Darwin: Okay today, I have the great honor to be able to talk to someone whose work I've been following for quite a while. I actually saw him perform one time and was blown away. Ever since then, I have wanted to talk to him, but always have been a little intimidated. So this is a really great opportunity. We got connected from a PR firm, which is good because that kind of like really ease the transition and made it easy for me to get kicked off on this. So with that, I'm going to shut up and we are going to talk to Tim Exile. Hey Tim, how's it going?
Tim Exile: I'm well, Darwin, actually I think it's the mutual. I was also a bit intimidated. I mean, I've been following your podcast for a long time now. I'm a regular listener. So I was always a bit like, "Nah", I couldn't bring it upon myself to reach out to you directly and say, "Hey, it would be really nice to speak to you." So anyway, here we are. So it's great that we get to speak.
Darwin: Well, this is really phenomenal and I know that one of the reasons we're going to talk though is specifically about an effort that you've got going right now, which is a software system called the Endlesss Package. Could you talk a little bit about that? I mean, I think that's why we're talking, but clearly I've done a little research on it and it's clearly more than a software package. It looks a little bit like maybe your passion gig, too. So I'd like to hear a little bit about what you've got going there.
Tim: I mean, to some extent it's almost a world. I mean, I think the, the core Endlesss community might describe it as something like that. It definitely feels like that when you go on our Discord server and you see what the community are doing on Endlesss. Endlesss is a live collaborative music creation platform. We have an iOS app that we launched in the app store just over a year ago, and we have a MacOS app, which launched just before Christmas last year. And the Windows version is coming very soon. It's definitely an extension of my life's work. I have always been passionate about the idea of music as something we do rather than a product we consume. And that's definitely in the DNA of Endlesss. I mean to take the macro view, we're definitely trying something quite ambitious, which is really to return the idea of music as an activity we'll do together to get consciousness, I suppose.
And that idea has gained a lot of currency recently with the beginning of DAWless jamming, modular performances. When I started improvising, probably the better part of two decades ago inmprovising electronic music was beyond niche. Very few people even knew that it was actually possible because at the time electronic music was all about designing sounds, laying them out in a pattern with blocks on the screen, in a DAW or a sequencer, and then hitting space bar and seeing what it actually sounds like. The idea of it being performative was not really around 20 years ago. And now it is which I think is wonderful. And we're moving into a world where creativity is becoming something that we do in real time to get there. I mean, there's a lot of big platforms recently, like multiplayer games, like Fortnite, live streaming platforms like Twitch.
Most recently, we've had this real time social audio platform Clubhouse, and it feels like this is where creativity is going. So in that in the 20th century, we used to value creativity as a means to an end to produce content, which would be picked up on millions of disks, distributed worldwide, and sold a huge profit. So it was all about creating content and building attention. Whereas I think where we're going now is people are becoming known not necessarily for what they have done, but what they can do. When you follow someone's YouTube channel, obviously you enjoy the content that you produce, but you get to know them as a person and you get to look forward to the next thing that's going to come out and that's becoming more and more real time. And so this is the world that Endlesss is going into, I apologize. I went right up to the macro layers, so I'll leave the mic there.
Darwin: No, that's really cool though, because it does kind of like lay down the gauntlet of what you're talking about. It's actually interesting to think about our perceptions of the value of performance is changing, Performance is no longer something that's captured, encapsulated, and made into a product, and then shipped out for profit. Instead, the performance is the thing that's treasured, it's a thing that people want to experience. And it's that experience in that sharing that actually is kind of gaining a lot of value. Now it's interesting to me that you came out with a highly collaborative product. At a time when people were stuck in their basements, trying to figure out how to even connect with their friends. I imagine that there actually was... to a certain extent, it helped with a problem that needed a solution, right?
Tim: Yeah. It was definitely weirdly timely that we launched where we launched the mobile app on the 31st of March, 2020. And the world had literally just gone into the lockdown. And yeah, we got a ton of press. We got a huge influx of users onto the platform. I mean, you can't say it was a good thing because honestly it was a terrible thing. We were in the middle of a pandemic. But there was something a little bit magical, I say, about the timing. And then we were right in the middle, there was just so much experimentation. To some extent, it felt like people were actually fascinated by this new normal, and you know, the tone with which you communicate with people would change every day as people got their head around things. I remember trying to get live streaming cameras and one week I got managed to get a Logitech video. No problem at all. And next week I wanted to get another one and you couldn't find one anywhere. So everybody was experimenting with live streaming and it just felt there was this real sense of wanting to come together and specifically, because we couldn't come together. So yeah, it was weirdly magical, but obviously horrific.
Darwin: I don't think we have to talk about how terrible it was, but I do think it's interesting that humanity and especially those of us who are artists had to find a way - because it's the one thing that I think is really clearly a tenant of artistry is that you don't do it just because it's convenient. But a lot of times it's incredibly inconvenient to be an artist. I think it would be a lot better to be like a hedge fund manager at almost any turn. But the fact of the matter is you do it because you need to do it. And you were there at a transition when people needed to still express themselves artistically and found a lot of the avenues kind of sealed up. I'm going to want to come back to this because I have a ton of questions related to this already.
But before we do that, one of the things that I like doing in my podcast is talking to people about how they got to be the artists and the makers and in this kind of stuff. You are fascinating to me because, like I said, I got a chance to experience your art in action. It blew me away. I have always appreciated the things that you've put on video. Some of the things you did were, so inspiring to me and I think to a lot of people, but you've also have this history of working with Native Instruments on doing different kinds of instrument, development, putting together this live show stuff. But now you're in a full on software development mode too. And I'm wondering where a person comes from that is able to develop the musical tastes and the musical vision that you have, but also the technological savvy and capability that you're bringing as well.
Tim: Well, I mean, I've got a fairly well-rehearsed story that I trot out on it. I know that the Endlesss community, I've sort of bore them to tears. But I mean the key points still hold, so I'll hang a bit of a deeper dive off the key points. But you know, when I was four years old, I picked up the violin. Apparently my mum tells me it's the first thing that I actually said "yes" to. I was a pretty kind of uncooperative kid. What I loved about the violin was it was so embodied. I put my bow on the string and move my body, the music happens. I stop moving my body, the music stops. So I think that first musical experience has really set the frame for everything else that I've done. That's how I understand music primarily as something that happens when it's being done rather than is consumed once it's been recorded and distributed.
My mum tells me that I used to just sit... we had this house in the Cotswolds right in the middle of the countryside, and we had this little B road running past the front door. Apparently I'd just watched cars go past and get fascinated by the sound, the Doppler shift, as they go past as they sort of go up through the valleys. It's one of my strongest memories is the phase shifting that happens when cars moved through the valley that I grew up in. I think there was always some kind of fascination with timbre and sound. And I suppose, well, this is going in really deep, but I had a couple of near-death experiences when i was very, very young - like pre-verbal. It actually took me a few years of therapy in my late twenties before I actually figured out how significant this was.
Then I did a bit of research on the effect that has on young children and how it affects their development. And one of the key markers there's pre-verbal kids who've had near-death experiences is, being fascinated with music, being fascinated with math. When I started reading the books that researched this, I was just like, "Oh my God, that is exactly that's me", there's a whole bunch of other stuff. And so I think that mixed with that first musical experience basically frames everything either I've done or has happened to me. You know, picked up the violin when I was four years old, I think I got fed up with it quite quick because it's just very, very hard.
I wanted to be able to express myself very quickly. I wanted to learn, but it takes years to make decent sound on the violin and you have to practice once a week to keep it up - sorry, once a day to keep it up, a week off and you really lose that dexterity. When I was a teenager, a friend lent me this bootleg rave tape, and I think I listened to it two or three hours a night, every night for a couple of months. And it was just, it was utterly mind blowing. I had no idea what was going on. I was 12 years old and of course my frame of reference, it was embodied music making. So I thought music was being played by people somehow with these crazy machines.
And then once I started to research how rave music was made and played and what raves were, I was like, "Oh, okay, this is actually music that's made the studios and mixed by DJs...", which I think I was probably a little bit disappointed by. Anyway, I taught myself the DJ, got some decks. I didn't find them in fun enough though. I went to Tandy, which is a kind of electronic shop, bought a bunch of components, like extra potentiometers and switches. So I can make the go backwards and go from zero to a hundred percent and stuff like that. And then of course they broke.
And then I started messing around in the recording studio at school and we had a reel-to-reel tape machine and a really big mixing desk and some old synths. I'd just kind of hack, and dub mix music. And I was trying to make sort of house and break beat/techno/hardcore jungle stuff by playing drum beats and recording them in eight track. I mean it was lunacy. And then I saved up for a sampler and started to actually get into the "proper way" to produce the dance music at the time with a sampler and a sequencer. And that sort of laid the foundations for me actually participating in the music industry that was going on at the time, making records, releasing them, hounding record label owners to release my music, et cetera. And being a, you know, being a sort of low level pain in the ass.
I never felt when I was making records that I was really in the right skin. I remember it was like around the late nineties and I got my first PC and I would spend, actually it was my mom's computer on dial up through modem we had throught my parent's house. I'd search for these weird esoteric VST plugins, and ways to process sounds. And they never lived up to what I wanted them to be. So I just started messing around with coding, well, not coding it was all node-based stuff.
Darwin: You really got into the Sync Modular, which became Generator, which became Reaktor. Right?
Tim: Yeah. I dived into Pure Data a bit, but at the time because it was fairly early and it was fairly open source. There were quite a few modules that didn't work properly. So I built an entire system in Pure Data, but I couldn't actually get it to work properly. So yeah, I mean the rabbit hole that I really fell down was Reaktor. To some extent, I mean, I'm still partially in that rabbit hole, there's even this year for a couple of weekends, I've been doing some creative coding projects in Reaktor. That's a sort of relatively deep dive into my background.
Darwin: It's interesting to me that though that the skin of the typical record producer didn't feel right. And that Sync Modular to Reaktor - that framing did. What was it about coding specifically that's scratched an itch for you, that you couldn't have gotten from getting, say, a modular synth or like diving down the hole of something like... at the time the Nord modular was floating around, so you probably could have bought something like that and something that was more a traditional musical instrument. I mean, Reaktor, it's music-focused, but it's by no means a traditional musical instrument in any way, shape, or form.
Tim: Yeah. I don't think there's any thing specifically about coding that got me into coding or programming. I still feel a little bit like a charlatan calling it coding, because it was essentially wiring up boxes and it works, but it is programming. It wasn't that I wanted to program things, I just had a very clear idea of the things that I wanted to do, and none of the stuff out there did what I wanted it to do. I think specifically I was really interested within the potential of taking off the shelf, MIDI controllers, particularly, the Behringer ones - the BCR 2000. Obviously it's a shame what's happened recently, but let's let that slide. Those products were incredibly forward-thinking and quite honestly, I still think that the opportunity that they offered then has never really been taken up, I would say, because they were so programmable that they were basically designed exactly for someone like me.
I wanted to make a very physical, very haptic, instrument that had a really deep, really tight integration with software where you never interact with the screen. So the Flow Machine in Reaktor for these interfaces, there was zero interaction with the mouse and the screen whatsoever, there's a few things need to be represented on the screen, but most of it is just motorized faders bank switching and performing, and that was what I wanted to do. That was essentially bringing that framing of the violin, from when I was a kid, into the world of electronics, it had to be physical-haptic interface first. And that was the only way to do it really. By the time I chose Reaktor, there were a few wormholes I could have fallen down.
I could have fallen down the Max hole, I could have fallen further down the Pure Data wormhole, but I think at the time, and still now actually, I'll just come out with my allegiance to Reaktor and Native Instruments, in terms of creating really quality DSP with quality interaction, with very capable data handling and ability to sort of build frameworks within it. I mean, Reaktor is super powerful, and at some stage, all of the Endlesss development team has told me that I should really just start building stuff in C++ given what I tried to get Reaktor to do.
Darwin: Well, yeah, but the other side of it is, these node-based systems and Reaktor, I would say is primary among them: It's a kind of high-level, so you can deal with a filter without having to think about coefficients and multiplication and feedback and all this other horse shit. You can think of a filter as a filter and really engage with it as a part of an instrument build, without having to be like, 'Oh, here's a premade thing that I don't have any effect on.' I think Reaktor does a really good job of being right in the middle of those spaces. And it makes a lot of sense that someone with your kind of focus would really gravitate towards that. Now I'm curious, what's the first thing that you programmed as a Reaktor patch?
Tim: I'm not quite sure because, the first thing I programmed with a node-based digital modular was in Sync Modular, and I'm pretty sure it was a delay effect because at the time you couldn't load samples into Sync Modular. I was very clear, I wanted to mess around with samples, that's always been my thing, I've always gravitated to that, not quite sure why, but so the first thing I built on the Sync Modular, I think you used a few different delay modules, and then I fixed the times. So I think it was trying to make a kind of beat repeat, beat masher kind of effect. And actually, I think that there's a track one of my first ever 12 inches, no it was an EP wasn't it, I can't remember, it was on Moving Shadow.
They did this limited series called the MSX series, and there's a track called Bad Diet, which is just crazy Amen mashup. I mean, the actual production of it is terrible. I literally smacked every transient in the Amen and break out of there. So it's madness, but I did use that little, intimate to produce these kinds of little twist ups at the end. That was the first ever thing that I programmed in a digital modular.
Darwin: That's really interesting, but that does actually kind of point to something else that's important here, because when you talk about kind of the timeframe of your musical development, you came to - and discarded - DJing, you went into production with samplers and all that kind of stuff in kind of a traditional way using computers. I know from watching some of your videos and reading some of your story, you kind of went the whole route of like, I'm going to learn a sequencer, I'm going to learn Pro Tools and we'll learn these things, right. You kind of followed that traditional path, but then you got into this node-based programming, but there's another part of it, which is you also got fascinated with looping and you talk about being fascinated with samples, but I would say that it's not samples in what is thought of in the traditional way.
You're actually into, it's not looping in the "I'm going to play acoustic guitar. Now I'm going to play harmonica. And now I'm going to play a snare drum" kind of thing. You treat it like it's a way of capturing live sound and manipulating live sound. It's this kind of like mishmash between looping and sampling where you're doing sample type manipulation, but it's always with live content or that's the way it feels to me. It seems like your music has been based off of live audio capture. I mean, is that fair enough to say?
-----Tim: A hundred percent, absolutely. I think it's one of these mysteries that I think I keep on discovering more about why I got into live sampling. And I think it all comes back to this idea of being spontaneous and somehow dialoguing, music creation as being a dialogue, at least between you and the equipment that you're using. And then obviously in the case of Endlesss, which now takes that workflow and makes it collaborative. You're actually in dialogue with other people who have the same tech stack at the center of their kind of instrumental experience, I guess it's this sort of shared instrumental experience. What I really like about live sampling and particularly then manipulating those live samples is that it's really conversational, the way you create.
So I'll lay something down - and then the way that turns out is never quite what you intended it to be, but it's also something that will surprise you. You have an idea about a thing you want to do, you do the thing, and then it comes back at you and it's just like, oh yeah, no, that is that's is kind of what I intended, but it's also different from what I intended and it sparks something else. And for me, well, that really is the magic of creativity. And it's also the magic of collaboration, where you and I are in a conversation right now. And every time either of us speaks, it sparked something else in the other person. And so it goes back and forth. And I think for me it's that interaction, this sort of, almost, the improvisational "Yes, and...".
When a statement is made or some kind of creative act is performed, there's always a space after that to then perform another creative act or reply or do something to the artifact that was created in the first instance. The more I dig into understanding that, the more I get into building technology allows musicians to do that together, remotely from around the world. The more I realized that this is actually about relationship building and possibly even community building it's this conversation that says, this is why I'm really interested in this new world where we're moving into where we're focusing on skills rather than just content, because content is an end point. It's just made this piece of music go away into this piece of music. And there's nothing really to respond to. I mean, people do respond to it or write reviews, or they'll tell friends or whatever, but generally the intention isn't really to spark conversation.
Darwin: Well, I think you're onto something there because, I would say, even in terms of electronic music and dance music, when we moved from whether it was like a bunch of DIN-sync'd Roland boxes that we would kind of like tweak stuff or, on the other side of things, people who had modular systems that would just like turn knobs and make squealy sounds, we started moving towards the computer. And what we started to do was two things. First of all, we stripped out anything that wasn't part of our plan and secondly, built a lot of guardrails so that it was hard to make mistakes. But one of the things you're talking about here is, first of all, you sort of like celebrate the idea of making mistakes, because sometimes that can spur you into something new. And secondly, this idea that when you're in a conversation, things are going to happen that are outside of a plan. And that actually is sort of like a mechanism by which you can launch creativity off of.
Tim: Absolutely. And I think that the whole idea of the mistake is a weird way of describing it because I think actually, what often happens is there's another bit in-between, there's the idea of the mistake is that it's either exactly right, or it's completely wrong and you need to find out what's wrong. But I think quite often what you find happens is very much this "yes, and". I've got a friend who's an improv comedian who told me about this idea that this is the key tenet behind comedy improv is it's always "yes, and". If you're improvising with someone you never shut anything down. You always say "yes, that thing and something else", because I think, when we get to the end of a certain creative act or a sentence, there is this period where we sort of regard what's being done and absorb what we've done.
And some things are revealed in that space, I think. And what's revealed in that space is all stuff that you didn't really think about when you were very intent on speaking those words or writing those notes or dialing in those effects or whatever. And when you step back, it's just like, "Oh yeah, more was happening there" - in some cases that that was unintended. But in other cases it was just out of scope of what I was thinking of at the time. And that's that space in which magic happens, I think.
Darwin: Now, I would say that when I looked at you working with your Flow system, that's what it was called. Right? The Flow?
Tim: Actually image and heat and named it The Flow Machine, because one went on tour with her. She was just like, "Tim, have you got a name for your system?", I don't know. It's like a kind of bunch of boxes kind of flow thingy. She's just like, it's a Flow Machine. So that became known as a Flow Machine.
Darwin: Got it. When I watched you work with that, I saw a number of videos over the years of you working with that. It was actually really interesting how you would oftentimes in the creation of your video, you'd be like, "Oh, I forgot to turn the source on correctly", or whatever. And it was interesting because we saw you sort of like do what would typically be called mistakes. And it's just like, no, that just kind of worked into the flow of the whole thing. And it was part of the process of performing. And I think that that's really amazing, but now you have kind of developed that, which was very much a solo tool, right? It was the Flow Machine was the Tim Exile machine really. And I think other people could use that as like a launching point for imagining stuff, but it would have been pretty hard to lay that in front of somebody else and say, "Hey, go!" Now what you've done is you try to encapsulate a lot of those ideas into this Endlesss software.
But I'm curious, first of all, about when you first started doing that, what gave you the indication that this collaborative effort, this conversation that you talk about was even a desirable thing. I mean, quite frankly, when you started working on these systems in this collaborative thing, I don't think that there were many people that thought of electronic music, whether it was experimental electronic music or dance music, or house production - nobody thought of that as a collaborative thing. Most people thought of it as something you'd do in your basement, while you're waiting to press your first disc. How did you imagine this to be a collaborative process? And was it a surprise to you that anybody else was interested in it? Or did you have an innate feeling like "Of course that's what people want to do."
Tim: I mean, there was a moment I think we started, so Ash, who's our lead developer lead engineer who has built a huge amount of the Endlesss platform. We started working together on just some prototypes messing around and Reaktor actually in 2015; you know, the initial prototypes were just Reaktor patches. They were basically the Flow Machine. So Ash had a version of the Flow Machine and we were trying to add extra features. Then And I think one of the most powerful features of Endlesss is that you've got this riff history of every single thing that's ever happened in a jam. And you can track back through that history, right? To the very beginning of that jam, which it's a really powerful feature. It's very freeing because you can keep on moving forward. You can always try stuff out and you know, you're not going to destroy anything.
It's a way it's going to be there for you to recall. So Ash and I were working together on this and he had his version of the Flow Machine. I had my version of the Flow Machine next to each other. He had his riff history of what he'd been working on. And he was kind of showing me some of the things he'd been doing, and I had my one as well. They were all on Ableton Push V1. So we built this using the colored pads. We built the system browsing back through riffs and he was playing back through his and I was playing back to mine and I was just like, "It would be really cool if we could actually have a shared one of these histories." And, that's how the idea of making it collaborative came about.
And since then, it just became quite obvious that that was a very cool thing. I remember the first time we had it working, I think it was maybe 2018, in late 2018. We got a version of the iOS app working with this shared history, and we staged a jam with five people, a couple in the UK, some in the US and someone in Germany, it was spine tingling. It was absolutely spine tingling. And I think that we knew then that experience, basically we needed to focus on getting people to that experience as quickly as possible, because it is an utterly magical experience when you're jamming together live with people from all over the world, you add a layer to what's going on. And 10 seconds later that layer comes back with some different effects or another layer on top of it. It really is conversational. I think that's something that humans innately desire because the most powerful thing about being in conversation is that you really get to be seen and understood, and you get to see and understand people and you get to do that in turns in an almost game-like way.
Darwin: Yeah, it's interesting. I watched some video of this in action and I actually - I'm having trouble imagining how some of this stuff works because you talk about this shared riff history. And I saw things happening in video that I didn't understand because it was different than any other collaborative system I've seen. Oftentimes what a collaborative system looks like is a shared clock system, where people are doing something locally and the clocking is shared. But what I saw in the videos really did look like the somehow the content, somehow magically in the background, was moving from device to device and was available on no matter what device you picked up or who is working with any device. Am I catching that correctly?
Tim: Yes. To do a quick, deep dive it's one of these things that it was dangerous in a way to get into describing exactly how it works. Just, with the power of voice, because it's benefits and diagrams, but basically it's asynchronous. So it's actually built on a fork of the technology used to build Dropbox.
Darwin: I'm glad you said that because I was going to say what it looked like to me is like there was a musical Dropbox in action. So actually I'm glad to hear that I wasn't like totally out in left field.
Tim: Yeah, no, that's exactly it. So it's basically Dropbox with a bunch of modifications. So everybody has their own transport and essentially as soon as you create something and commit it, that's sent it to everybody else in the jam, they will pick it up and we'll slot into their local transport wherever they are in the program. So it's a modulo.
Darwin: That's really fascinating, but it's also interesting to see sort of like business logic subverted into artistic purposes. I have to say that I really appreciate that a lot. Now in your mind, or in your experience, what's the coolest thing that you've seen someone do with this system?
Tim: Oh gosh. There's so much cool stuff that people do with it. I know that, Imogen Heap has done some really cool stuff with it. She has performed live. I think there was a big, expo somewhere in the middle east. And I can't remember what it was now, but they had a bunch of musicians on the stage and Imogen was piped in via Endlesss to, a light show in a physical concert hall from her house, just outside London. That's really cool. I think that some of the live performances and live streams that we've done with Endlesss, state staging it directly on our Twitch channel. Those have been very exciting because we bring the camera feeds of people and we also we make it look pretty and we stream the audio from a central machine and it feels like an event.
Tim: I'd say generally the really exciting stuff has been staging these kinds of operative using creation rituals. We did a bunch of experiments with NFTs turning riffs into NFTs. That was quite exciting just to be part of that whole world, trying to understand this crazy new technology and this crazy new marketplace and how people were using it. There's so much stuff that people are doing. Another interesting thing that's happened recently, there's this really great app called Mubert. And they create these kind of generative pieces of music where they take a bunch of stems and it's basically kind of like auto switching between them, but they create new sort of stations that you can listen to. And if quite a few people have taken Endlesss jams and turn them into Mubert things.
So yeah. Turning your jam into a generative piece of music. I think that's also really interesting. And I think that's something in terms of where we're headed, in terms of what we're building for Endlesss. You know, the next big step for us is how to turn the media that people are creating on Endlesss either as live performances into something that people would want to come and see or experience in real time. But also that the music that people have created in these jams, turning those into maybe more lean back experiences that people can go to someone's profile and then play through all the stuff they've created, et cetera.
Darwin: So now that hopefully, fingers crossed, we're starting to come out of this pandemic world... How do you imagine that changing the way that people are going to interact with this? I mean, so far everything's been kind of like managed and mitigated through things like Twitch or other online services. Do you expect this to be something where either you yourself or your team, or just people out in the world, start putting together in-person jams? Is this something that you imagine as sort of an outgrowth of what's being developed?
Tim: Yeah. One thing I am quite excited about is the idea of being able to say... Yeah, we've got a great sort of office event space in east London. And we started at least on that beginning of March last year. I think we managed to run one event. So I think the potential of sort of mixed reality, if you like, events where we could have a few people in a real venue in one place and a few people in real venue, in a few other places around the world and stage live concerts, live jams linked up between multiple physical spaces. That's something I'm really excited about. In the long run. I don't think the great opening up is a big threat to Endlesss because ultimately your own studio setup is not very portable and it is just quite a pain to organize it.
Even with someone just down the road: to find a space means there's some stuff you have to do. You have to find the space, you have to put the space, you have to take your kid there. You have to disassemble it from your setup, put it in a car or cab, move it somewhere else, set it up again, and it doesn't sound the way it used to sound. I think the ability to just plug in through a social network and find people who are online, this is in the next six months where we're really focusing on the social features behind Endlesss. So you can connect with people on the platform, which you can't do yet. You can discover people so you can get notifications when your friends are online, et cetera, all this kind of stuff. So I think the convenience and the kind of lack of friction that Endlesss offers. We have people collaborating from the US and Canada and Sweden and France and the UK regularly. And to make that work by getting people into a physical space is pretty much impossible.
Darwin: Sure. Yeah, I imagine. So, unfortunately our time is up, but before we go, why don't you tell us really quickly what's next on the burner for Endlesss, but also what's next for you as an artist?
Tim: Well, what's next for Endlessss is: we're currently fundraising. I'm not actually sure when this podcast is going out. So either we'll be just about launch a crowd equity campaign, or we'll be in the middle of it, or at the end of it, so that's happening. That's very exciting because, it's going to give our community an opportunity to actually have a stake in the business that we're building as well, which I think is exactly how it should be. And then we're raising this money to build out our social features, which is also very exciting. The app has been out there quite a bit now, and we know how people behave. We know that if it will actually form friendships around Endlesss, they stick around for a long time and get a huge amount of value, personal and creative value, out of it. So we're really excited about that.
For me as an artist, I mean I don't really get that much time to work on music these days that said early this year, I did start building something that has been an idea I've been working with for a long time, which is it's actually an idea around composition having built an entire career on improvisation. It's basically using the idea of key framing in video editors, where you can take a snapshot of all the settings and in take another snapshot with settings and morph between multiple snapshots, I've been working on some systems in Reaktor that allow me to do that and also generate visuals at the same time. It's pretty embryonic at the moment, and I very rarely get any time to work on it, but maybe after we've got this funding round tied up. I might take a couple of days to work a bit more on that.
Darwin: That sounds really exciting and really interesting. Well, Tim, I want to thank you for having this chat and for taking time out of your schedule, it sounds like it's packed full. I appreciate you taking the time to have a talk with us.
Tim: Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. In fact, thank you for having me on - it's an honor. I mean, you've spoken to everybody who I'd ever want to speak to about music and tech. So yeah. Thank you. I think it's a great service that you're doing to this community with this podcast. So thank you.
Copyright 2021 by Darwin Grosse. All right reserved.