelo.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: I have been fascinated with Marcelo's work for quite a while, obviously. The thing that always speaks to me in Marcelo's pieces is how musical they are, even though they are visual. This is something that is just like touching me very, very much. And this is what I wanted to work with myself. As I said, I'm a jazz musician as well. So I'm making music on a regular basis and I really wanted to to find a way of incorporating this practice into my, well, visual arts practice, if you want to say so, into the NFT practice. This is kind of why I thought it would be really, really nice to do something together with Marcelo on this, like, musical, like, walk this musical journey together. And this is where it all started.

Speaker D: Yeah, he did get in touch with me. And I initially had, I mean, I had been contacted by fxhash to consider this option of doing these collaborations and so on. And I wasn't too sure about it because I had like, my calendar was not too clear. And initially I understood that the pieces would have to be ready more or less during the first 1, 2 months of the release of fxhash 1.0. And to me that would have been impossible. But then Andreas got in touch with me and I thought, well, of course. I mean, I also have been following Andreas' work since, well, since I got to know it. And I've been a fan since. And I thought, well, If anyone, this for sure, this could be a great collaboration. And I would be very much interested in exploring what a collaboration means, because to me it wasn't so clear how to approach that. And to me it was a fantastic, nice discovery to know that he was a musician. I didn't know that he was a musician. And then somehow music came up very quickly. He mentioned about my pieces having some kind of musical rhythm to them or musical reference or something. Which also, I don't know, I was honored and humbled to read that because somehow music is very important to me, even though in lots of my pieces, I'm not really looking for a connection with music when I do the visuals, I mean. But somehow it completely conditions or affects, let's say, what I do. So reading that from him was very special to me. And yeah, we got the conversation started. And I guess that it was very early on touching on this topic that musicality was flowing through our artistic interests that we thought maybe we can, you know, just bring music into the piece and do something in that respect.

Speaker B: How did that collaboration continue then? So you aligned on, we want to do something in this sphere of music. I feel like there's so little insight into how the collaboration process works. You know, I think that we've talked to some people who may have done collaborations in the past, but, you know, it's a total treat to have both of you here together. So when you come up with this initial idea, then what? How does it really progress into something that is full and final and beloved by all from just like these initial thoughts and feelings?

Speaker C: If only we would know. It's like, it's really, it's really interesting how everything just went super organically, actually. I mean, like I've been doing collaborations before, but never like online collaborations in that sense. Like we've, Marcelo and I have never met in person, which I also find remarkable. When we first started talking, it's like we really quickly found like this notion of like a shared interest in music, obviously, but also in this idea of like things that evolve over time, change over time, things that maybe unexpectedly change in ways you don't, you would have never guessed they could change. And it also was like the time when we first started talking was a time when the Ukraine war just had broken out. So it was very much this time of change, basically, and things that we kind of had as a, well, taken for granted for many, many years, all of a sudden were not that given anymore. And so this was like the other main topic that kind of, that we agreed on really quickly, I'd say, because both of us were like really, really interested in like exploring this a bit more and then like talking, talking about this, what's happening in Europe right now in the piece, basically.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah, do you have anything to add, Marcelo?

Speaker D: Well, just that I would stress the point about these things growing organically because these were just conversations. These were just sessions basically to kind of get to know a little bit more about each other's artistic mind, if you would, in the moment, because we didn't maybe spend time trying to, you know, get to know each other on a more personal level back then. It was very much like focused on the art and trying to kind of, you know, get a feeling, I guess, of what we had in mind and how we could at some point find something to do in the collaboration. It was about, oh, taking from the music and taking from this interest in decay, in degradation, in certain way in cycles as well, stemming from the news about Ukraine. All those things just, I don't know, happened in conversations that had kind of no direction. And I think that was actually very good because we didn't stress out to say, oh, we should take this style of yours and this thing of mine, and let's see what we can do with this. But rather, it was more a question of which is the common ground that we would both like to explore, and how can we find a way to do a collaboration that is a collaboration and not just a cut-up of, you know, pieces that we have around. Because it kind of felt that we had to do that. Also maybe because moved by the situation again in Europe and those things, it kind of called for something different. And this is— I'm not saying that this is necessarily the story, but this kind of was in the ambience, or it was at least like in my mind, it was kind of something like that floating around. Now looking back, I think it is so important to have let things mature, to have let those conversations take their time. And then, you know, we've been skipping deadlines for quite some weeks actually in the project, even things that we agreed, oh, I'll try to do this thing. Okay, I'll try to do this thing. Talk to you next week. And then next week, oh, you know, I didn't have the chance to really advance on this. I mean, I was a complete disaster all throughout because, you know, I also had these other things that were going on and, you know, I had to look into this and look into that. And then all of a sudden other new things came along also that, you know, I tried like to shoe in in the middle. And then looking back again, all those things, I think they have been very good. Otherwise, I mean, if we had had like a completely clear table, at least I'm speaking for myself now, But if I had had a completely clean table, then maybe I would have rushed more the desire to kind of find the space for the project and find the concept for the project. And in my experience, at least, the result is always so much better when you have some time to mature things and let them, you know, rest for a while. You think about this thing, oh, I'll do nothing about it for a week. I'm not saying that I did that intentionally. Don't you think that, Andreas? I mean, I really wanted to work. But yeah, but I think it was good actually to leave some of those things just there, you know, like hanging around. And then seeing what happened to those after a week or 2 weeks. And then, of course, since you had to do other things, all those other things also bring some little ideas to your mind that then you can kind of integrate into the flow of this other general thought that is bringing you to whatever thing you're going to do for this collaboration.

Speaker C: I 100% agree. And so it was so fruitful to just like both of us, we had our different things going on at the same time. Like what Marcelo just said is just half the truth, obviously, because I mean, even if he would come back the week after and say like, oh, I didn't have the chance to work on this that I wanted to work on, he actually would have worked on a ton of other things and like, oh, we could do this and that as well. And I've tried this here. And this is kind of, this is kind of how we progressed. We like both of us did experiments all the time, like trying out different stuff and just like organically and by taking our time finding out where we actually want to take this. So there was nothing, no real, what should I say? There was no goal. There was nothing, no vision, nothing we had in mind when we started. There was just like this path that we wanted to walk together and just like trying to find out of things on the way. And as Marcelo said, just taking our time. It's also something that I really, I think that I really appreciate both with this collaboration, but also like in general in life.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: Taking time, letting things just sit there and ripen a bit, just gets so much better.

Speaker B: So it sounds like the initial concept around music came together really quite immediately. But obviously when we look at Taccata, it's incredibly complex, it's incredibly rich, and clearly took a lot of time to like mature and get perfect. Like at what point did you really decide on like, this is going to be like the form that we're pushing towards and What was that like?

Speaker C: It's hard to say because it's like there was no clear cut, obviously. I would say the basic concepts of the piece, both like on a conceptual level, but also on like in terms of the visuals and in terms of the music, like we settled on these concepts rather quickly, actually. Just like this basic idea of having shapes consisting of like a multitude of shapes, again, shapes that move, shapes that contract and expand, shapes that evolve over time. So this very base concept was kind of there from almost the beginning on, basically. Then we just started to build upon this concept. So instead of just like trying to figure out, okay, this is the exact shape and the exact colors and the exact behavior you want to have, it was more like, okay, this is kind of the base. And then let's see what we can do from here. Let's find out how these shapes exactly behave. find out what kind of simple geometric shapes we can use, or should it be more complex? Should it be noise? Should everything float? Should it— whatever. It was like very, very much like this, but also this, yeah, this visual idea just, I don't know where that actually came from, but it just was there very, very quickly as well. We established this understanding of the holes, as we used to call them, very, very, very quickly and just like continue to work with them.

Speaker D: We had a, I think it was a Figma board or something like that to share some ideas that Andreas set up. We just, you know, started putting out some concepts there. Like, the truth is not that many concepts, like Andreas said. Very quickly it was there, it was on the board. And then from that concept, we just played around with it for a long time. And we played around with it and then we said, oh, we played around first in 2 dimensions, like in a flat Completely flat geometry, let's say. But then we thought maybe we can— what if we expand this? And then this will give us some extra behavior for free if we do it on 3D, and then we just set on a projection perspective or whatever. So there was both an exploration of what are the visuals like in terms of what shapes and, I don't know, and what are the behaviors like Andreas was mentioning. At the same time, this also— this other path Of technical exploration, let's say. Myself, I hadn't done any relevant 3D work so far, and I had to kind of learn how P5 works in 3D. And then I had to learn, oh, how am I going to do this? And I was like a little bit lost initially. So to me, it was a journey of technical exploration for quite some time, actually. For quite some time, it was about this nice concept that we have here that somehow we believe it's going to be interesting. The holes, exactly that. That's how we call it. It seems like they can form interesting things somehow when we get to combine them in various ways, when we get to do different things with them. But how can we create them in 3D and how can we create them a little bit efficiently, even though the piece is not the most efficient piece probably that you can find. And I'm pretty sure there's other ways to do it technically that would perform better in most computers. But still, what we got was also the result of a path. So this exploration This back and forth, you were asking before, when did it click or something like that? And even though it's very hard to find a point in time when it clicks, I think it has to do with once the technical aspects of it were good enough so that it would work on some computers at least, then playing around with it until it clicked emotionally somehow. I mean, at least that was what happened to me. It was like, oh wow, the first time I looked at it and I said, Wait, it makes me feel. I get an emotional reaction from the piece. We're getting onto something. And then, and then it's just a matter of, you know, playing around with it a little bit more until, until it kind of makes you feel. And, and towards that emotion thing, music is absolutely key.

Speaker A: I think probably for both of us co-hosts here, it was that combination of the music combined with the flowing rhythmic motion of the holes.

Speaker B: And the decay.

Speaker A: And the decay and all that, that Drew us into the piece. And it's really phenomenal, you know, hearing the story and kind of the organic way it came together and how you, neither of you were working from pre, you know, half-made projects or anything like that, because where you arrived is so unique for fxhash in particular. You know, this is fxhash show. Very often pieces are static, 2-dimensional. To make something that's animated, 3D, and has a music element is almost like you're If you were to assign that project to someone, you're basically like setting them up to fail in a way, from the way that the community tends to react to projects like that. If you look at a lot of like animated work, 3D work, it tends to just not get collected at the same level. So it really feels like such a breakthrough moment to have Takata come out, have people look at it. And like you said, I think it really resonated, that emotion. That is really primed by the music and the animation together. I don't know if there's a question there. It's kind of insane that it worked out like that. To ask a question, I would love to know more about the actual music side of it. So there's 8 different variations when you look at the properties to the pieces, right? So from some of them, I could hear individual phrases that maybe have been reinterpreted from the Toccata itself that you referenced as one of the musical influences, but can maybe you talk a little bit more about how those variations were composed and then where's like the generativeness in the music and the decay and how does it work, like the sound side of it?

Speaker D: Initially, we had this idea of, I don't know, we discussed many concepts and probably this is not a linear story and how we got there, but rather again, a combination of ideas and feelings and then a technical exploration and then doing something once we had the tools, let's say once we have built our technical tools to to finally execute the piece, then it was about what can we do with these tools and where do we get to with these. Originally, we had discussed also this idea, which apparently we both had had in the past, of saying, oh, we love this concept. There's a lot of concepts in there. There was the concept of recomposing works that kind of was interesting to us. There was this concept of the decay of a work, of a musical piece. What does it mean for a musical piece to decay? Is it audio distortion? Is it notes sounding offbeat? Is it notes sounding off pitch? Is it notes missing? I don't know. What does it mean? How does a musical piece decay? Because, and again, this was very important, I guess, throughout music has such a strong emotional presence, and it's probably one of the best ways to encode emotions. It carries that weight a lot on the piece. So the reaction is very much encoded there precisely because of that, because it carries a lot of emotion. Then your relationship to how you develop the music is also very emotional. And that's why we came with some references, like Toccata was a beautiful reference that was brought early on by Andreas, the Toccata by Prokofiev. And we had this idea of maybe we can just kind of make variations on it, or what do we do with this? How are we going to translate this piece into the work? Shall we make a recording of it? Shall we take a recording of it? Shall we distort it? Shall we— how are we going to do that? We didn't want to build our own entire sequencer inside the piece, but in the end we did. That's kind of what we have. We have a full-blown sequencer in there and composing tool, and it's a lot of things. So it kind of started from a very simple thing of how are we going to technically add music to the piece? So there were these explorations with p5.sound, and it didn't quite work. It was a little bit buggy. And then Andreas tried out Tone.js and it worked much better. So we took that as a foundation. And then how do we go with this? Shall we use synthesized sounds? Shall we make prerecorded segments that then we will combine somehow like audio files? You know, it went on evolving and evolving and evolving all the time in a dialogue between the technical possibilities of the environment, the time constraints that we had, and then the—

Speaker C: The—

Speaker D: let's say, artistic direction that we would like the piece to have. So it was all through that dialogue, I believe, that we started exploring the capabilities at each time that we had with the tools that we had. And then some of the pieces started coming up there. Oh, with this sequencing, very basic sequencing system, we can do this thing. And then Andreas would improve the system with some more capabilities. And then with those more capabilities, now we can do this other thing. And well, that's like a general intro, but maybe Andreas wants to talk more about the details of it and the generative aspects of it, because they're very interesting.

Speaker C: Yeah. As Marcelo just said, there was this basic idea of let's not create a sequencer. Let's not try generative music in that sense, because as a musician, I always find it a bit tricky to really connect to generative music. So there's, I mean, I've listened to a lot of generated pieces. And I love a lot of like ambient work that is super, super nice. But we agreed really, really quickly on that we don't want to do basically an ambient piece, which would have been interesting and fun as well. But it was like we really wanted to put forward this narrative that we are telling with the visuals also through the music and wanted to kind of have this musical support to the piece and or foundation, if you will. We talked about the Disintegration Loops by William Basinski, which you also mentioned on the show last time. So really nice that you got this reference, which is basically a piece that is talking about the exact same topic. It's talking about decay and talking about the physical decay of like a recording tape, basically, that wears out over time. And this little phrase that they're playing over and over again, just like gets more and more distorted over time. And this is kind of where we started the journey, just like having snippets from this Toccata in D minor by Tchaikovsky to transform them over time, to distort them, just to talk about the story of decay. Then we went down this route and saying, oh yeah, but what if we would add on top of this just like some notes here and there, just like fills, just to make it a bit more interesting, just to have it a bit more telling a story and not just like, not just basically doing these exact same things as the disintegration loops we were doing. And then we were basically just starting to move further and further into actually creating this sequence and creating this generative music system. It's very much built around this idea of, I would say around the idea of jazz music, because that is kind of what I, well, what I had in mind when I created or was working on this musical system. In jazz music, you always have kind of a set structure. So you always have like, okay, this is like part A, part B, and this is like the chord progressions in there. And this is the scales you want to use and so on and so on. This is kind of what Toccata obviously also builds on. There's like different parts to the music. There's different scales you can define. There's all these kinds of things. But what I found really interesting in the process was playing with this scale between composed and generative. There's a couple of the musical variations in Toccata that are a lot more, what should I say, a lot more composed actually, where we basically defined each and every note or maybe almost every note. And then there's like some of them that are like filled in randomly here and there. And then they're layered on top of each other. And through this, then really interesting complexity emerges. Like other pieces, then again, like other variations are completely generated. When we first introduced these, like we had the musical variations all got names, just like arbitrary names to have something to identify them with. And I remember this moment when I was typing this name of the one that is fully generated and it was fully generated. It was exciting because I have attempted to write generative music systems for years and years and years. And they always sucked and I always hated them. And I never put something like that out in the world.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: But this time it was different since we had this very clear foundation and this idea, okay, we have the composed parts and we can enrich them with some generative parts and we can variate them over time. Again, coming back to the idea of jazz music, you have going through the theme once or twice, and then you have like the improvisation part. And this is basically what Tokara is doing. It's improvising on top of a given scheme, on top of Given chords or chord progressions. And I mean, I think it works.

Speaker D: It does work.

Speaker A: What are your favorite variations? I mean, I think we each have a favorite of our own, but I'd love to know which are your favorites.

Speaker C: I find that really, really, really hard to answer. I honestly, I can't tell. I've listened to them over and over and over again, all of them. I had this breakdown a couple of weeks before release where I was like, oh shit, I hate all of them. I don't want to listen to them ever again. I mean, like, we were just like keeping on improving them and like playing a bit more with the effects that we're using and so on and so on. And then things played out again very well. But it's like, I seriously can't say if I have a favorite variation.

Speaker D: Yeah, I agree completely with that. And I also had kind of this moment of, I can't listen to this anymore because, well, you're just debugging and it's all the time you reload and reload and reload and then the music is there and again and again and again and again and again and again. And you kind of get very easy. I mean, the visuals is like they don't attack you somehow. I mean, you don't get so fed up of something quickly visually, but audio, for example, it made me think if the pieces always start in the same position and people don't stare at the piece for an hour or 2 hours. Then they don't get to discover the variations that can happen in the piece at the back. And this was a conversation we had late in the development phase, let's say. We were not so far away from release. Because until then, we let the pieces sound in the way that they were pre-composed somewhat. And then they start with their improvisation. But the truth is that after hitting reload too many times, it's like— You know, it's much better to just let them roam freely in the musical land. And see where they get you to. I don't have either any favorite piece. To me, it depends on the moment when you listen to them. And also some of the variations work very well with some of the visuals and maybe not so well with other visuals. So it's like the combination of things, what works. So there's no clear favorite. And the most interesting to me is that even though I may have in a moment, in a specific moment, a favorite or another favorite, I listen to one of the other variations And they will always come up with something unexpected at some point. And this is the beauty of both generative art, but then seeing it happen in generative music, generative-ish music, somehow like pre-composed/generative. I don't know what this is, but it totally— and I remember the first time that I heard one of the— once Andreas upgraded a little bit the sound system and he said, I did this and that, and now we have these possibilities. And then I listened to the first thing that was done with that. And I told him, I said, this is like the first time I hear generative things that I would actually listen to. Because, you know, it sounds— it has some meaning, musical meaning, and it can convey— I can attach a feeling to this piece of music. It's not just some random thing that, you know, I mean, currently we can do very beautiful things like you can have AI models that can mimic what Bach would do, what Beethoven would do, and it would sound kind of like Beethoven, but they would be completely lacking in soul. And I kind of found a soul in the music system that we have in Toccata. And there is— there are these moments where it just breaks your expectation. And that's what I like to do. I'd like to discover those little moments instead of, you know, kind of thinking, oh, I like this theme in particular. Of course, there are things that I like, like more, but it's the whole thing evolving what makes me sometimes sit down and stare at it. And listen at it.

Speaker A: I kind of don't know if we should say our favorites now after those answers, but in listening to everything in kind of preparation for talking to you both, like, I came to really appreciate the minimalism of Andanto con Moto a lot and how sparse it was relative to the others. And just every time I would load up one of those and just kind of like let it get through its start, and then all of a sudden some of the other elements come in, I really, really liked that one.

Speaker B: My personal preference is Vivace con Grazia, with like just that deep bass note just kind of keeping you steady throughout. It's something I could just listen to forever. Maybe it is slightly more ambient than some of the other ones in a way, just because it is so like, I don't know, it sits in my soul in like a weird way where I could just go with that for forever, I think. And all the other pieces are great. But that's the one that just, oh, it hits me really hard in all the best ways.

Speaker C: Well, that's really, really touching to hear. Thanks for sharing this.

Speaker D: It is. Thank you.

Speaker B: There was something that you were talking about, Marcelo, about the time element. It was the thing that you brought up. And when you're talking about it, it kind of sounds like you introduced the time element because you didn't want to start hearing the pieces from the same beginning point over and over and over again. But how did you get to like the practice and like the implementation of putting in a timestamp and just making this a piece that always exists and not always just from the same spot where it's kind of existing in time forever. And it's just, you happen to start listening. You just poke your head in the door of like this amazing concert.

Speaker D: Ever since we thought that it would be a piece that would have cycles of degradation and blooming, let's say, of getting old and getting young again somehow. Once you have that mindset, the truth is there is no other way to do the piece than by having it live an eternal life with cycles, and then you just happen to be in a moment of the cycle. But if you always start from the very beginning of the piece, then it's very hard to actually experience that decay that we were thinking about. And like we said earlier, this was a topic that was of interest to us. So it was kind of easy that the idea clinged on to the project like very strongly. Finding, let's say, the way to technically do that, it's the matter of doing it. I mean, once you know more or less the concept that you want to have, there are some technical aspects because the visuals and the music have like a little bit different ways of Timing themselves and so on, and we tried to make them work as much together as possible so that everything would work. And at some point, we decided that the piece would have a birth date, actually, and then that would be the thing that would set everything. That would be like the mark where I mean because you need to have a reference point because if you open the piece today, which what is what does it mean today? Today means we look at the calendar and we know. what today is, but we have a calendar, which is the reference. So we needed a reference and the reference, the birthdate that we set was the important thing. And then from there, you just, you know, you just have to count the time and measure the time elapsed and affect all the control signals, let's say, of the piece by that amount. The concept, like I said, in my opinion, it's like very natural. You know, if you're thinking about these cycles of decay and degradation, that piece should actually work like that.

Speaker C: What I find really beautiful about this way of engaging with a piece is that you always have this window into something. As you were saying before, like, kind of peeking into a concert hall and just like listening to this little part of the performance. And I really like to think of Toccata as a performance, actually. Not a static piece, not a fixed piece by any means. It's just, it's living. It's going to be different each and every time you You watch it, even though there are similarities, obviously. Also, when you're talking to a music performer, it's like, of course, performances are going to be different each and every time you're performing. It's affected by your mood, it's affected by the audience, affected by the place you're playing at, and so on and so on and so on. And this is— having this in a generative piece, this window in our computers, basically, I find that really, really beautiful, actually, as also as a Just one more thing to add regarding this.

Speaker D: We talked much about creating a piece that would actually foster that you would spend time with the piece, which is not so common probably. And also maybe goes, you know, it makes the piece harder to experience because you have to spend time. A static image is instant. I mean, of course you need to spend some time looking at the details and everything, but But your vision captures the whole piece at once. It's immediately there and you have this impression. But with a moving thing, with something that happens in time, you need to spend time to fully experiment it. And then if you go back to the piece and you experiment the same thing again, then maybe it loses a bit of the interest.

Speaker C: Of course.

Speaker D: I mean, there are very nice videos, for example, and you just want to watch them again and again and again. But we thought that the experience could be much different if you just go and you see the same thing but different. Like Andreas just said, a musical performance. I mean, I can go and watch the same concert by the same composer 5 times because I love it, but every time you'll find some nuances to the performance. In this case, maybe the differences are even bigger. But it was very interesting to just having the piece be different in different moments in time and letting it evolve. It kind of also gives you room to have different reactions to the piece also. I don't know how to properly explain this, but your emotions take place in time. Your cognition takes place in time. I mean, if you only take a single fraction of time, there is no emotion because emotion is actually an evolving thing. The biochemistry of emotion happens in time. I mean, there's no such a thing as this is a photograph of your emotion. Your emotion cannot be frozen. And then the piece also plays out a little bit in that respect. It evolves because it has to progress, because everything has to progress, because the notion of stillness and the notion of permanence is false in nature and in reality. And hence the piece also has to move forward with time.

Speaker A: That makes me feel like this next question would be really appropriate. Considering the piece is so dynamic, And whenever you view it, however you're feeling, wherever the piece is in relation to its birthday, all of these factors and how it might change. When you were working on it together, did you ever imagine how it might be displayed? What is the ideal way for someone to— I mean, did you think like, you know, museum projector, like multiple next to each other? Like, are they meant to be contrasted or are they meant to kind of be these little solo experiences that If you have multiple of them, that's great, but they should kind of be evaluated individually. Like, we talked in an interview recently with a collector about exactly this, and LeMonde2D, we just had an episode with him, and he is putting a lot of thought not just into how to display the work he collects digitally, but also how to display it physically, you know, through printouts or in the case of like Takata, like some kind of screens, right? So what is your vision for how people should view it?

Speaker C: We haven't actually talked about this. This is going to be really interesting. Each and every iteration of Toccata is so strong on its own that I personally, I would prefer Toccata to be displayed one by one, basically. So having like one screen and also like because of the music, because the music is such a vital part of the piece, you can't have like multiple, what should I say, multiple music pieces overlapping in the room. It just would get too much.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: total chaos. So I would imagine like one room, one screen or a projection or whatever, and like decent speakers. This is how I would like to experience Toccata personally. I haven't set up this space yet, but I really should. That'd be really nice.

Speaker D: I fully agree that there's no way to have multiple Toccatas on display publicly next to each other because of the music. This was a recurring theme along the whole development of the piece when we started devising a way to, you know, you can save image to your hard drive or something like that, it feels very much incomplete. We left the option to save an image because it is kind of almost a de facto thing maybe nowadays, and for whatever reason, maybe you want to take that away. We put much effort into you being able to extract a full piece of the work, like visuals in motion with music. And if it wouldn't be possible, then probably we would have removed completely. I mean, For example, saving just a video without the music, that would have been unthinkable. Because again, the music is the piece. I mean, it's not something that— it's not an extra. It is the whole thing combined. So taking that into account, then to me, it's not possible to experience the piece only visually. If you would have multiple screens, then you would have multiple headphones. So multiple people can connect to a single screen, maybe, if you want to have like a shared experience somehow where there are multiple screens. But to me, it is a bit about a personal thing. I love just enjoying it in my laptop with my headphones or, you know, with loudspeakers. And that's very nice to me. But a proper setup with a decently sized screen with decent loudspeakers, then that's truly something else. That's also something that I have still not done. I have projected it only once with a projector on a wall with my laptop speakers. So not the best possible setup. But again, the experience is very much personal. It's about you and the piece and how it moves you. Because again, to me, even for example, if you're at a concert and there's like this audience with 500 people, 1,000 people, whatever, they're all listening to the same music, but you're processing it very differently. And in this case, since there are visuals and music, and if you would have many at the same time, there would be no possibility because then that is like listening to 2 songs at the same time. You can't do that. To me, the time aspect of it makes it that if you are going to experience it, you have to experience one. You can maybe then shift it or you can do, I'll see another one, or I go to the next room. And I don't, I doubt that people can have many rooms devoted to Toccata, but who knows? People are free to do so. If anyone does, please send some pictures. Well, videos.

Speaker C: Oh yes.

Speaker B: I'm just imagining like a dinner party of sorts where you're just going through a bunch of different variations. Like you kind of let each sit for like 30 minutes or so and then move on and you get dinner and a show.

Speaker C: It's also really nice to just play Toccata from your phone. I've been doing this a lot these days. Like I was, as I said, I was at the hospital with a newborn baby and I was playing Toccata a couple of times because she actually recognized the music and reacts to it from pregnancy. It was obviously the music she listened to the most, like by far. So yeah.

Speaker A: That's super cool. It was such an amazing innovation in a way, like to include that ability to record from the piece. Like so simple, just pressing R, it starts, press R again and you get this full clip downloaded. It was so seamless. I mean, it made it so easy in the beginning to start sharing clips, especially when the project was up in the queue before the auction started. People were going in and flipping through the variations and recording and sharing them in Discord. It's just like, And I know that that's a part that's also going to potentially come soon too, right? The ability for people to maybe mint those clips and turn them into their own kind of pieces. Can you tell us a little bit about where Tokata is going from here and like what that next step is going to be?

Speaker C: As you said, we are planning on doing this, on setting up this system where collectors can basically extract a slice of time of Tokata, a window into their piece they collected. And then Marcelo and I are going to mint this. It's something that is still in the progress. We didn't finalize this yet. It's hopefully not too long away. Just give us a couple of weeks. Things need to ripen, as we said. Things need to take a bit of time and it's going to be good in the end. So yeah, this is kind of what we think is really nice about, well, Tocada and about this recording system basically. And it's not only the shareability, which is Super nice, obviously. But it's also this that you can relate to one moment more than to other moments of Tukara, which is totally fine. I mean, it's evolving, it's changing. It's life is not beautiful each and every day. You have days where you're tired, you have days where you're super pissed off, you have days really happy, and you have days you really want to kind of play over and over again. And this idea of like having having this these slices of tokata of your piece and having them minted and having them being able to showcase those moments that you really like and that you really appreciate. This was really important to us, and that is why we— well, that's why we decided to put up this possibility.

Speaker D: Just to add— well, not add, but maybe stress some points— the ability for a collector to select their points in the piece probably also makes them experience the piece in a different way. It's not just a spectator point of view, but it's all of a sudden it becomes much more yours because this clip that I selected, like Andreas says, this is my happy part of the day, but it's my happy part of the day. I mean, the day is going on with a lot of things, but then this is my happy part of the day and I get to choose it and I get to select this piece, which is, which is what I really want to have then maybe in my gallery, my wallet or whatever. That kind of maybe creates a new relationship to the piece. And it gives you room to experience it further somehow, which I believe is nice because to me one of the one of the nice things about making art is to touch to let people be in touch with themselves somehow. I mean, this is this is always my reaction when I see a piece of art or when I experience a piece of art that I particularly like any art any form of art and maybe particularly music when I listen to certain specific pieces of music, I get moved so deeply. And then when I get to spend more time with that, I find that the strength of that is stronger. So maybe letting collectors, giving this option to collectors will actually like maybe potentially trigger some extra interest, like some extra, I'm going to spend some more time with this. And this exploration might actually be good for them. Maybe not. I mean, I'm not saying that this is like, oh, this is very important because we're letting people know. But I find it very interesting that when you let an experiencer explore the piece in different ways and experience it further, then maybe it is nice.

Speaker A: That's all.

Speaker B: I think that when this first came out, Toccata first came out, there was, you know, obviously people exploring the music, but I think people creating that deeper connection by putting in a date was the number one thing that I think we saw people talking about was Oh, this is what it's going to be on New Year's. This is what it's gonna be my birthday. This is going to be how Takata is when I'm 100 years old, when I am 500 years old. And really it's giving you that window into a time when you may no longer be, or when it's like a moment of significance within your own life.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Obviously the music part is important in being able to find the music that resonates with you, but it's also seeing how people relate to a particular window. Like no matter what that sounds like, we can't go back in the past and change our past. That was what was happening on a particular day at a particular time. For better or for worse, it was our lived experience. And I think that people really, really have responded to that as well.

Speaker A: You know, collectors are not gonna be able to just mint as many clips as they want, right? By restricting them to maybe only a handful, you're also putting us in a position of sitting with the piece and curating out the 2 or 3 or whatever will be allowed that really speak to us as the viewer, right? Like, I think that's in some sense, then that restriction is actually really wise because it becomes, you have to be more thoughtful about it than if you just said, if you hold a Tokata, you can mint as many of these as you want, right? No, you only get so many. I really appreciate that. So I'm wondering if you'll both allow, like, we maybe have a couple more random questions about the project that we could wrap up with, if that's okay. And then, you know, Andreas, if you don't need to go take a nap.

Speaker C: I'm fine.

Speaker A: So one thing in particular, which is maybe a little more nuts and bolts about the project, you know, obviously There's the visual element to it, the music element to it. fx hash limits you on the file size and all of that. So were there anything that you originally intended for the project that had to get scaled out in order to bring it into the constraints of fx hash and kind of that limitation? Or was it just like, was that never an issue at all as you were working on it?

Speaker C: I personally found it actually a very fruitful constraint because Because I mean, we have obviously been at this point where we were trying to add, like, specifically on the music side, since we were working with samples, like the sound files are taking up some space, obviously. And so we started adding different instruments, basically different layers again on top of the music. We could have probably gotten away with it also, like in terms of the restrictions of fx hash. But then it was like, should we? Should we really? Should we not just stick to the very basics and stick to the piano and stick to this very basically restricted aesthetics in the music? This is what we then decided for doing and not adding more and just removing and removing and removing and just having the bare minimum and the piano and some effects and some Some small additions here and there. You probably have read about it on the project page. It's a special piano. It's the piano that I learned to play on as a kid that I sampled sometime this summer. It was also one of these very organic moments in the creation of this piece. Like, I was spending a couple of days at my parents' place this summer, and I was actually intending not to do any work. It just occurred to me that I need to record this piano and I need to do this here and now. And I need to have this in Toccata. And I was so— I got really excited and I told Marcelo about it and he was like, oh yes, we need to have this. Sure. Sound quality probably isn't the best in the world, but I know, you know, it's— to me, Toccata is not about sound quality. It's about this connection to the soul that Marcelo has been talking about. We managed to create something that at least talks to my soul. Yeah. So coming back to your question, it's like, it was really, really healthy to have this restriction in place, to not be able to dream too wild in a sense and say, oh, let's have a full orchestra. Let's sample violins and whatever, and just have it all in there. No, let's reduce it to the very minimum that speaks to our souls.

Speaker D: I concur.

Speaker A: Trinity, do you have any, anything else you wanna—

Speaker B: No, I, I think that this conversation has been so wonderful and so enlightening, and obviously you had such an excellent write-up on the piece that Will is very happy that you released.

Speaker A: Before the drop.

Speaker B: Before the drop.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: It does go so much into like that depth and the detail that you have, but being able to hear it from you two live. And, you know, just have that— having that conversation just takes it to a whole other level, I think, for me, because you're just sharing so much. And that is also just another amazing thing. It feels very in line with the piece itself. And I, I think that it's so good that this is like the first piece that we're actually talking about specifically. Like, when we've talked to artists before, it's about their work.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Just generally, and I think it's appropriate that our first deep dive is for Takata specifically.

Speaker A: Really awesome that this worked out, and thank you both again for coming together so quickly and finding the time to do this. Yeah, so I guess this would be a good place to wrap it then. Maybe, is— do either of you want to add anything? Is there anything that we didn't ask that we should have asked that you want to throw out there?

Speaker C: There's one thing that we Haven't talked about it. I mean, we kind of we kind of talked about it, which which is the the write-up like the little article that we that we posted before we released the piece. We are indeed at this very moment working on an a bit more in-depth version of this article since I mean it was pre-release, so there there was a lot of other things to to do and take care of as well. But you know there's going to be an extended version of this this art. article sometime soon. When, who knows, but it will be there and we're gonna, we're gonna let you know.

Speaker D: Cool. Yeah, nothing, nothing more to add on my side besides that. And, uh, well, just to say that it's an honor that you would, uh, be interested in having a full show about One Piece. So thank you for that.

Speaker C: Really, thank you so much.

Speaker B: One last question is, if you guys had to do another collaboration together again in the future? Would you work together again? Was it a good experience?

Speaker C: I can wholeheartedly say yes to this. I would love to, I would love to create the, the fugue after the Toccata. Who knows?

Speaker D: Yes, I do.

Speaker A: Well, thank you both, Andreas, Marcelo. It's again such a pleasure to have you, and I think it— you've maybe inspired us to try to do more shows like this where we, where we deep dive on a project. It was I think really fruitful, and I think everyone's gonna really enjoy hearing directly from you about the piece. And again, it was just such a special— this is such a special piece to both of us as well. Like, we were so excited to collect it and talk about it on the show. So it's really awesome to, you know, and also we'd probably, of course, we'd probably love to have both of you individually for like a regular artist interview episode, but we can— no pressure. We'll work that out for another time. Yeah, cool. So that's Tocata. That's Andreas and Marcelo. And thank you again, both. We hope everyone enjoyed listening. Later.