Episode 1: Welcome to XJ music

Transcript

Charney Kaye
Hi, I’m Charney Kaye, founder and CEO of XJ music. I’ve been a hacker and electronic musician since I was a kid. I was constantly on the drum machine, staying up all night, making beats. Let me tell you about a project I’ve been passionate about for 20 years. XJ is a music technology project. It’s a new algorithmic medium for collaborative aleatory music. For artists, XJ is a new avenue of expression in a world now enamored with AI plagiarism. For audiences, XJ is a new experience, with exclusive streams live 24/7. My friends and extremely talented musicians are my closest thought partners in this business. The team has made XJ a reality. Allow us to introduce ourselves. We got Dave Cole here.

Dave Cole
Hey!

Charney Kaye
Mark Stewart.

Mark Stewart
Hey!

Charney Kaye
Ian Hersey.

Ian Hersey
Hey!

Charney Kaye
And Jamal Whittaker.

Jamal Whitaker
What’s going on?

Charney Kaye
Welcome to XJ music.

(XJ music: Chill House by Bump)

Charney Kaye
It’s been more than seven years since I was first talking with Mark, just sharing these very vague ideas about this, and then it’s been a year since all of us that are here got to listen to the first tonal sounds that XJ was making. When a person now looks at XJ music, they just see this complete picture. Even though this is very much in its infancy, it’s all there. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen some pretty freaky AI music apps out there. But XJ is not AI. XJ is a musical instrument. We’re proud to be a human music tech project.

Jamal Whitaker
Right.

Charney Kaye
And hold that down.

Jamal Whitaker
All the way! That mirrors any band, you’re doing it for the love of it. You’re doing it for the passion. You’re doing it for the artistry of music, music making.

Charney Kaye
So after we released the Alpha prototype app, Jamal and I spent all this time focus testing. We send the app out to anonymous testers who make these recordings using the app while speaking into their phone.
We reviewed a bunch of these throughout the process to identify the dissonance preventing people from accepting us as a music listening app. We’ve iterated on the design numerous times— and lately we’ve been getting good feedback.

App Tester: Michael
Okay, so I have downloaded XJ music. From what I understand, it looks like it is going to stream 24/7 original music in different playlists. There was one that was Lo-Fi beats, which is actually something I enjoy. So I like that it’s just really simple. You just click on it, and it starts playing. That’s actually something I do a lot is I’ll just look up a genre. But not being able to skip a song, that would be a little bit frustrating, because there’s definitely a lot of times I just don’t like the song, and I just really enjoy being able to skip it.

App Tester: Alyssa
This music was just some really cool beats. The beats varied a little bit, just kind of some nice background music. I like that we can read the different descriptions about what we choose to play. I love that it’s something different and unique.

App Tester: Ian
I like the concept, the way that it talks about how it’s not just a DJ putting records back to back, that it’s introducing new music into the streams. And I do like to focus on kind of like background ambience, trying to listen to news and podcasts while consciously thinking about my work is a little bit more difficult.

App Tester: Stellar
Almost every day I listen to music, things like classical, jazz. One of the things I’ve liked about it is, here it says, “we’re not playing records back here.” I think it’s a good thing. The algorithm plays for you something completely different. So you’ll listening to fresh ideas every time. Well, it’s probably an advantage and a disadvantage. Sometimes there are songs which I almost listened to every day, they’re the same songs. But then there are days there are other days where you don’t want to listen to the same songs, you just want to listen to something completely different.

Charney Kaye
The level of honesty you get from that situation is pretty cool.

Ian Hersey
Yeah, I wish there was that for like other parts of life. Tell me what you really think. For cooking or something.

Charney Kaye
You could do that.

Jamal Whitaker
Yeah

Ian Hersey
You are getting complete honesty because they don’t know you from Adam. So there’s no reason for them to like cushion it, right?

Jamal Whitaker
Exactly. And moments where you know, even the apps design, looking so similar to other music streaming services, and people would intuitively just hop on and start playing something and be like, well, where’s the lyrics tab?

Charney Kaye
That’s a sign we’re doing a bunch of things right, where our app experience is on par with major listening platforms. And we sneak into the part of the mind that’s using Apple Music and Spotify, like sneaking into the VIP section.

Mark Stewart
Yeah, you just hit “podcast” on the app, and it just has a scrambled up version of this conversation

Charney Kaye
That goes on forever.

Ian Hersey
It never repeats.

Charney Kaye
Somebody would love that.

Jamal Whitaker
Yeah.

Mark Stewart
Me. I would love that. That puts you in like William Burroughs territory.

Ian Hersey
Yeah, I would listen to it.

Mark Stewart
What I think people don’t understand about the ticket that exploded is that, didn’t he just write a thing and then just completely scramble it?

Ian Hersey
I think he would take sheets of typed paper.

Mark Stewart
Yeah.

Ian Hersey
And cut them up into phrases and words and then re-assemble them.

Mark Stewart
Yeah.

Ian Hersey
I think that’s a David Byrne thing too, right?

Mark Stewart
Right.

Ian Hersey
All the Remain In Light lyrics.

Mark Stewart
So what I’m saying is that any of those actual books of his are not even really the point. He could just run the thing that he did to them again and again, and get any number of books that are just as good or not good as the famous ones. Just as bad as the famous ones. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so we could really just have a continuous stream of podcasts that’s just as bad as any 30-second expanse of this conversation right now.

Charney Kaye
Well, that is a lot like the music we’re making, in that it is aleatory.

Narrator
Aleatory means determined by chance, from the Latin alea, meaning “dice” or “gambling.” In aleatory music, the artists leave some element of the composition to chance or the determination of its performer or performance.

Charney Kaye
Musical dice games date back to 18th-century Europe, where people rolled dice to arrange these cut up musical pieces and then play them together.

Ian Hersey
There’s like a Wolfram tones analog to that.

Mark Stewart
Yeah, I remember when you were talking to me in the first place about signing on to XJ. I think we’ve both always vibed with the idea of something that is ever changing, has enough variables within it so as to be effectively infinite. Something like that I consider like an Oracle. You check in with it at random times, and it’s always different, and it can maybe give you something that happens to be useful to you or edifying or whatever.

Charney Kaye
I’m standing at my apartment on Dean Street in Brooklyn. This is when I was living with Dave Cole Rubblebucket was rehearsing in the basement pretty frequently. Bill Wurtz hanging around, talking about making a video every day. Mark and I are sitting there listening to Wolfram tones. I think we were actually planning on doing a float in the mermaid Day Parade. I volunteered to…

Mark Stewart
Oh, yeah.

Mark Stewart
We were we were getting pretty far in those plans. We were about to rent a flatbed truck to make that happen.

Ian Hersey
I think I rehearsed for that.

Jamal Whitaker
Word. I need to hear that whole story.

Charney Kaye
You were gonna like wear wolf-ram masks.

Mark Stewart
Yeah, shout out Liz Cossack, wherever she is. Yeah, she made wolf and ram masks for us. We, I mean, the Wolfram band… (laughs) That was Dave’s and my idea in 2006 I think. We loved the website, which used the Stephen Wolfram cellular automata math drafting software that he had to generate MIDI music. And it had this awesome graph, which just looked like, you know, weird lines and dots that showed the evolution of your music.

Dave Cole
It was kind of a short lived thing. The thing that’s funny about them is how like, unsatisfying they are, how they just are this snippet of just randomness and then they just like fall off. They feel so fragmented. Actually executing that music could only be so satisfying, because it just didn’t make any fucking sense.

Mark Stewart
We riffed on it, and then it turned into like, “okay, it’s going to be a space opera.” Everyone will be either wolves or rams. Oh, you’re gonna have like your star crossed lovers between a wolf and a ram. There’s going to be a baby ram.

Charney Kaye
A baby wolf-ram!

Mark Stewart
And like, whatever, a lot of really elaborate set design. We didn’t get that far. But we did play a few birthday parties of mine and there were masks.

Charney Kaye
That was legendary.

Ian Hersey
Yeah, I was there.

Charney Kaye
Yeah.

Mark Stewart
Ian was definitely there.

Ian Hersey
I remember quitting that for sure.

Mark Stewart
Yeah, I remember you quit that. It was “not worth all the effort.”

Dave Cole
Even if you were to play that shit like dead-on the amount of time that this demands, there’s not enough of a return, like artistic return on what is required to invest. What makes music real is the intention, basically. Anybody who’s making music, even if they don’t really think it through or if it’s like first-thought-best-thought philosophy, there’s still some intention behind it. Even if it’s not that good, there’s a human being who decided that they were going to make something in music. And regardless of the quality of that, at the root of it, there’s still some intention. And there might have been some experimentation to get to those decisions. But, ultimately just decided that this is what it is, you know, this is the music that we’ve decided that we’re going to play. The thing that makes Wolfram funny is that there is zero intention.

Mark Stewart
It was extremely difficult music.

Ian Hersey
Yeah.

Charney Kaye
Was it worse than the Shinobi controls?

Mark Stewart
Yes. Then the Shinobi band?

Mark Stewart
Yeah, it was much more difficult than that.

Charney Kaye
I was at a couple of parties at Mark’s house, birthday parties for him or one of his roommates, all musicians. Mark handed out these charts to everyone to play through. Wolfram mostly went down in that context. But I gotta say that three-part guitarmony in your transcription of Shinobi controls was one of my favorite things ever. I realized that I got terribly spoiled by you guys during the 15 years I lived in New York City. When Dave started coming down from Boston, he’d be in town with a few other musician friends from Berkeley. I get this call like, dude, you got to come here. This guy that no one’s ever heard of is playing underneath a garbage can lid on the intersection of 14th and 7th Ave at 3:47pm. And then we’re there and there’s like, 15 people there.

Jamal Whitaker
Yeah.

Charney Kaye
And it’s the sickest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. I feel really blessed for that.

Dave Cole
Where did you first get the idea for XJ?

Charney Kaye
If you remember I had a couple shows in Boulder.

Dave Cole
Yeah, I remember one of them.

Charney Kaye
The Live In Boulder album at the bandshell where I had the pair of MPC-2000s and the scratch mixer?

Dave Cole
That’s awesome.

Narrator
M. P. C. stands for Music Production Center. It’s a box about the size of a turntable with a screen and keys, and a grid of drum pads, allowing users to record portions of sound, modify them and play them back as sequences.

Charney Kaye
I had started as a DJ with two turntables and a mixer. DJ stands for disc jockey, because you’re mixing between records or discs on the turntables. I swapped the two turntables out for two MPCs. Instead of playing records, I was performing complex sample sequences. So, I changed the letter D in DJ to an X and called myself an XJ. I had just come from this world of tracking, which is this demoscene, computer programmers competing against each other to make music that’s like laid out in these grids of 8’s and 64’s. You see hexadecimal code sticking out of the music, basically like a chiptune situation. I was deep into this world. I was trying to live and make music in a space that was never finished. I didn’t really want to pay that much attention to finalizing all the tracks and mixing it and figuring out where the song begins and ends, you know? I just wanted to show up for the gig set up my samplers and just rock.

Dave Cole
You just wanted to jam!

Charney Kaye
Right!

Dave Cole
Kind of like a jazz musician, there’s always some different iteration on it to be had that’s never finished.

Charney Kaye
I was never good at being an electronic music act. The moment that I had performed a show, I was bored with it. (laughs) That was it. If you were at that show, great. And if you weren’t, then it’s done. It wasn’t like I kept creating an infinite amount of material. I have to assume that this is still what happens for major artists that record an album and then you go on tour with the album and it keeps evolving.

Dave Cole
I feel like artists have different opinions and thoughts about that ending on who you talk to.

Charney Kaye
I had that idea 20 years ago. I played a handful of shows after I moved to Brooklyn. I see my friends that are professional musicians that have really made that journey over the years, and I see how much work goes into that. And I never put in that work. I’m a hacker, and made my career in digital media production. And I probably have a lot in common with Mark in the sense that my brain will get hooked onto something that’s very absurd, kind of out there. And that’s so exciting to me that I have to do it.

Dave Cole
Yeah. I don’t mean to sound dismissive of anybody who has a absurd idea. That’s kind of where I like to live too, and just imagine, “wouldn’t it be crazy if this happened?” I would love to hear what that actually sounds like, no matter how crazy or absurd the idea is. I think that most interesting music is born out of notions like that, you know, I started thinking in terms of people having different roles. I started thinking in terms of music making being something that was distributed across time and space. So even though you were hearing it live at one time, the work being done is happening in a more abstract way. I became more and more excited about XJ as a recording medium, thinking of it as an evolution of sample sequencing.
Specifically because there’s all these other apps out there that are talking about AI music composition, it’s just caused me to double down. What if we built a new instrument that allows humans to make music that’s more than human, but is still human? For the earliest prototype, I just went into my kitchen and recorded the sounds of hitting pots and pans with a wooden spatula.

(XJ Ontic: Pots & Pans #1)

Charney Kaye
I needed help, and Mark was the first intrepid explorer. Mark Stewart comes from a classical musical family. He’s an all around beast of a composer and performer on numerous instruments. I remember him most on bass and keys. He graduated from Berklee College of Music along with Ian and Dave.

Charney Kaye
Mark, what’s your earliest memory of me asking you to write music in XJ?

Mark Stewart
For I think longer than we’ve had notes, we didn’t have notes.

Charney Kaye
Yep.

Mark Stewart
The XJ stream was drums-only for years. You were just taking my word for it that I was writing lots of different chord progressions. You had no proof of this for two years, I think. And I was like, “trust me, bro, it’s real music I’m doing.” So I would just kind of write them in a notebook at first and then there became like a filing system. And I would like come up with goofy names for stuff, without this music actually being fabricated in a way that was like, proven to a listener. So I’ve written I guess what you’d call songs or main programs.

Narrator
In XJ music, a program is a collection of musical instructions, like a piece of sheet music printed on paper. You can’t hear a program by itself, just like you can’t hear sheet music on paper. An instrument is a collection of audio recordings, XJ is like performer using the instruments to play the programs.

Mark Stewart
We were hewing to this Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water scheme for Cool Air. And we would all just sort of intuitively assign to those elements whatever musical properties we felt like, and that applies to me, the program writer and to others as like the instrument uploaders.

Charney Kaye
When it came to instruments and audio, I brought on board our friend Ian Hersey. He’s a phenomenal guitar player, but I’ve also seen him shred on a Gameboy doing chiptunes. He’s gotten into a lot of the demo scene style tracking I grew up on and he’s mixed or produced almost 100 records. He’s been a crucial partner in completing X J’s sampler mixer and other aspects of the software.

Ian Hersey
I mean, for me, it was trial and error too. I came in and it wasn’t yet making tonal sounds. There was just drums. And so I made a bunch of drum instruments at first, because that seemed to make sense. And then Mark and I got together and made a whole bevy of tonal instruments.

Mark Stewart
Yeah, we had a fun day with like a template beat.

Ian Hersey
Yeah, just applying new instruments to this template beat to see if they work together. And we, you know, thought we had done some great stuff. And then once we threw them in, like, half of them were just the cheesiest, or just most inappropriate shit. You know, there was a saxophone instrument that like haunted XJ for months.

Mark Stewart
Yeah, that’s the problem with fun.

Ian Hersey
Yeah, exactly.

Charney Kaye
My best friend from NYU film told me for years that I should meet his brother, because we seem to have so much in common, and it’s true. Jamal Whitaker joined XJ music for an internship to finish his degree in sociology. Over the last four years, he’s become my main collaborator designing XJ’s product and optics. Now he’s our content and communications manager. Oh, and he is a formidable electronic music producer.

Jamal Whitaker
I started making beats mostly focused in hip hop at 14. And even before that, like I had a very extensive background, from the age of three, of participating in drum circles. We had djembes in the house. We had congas in the house. We had bongos in the house. We had berimbaus and kashishis.

Ian Hersey
That’s awesome.

Jamal Whitaker
For the one guy who’s listening and is like, “oh, yeah, kashishi,” yeah, you’re my guy. Percussion was my deal. In my experience as a producer and making beats, my style was heavily sample-based. So my input as a musician is heavily percussion-based, because I’m not playing the violin that you hear, you know, laid in the background of track three on whatever my first album or whatever. It’s me just having the ear and saying, I want that to be on these drums that I’m playing, or that I’m chopping and putting down. And it has been interesting and fun to do that to the extreme, making beats for XJ, and in the beginning, be completely removed from any type of other aspects of the music. It was like, just do what you do, but really really.

Charney Kaye
Yeah, I’ve been trying to learn what’s important to musicians, running around trying to catch all the pearls of wisdom you’re dropping. And now when you listen to XJ, every time you hear a kick and a snare paired together, you know that an artist made that match. It’s interesting to me that this activity is so ubiquitous. Anybody who makes beats would understand it takes a lot of time spent digging in the crates.

Jamal Whitaker
Definitely.

Charney Kaye
So I focused on that question. How can we capture this human activity of matching kicks and snares, hi-hats and all the other samples, so that there’s aleatory potential from curated inputs of taste and culture?

Jamal Whitaker
Yeah, definitely. That is the bulk of my time in doing the arrangement of drums in my own production is like, this kick just does not fit this snare. They don’t work. I don’t know what it is. I can’t name the science. It just is what it is. I just know they don’t jive. And I know it’s gotta change.

Charney Kaye
We never taught XJ a single thing about how to pair kicks and snares. Not a single thing. We only taught XJ how to follow instructions. This instrument is essentially a sampler-sequencer. When artists upload recorded audio, it’s got the performance baked in, the rhythm and effects. So it’s human-in, human-out. The uniqueness of XJ’s sound comes from the fact that this is all handcrafted. And one of the first things that Jamal and I worked on was the user experience research and interface design for the XJ lab where we compose music.

Narrator
U. X. stands for User Experience, the research and thought about how musicians and audiences perceive XJ, and what they expect from it. U. I. stands for user interface, meaning the design of surfaces for human machine interaction.

Jamal Whitaker
And I even remember telling the class what I was doing at this internship while everybody else was like, I’m shuffling papers over at this social work nonprofit over here, I’m doing this and that. I said, man, “I’m like cloning various aspects of digital audio workstations I’ve worked with in the past,” mostly trying to justify why somebody who was a sociology major was deep into this world of technology and music. These other kids were like, “what do you mean?”

Charney Kaye
Maybe I’m just a huge nerd. It seemed like a natural leap from sociology to human machine interaction.

Jamal Whitaker
There it is. I got my credits. I remember the first couple of weeks that I was the XJ intern, it was a lot of a lot of everything. Sitting down with Charney being like, “can you to copyright?” Okay, yeah, here I can write stuff. Yeah, sure, let’s work on this. Let’s come up with marketing phrases, taglines. Let’s try this, read these research papers that I’ve compiled in my years of developing XJ. It was just a big download. The very first day I remember it was Charney just pushing over a notepad and pencils. The basics. Out of your imagination, how can you make this thing work? In one of these Google Drives there are code names of like, I don’t know The Slapdropper or whatever I thought would be a fun name for a little like DAW clone.

Narrator
D. A. W. stands for Digital Audio Workstation. It’s an electronic device or computer software used to alter and mix multiple recordings and tracks into a final output.

Jamal Whitaker
A lot of what I was relying on is, let’s see, at that time, 2019, ten or so years of being experienced at using ProTools in my own production. And kind of knowing exactly what I liked about that interface. What I didn’t like about that interface. What I had seen in my experiences with other interfaces, you know, different DAWs, Ableton, Reason, all the way back to Fruity Loops before it was FL Studio. Fruity Loops!

Ian Hersey
I remember the old Fruity Loops. That was I think the first thing that I used.

Jamal Whitaker
Yeah, Fruity Loops used to be the shit that like broke dudes used to get because like, it was the least costly option and now it’s just like, you know, it’s got its suit and tie on, FL Studio, you know?

Ian Hersey
Yeah. People like really use it now too, it’s crazy.

Mark Stewart
Yeah.

Jamal Whitaker
Yeah, I’m like I remember when that was fucking Fruity Loops man and every terrible producer, not to say anything about you or me or anybody else.

Ian Hersey
But oh, no, I was terrible.

Jamal Whitaker
With the design for Stepmatic, it was like incorporating experiences with different DAWs, and kind of like, refining that in this exercise in UX design, UI design. And it was the first time I’d ever really done anything like that. If you hand me a pencil and paper and say, “draw something,” okay, I can draw something. And then you know, that eventually morphed on into placing rectangles, placing rectangles here, placing them there, making a grid, trying to map out what an event in a field grid would look like, you know, lots of like, weird lime green shades and studying of all these DAWs, like I was saying and aping various aspects of them. In the months following that it was like, get acquainted with house music. Let’s see if you can musically integrate yourself into what we’re doing right now, into what was at the time Cool Air, and is now Chill House. It was like, okay, you’re going to use you know, your experience in production, mostly hip-hop, to study house music, the reference playlists and just kind of get yourself in the vibe of what is house and what isn’t house to drop beats into XJ.

Charney Kaye
Mark’s writing main programs, Jamal’s writing beat programs, Ian’s uploading instrument audio. What we’re dealing with here is an algorithmic medium for collaborative recorded music.

Jamal Whitaker
Yeah.

Ian Hersey
How would you succinctly describe an algorithmic medium.

Narrator
A medium is any means of recording and transmitting information. And music is information. What makes it an algorithmic medium is that instead of directly writing on the medium, verbatim, you’re providing instructions. And the medium, instead of just being static, is alive in some way.

Charney Kaye
The living aspect of the medium is not consciousness.
I mean, just to be clear, like it’s just not, it’s not an AI. It’s not a conscious entity. It’s more like the individual cells of your body, following the instructions in your DNA. XJ is a unique sort of instrument and recording medium. You can’t really hear your final product until it’s live. To understand what a record is in the world of XJ you need to think differently. Think in terms of creating a musical framework, then record a ton of audio performing variations of instruments within your framework, then handover your material to a machine performer. We don’t publish albums or songs, we only broadcast channels running live nonstop 24/7.

Mark Stewart
We’re all just using XJ, and the routes that Bump and Slaps and Space follow are like totally different.

Ian Hersey
It couldn’t have happened until we had preview templates.

Charney Kaye
Each channel is based on something we call a Template.

Narrator
An XJ template is the model from which we stamp out the product. We have the production templates that everyone is listening to in the app, and then we have preview templates that artists use to compose music and collaborate in real time. Since the XJ product is a 24/7 live stream, we need a template from which XJ continuously fabricates the music we hear.

Charney Kaye
Artists work on templates, and then we play a template live 24/7 like a record into a player except XJ iterates through every possible permutation of the content you gave. This is a paradigm shift regarding the artists and audiences relationship with time.

Ian Hersey
Prior to that we were all just working in at the time, Cool Air.
And I think the only thing available was the main stream that was being published at all times.
So if you put something in, it’s fucked up, then it’s gonna get published to the stream that everybody else listens to.

Charney Kaye
Like the Plent glitch. Building a digital audio workstation from scratch and building an internet broadcasting platform were pilgrimages for me as a computer programmer and a digital media maker. I’ve been learning a ton about music from my team, and I share the tech with them.
I push everyone on the music team to their technical limit. They participate in software planning, writing features and bugs and doing QA.
I tried to find surfaces for collaboration where I can meet musicians on their own terms. So for example, Mark has been writing musical tests you might administer when teaching a piano student. Still, he writes the test in a standardized template we’ve developed so I can easily port it into a software unit tests built directly into XJ’s code.

Mark Stewart
Yeah

Charney Kaye
Musicians who work on XJ music projects run XJ on virtual machines in the cloud. They have to do this kind of process which is the behavior of a software developer. So I call everybody music developers, a combination of making music in XJ, and helping me build XJ. We avoid saying AI because XJ is not AI. XJ is a live show running on cloud computers, but anyone on Earth listening exclusively in our app is tuned into the same broadcast. If you picked up any instrument and just played it live on the radio 24/7 that would be closer to XJ than some AI thing.

Dave Cole
Who the fuck knows why that just sounds like any random ambient library music. It sounds like a million things. What makes something good or bad in somebody’s eyes? I have no idea. Music is less about its quality, and more about the timing in which it finds somebody you know, it’s a lot simpler to make a convincing ambient track than it is to make some fully produced hip-hop thing or house or electronic thing with a groove and phrases or chord progressions that makes sense, and then have that all hit in the right way and have the mix sound real and past a demo stage. That’s really, really hard.

Charney Kaye
In the future, the law will protect musicians from this so called AI, because it shouldn’t be any more ethical or legal to plagiarize artists work using a neural network than a tape recorder. What we’re trying to do is cultivate artists working in algorithmic media, and try to find this future in a way that is compelling for artists and audiences, focusing on making sure that the human aspect of this is not lost, all the way through to you sitting there having this experience, you know, you still know that this is music made by people and you know, who made it and you know, what their intention was when they made it.

Dave Cole
I think that that’s huge. That’s a giant point of distinction, because Endel and Mubert are putting off like the polar opposite of that vibe. I don’t think that makes it appealing to any listener, either. Even people who want something just in the background. you know I think people want to see some sort of humanity and vibrancy in the music, even if it’s just background shit, they still want there to be some notion that somebody made this or somebody with fucking blood running through their veins is responsible for what I’m listening to. And I think that that creates an incentive for artists to work within it. And I also think that that makes it exciting for listeners as well. Look at this brand new thing that like this artists I love and this artists I love is working within, you know, they’re doing this whole other thing. It’s not just an album that’s on Spotify. It’s not just the static recorded piece. It’s an ever changing, evolving thing.

Jamal Whitaker
The whole process surrounding this podcast, and where we want to be going in the next coming months is like reaching out to artists and recruiting people to work within XJ. I was sitting there thinking, why not just do that I’ve got like six albums that are like halfway done, just beat tapes sitting there. So might as well just start parsing those out and dropping those sound palettes into XJ, and be the first “outside artist” to be a part of XJ.

Dave Cole
Nice. Yeah, I think that that’s an amazing idea.

Jamal Whitaker
It’s going to be interesting, but I’m like so excited to hear what XJ does.

Dave Cole
Nice. That’s an awesome thing to do as like an invitation for other artists to work within the medium.

Jamal Whitaker
Yeah, definitely, definitely.

Dave Cole
As a person who’s been kind of away from the process this whole time and sort of checking in and, and watching the 30-second clips on YouTube and stuff, as an outsider. I’m not totally understanding like what makes XJ unique just yet and I think that having these windows into the process could be entertaining in and of itself, but also be illuminating as to like what XJ actually is in the first place.

Jamal Whitaker
Right. How do we encourage somebody like Drake, for instance, to be a part of XJ. Take Thank Me Later from Drake dropped into XJ and have it just constantly mashing up and just be able to show Drake, hey, we’ve got this work of art that is just now ad infinitum.

Dave Cole
That is really compelling. Because you need that bridge to the medium, right?

Jamal Whitaker
Exactly.

Dave Cole
It’s so novel, that being transparent and being open about it, and being exciting is what’s going to draw people to it, if it’s novel, but it’s like opaque people are in the dark, they’re not going to be drawn to it. There’s not as much trust there.

Jamal Whitaker
If you’re just walking past a window that you can’t see through, you’re not going to look inside.

Dave Cole
Yeah, totally.

Jamal Whitaker
That makes sense.

Dave Cole
Artists feel vulnerable. And they want to know, like, what they’re getting into, you know?

Jamal Whitaker
True, true.

Dave Cole
If you can demonstrate something that makes them excited, be like, “oh, shit, I could work on something, and it can yield this much material.” And all of these different iterations.

Jamal Whitaker
If you’re an artist who’s excited about this concept of being able to collaborate and develop a project and to something that is just infinite, you could take it on tour, you know, and you could be in a different city every night, but with a different set every night, because your album is just changing, just never repeating, you know, so you’re gonna have people that are gonna follow you across the country, across the world, you know.

Dave Cole
That’s a really interesting idea. You have the structure of the song to fall back on and the key, an artist could be performing the song live. And the artist does not even know the context of which the melody that they sing is going to be surrounded in, because it’s completely getting generated on the spot that they don’t even know what’s coming.

Jamal Whitaker
Yeah, to be an artist that can take that and adapt to that and like be good at that where nobody else can do that. That would be pretty insane.

Charney Kaye
The algorithm is hard coded. It’s a machine that we call XJ music. What you do with it is as open ended it’s what you do with magnetic tape will open this conversation now that XJ is up and running. Next episode I’ll invite more voices to join the core team and create XJ music.