Hopkins Creek Festival had been decimated by wind the night before Nū took to the Planetarium stage in November 2025. ‘Good luck to those of you in a tent that cost less than $100’ Fetle joked. But it was true: the campsite had been turned into an apocalyptic wasteland of mangled gazebos, and of those tents that remained, most were looking misshapen and worse for wear.
The PA system at the stage bore the name ‘Solar Sound System’, constructed from ply-wood and solar panels. However, right at the start of Nū’s set, a conscientious fan from the front row stood up and sought out the sound guy as the audio from Fetle’s computer was too quiet by far. The fan – a young Black woman – waited patiently until the sound could be properly felt all the way in our chests before signalling a thumbs up.
It was an important moment; the audience securing control of the sound system felt like part of the performance, part of what Nū does. There was a project here; not simply a fandom, but something much more lucid and assertive: an avant-garde.
Something drew me to consider the sound system more carefully. The sound of Fetle’s algorithms seemed to imbue the ply-wood with an enigmatic energy, curling through the layers of wood grain and glue. A sense of spiritual momentum: immanence, I want to say. Apprehending both the sound and the materiality together, rather than in isolation, seemed to open a faucet of deep, textural satisfaction somewhere near the base of my cerebellum.
The way Fetle was utilising the system, in any case, was not for simple reproduction. It was more that she had coalesced its material processes into the apparatus of her musical instrument, amplifying the mastery implicit in the lines of code we could see her executing on her laptop. Mastery, pertaining to the silicone circuits aflutter beneath her keyboard. We did not want the PA for verisimilitude, we wanted it for transduction.
About halfway into the set, Fetle set off a slow loop: a patient and abrasive inharmonic arpeggiation which seemed to push the audience into what I want to describe as a state of open decoherence. As Fetle’s voice — defiant, restrained, thick — filled the space with an expression of her human person, for the first time in what felt like weeks, the clouds opened and the sun spilled through, flooding the Planetarium in a gentle, golden warmth.
This moment, in which something like providence or salvation seemed conceptually hard-coded in an abiogenic, electromagnetic embrace, has stuck with me. More than that, it gifted me something: a primeval sense of correctness I can use, that helps me constitute myself, that makes me feel strong in a world that is falling apart. A purpose. A vector. A weapon.
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When I called her, Fetle had just recently returned from Outer Magnolia, a residency studio in Port Macquarie. I asked her about her experience there:
The insects sounded like a drone. It’s nice to hear those sounds in nature and tune in, you know? It inspires me to recreate them with the digital tools that I have.
I was curious about how Fetle got started with live coding:
I did my undergraduate degree in science; I did a mathematics and statistics degree specialising in discrete maths and operations research. Making computers faster, essentially.
A friend of mine had a group show at Northcote Town Hall in 2021. Tash Atkins was exhibiting work in that show; she was doing live coding and opera singing. I had only done ‘Intro to Python’ at uni, but I had enough knowledge to look at the code and understand: oh, that's literally super easy. It's only a couple of lines, but it is generating such beautiful sound.
Fetle live codes with a distinctively open, architectural style. What led her towards this approach?
Sonic Pi has allowed me to develop an ambient, spatial style because it doesn't sync things unless you ask it to. You need to specify your own cycle length for each loop. It doesn't have a grid, if you think in DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) terms. It was really freeing when I was first developing work.
There seems to be something of a live coding renaissance currently: more live coding content popping up on my social media feed, different faces, more engagement. I asked Fetle whether she had noticed the same thing:
I completely agree. TOPLAP [an organisation focused on live coding in music and video] formed in 2004, which is what, twenty-two years ago? Crazy. So it's been around as a practice for a while. As a community it stayed around Sheffield or UK, before spreading to Mexico, Barcelona and then to other small pockets globally.
It stayed in these scenes that have this amazing political ethos of anarchy and non-hierarchical vibes; but it stayed niche. They’re super inclusive communities, but I think there’s even more of an openness now.
And maybe with artists like DJ Dave and Switch Angel, who have come into the popular scene. DJ Dave has toured with Danny Brown and Switch Angel is massive and she’s incredible: one of the main contributors to Strudel, one of the developers.
Has live coding become more accessible? Is it easier and quicker for a new person to get programs to do something expressive?
For someone to get into a program and understand it and not have to deal with heaps of random jargon and assumed knowledge — from that standpoint, yes. But also on the cultural accessibility side to things: live coding feels more accessible. There are more visible women, gender diverse people, women of colour popping off and setting examples for demographics that are usually turned away from highly tech-y spaces. So I feel like it's become accessible on both of those sides.
The conversation gravitated towards the relationship between spirituality and technology:
I feel very spiritual and I really lean into that in my music. I’m drawn in by — and inspired by — gospel. I'm not going to church or anything, but I do believe in some higher power. It has freed me to think of my creativity as something I tap into and, at times, it does feel like I’m a vessel for something else. Or, when I’m in that flow state, it doesn’t fully feel like it’s just me in the room, you know what I mean?
Technology is not new. There are so many Indigenous technologies that are super complex. Even if we just look at weaving practices: ancient hand woven tools that are methods of data collection, like the quipu, which is an ancient Incan technology. And humans have been making patterns and algorithms outside of computers for a very, very long time. The algorithms we have now are less visible to us. Sometimes it feels like they have a life of their own and we no longer have power to change them, but we need to remember that they’re still made by us.
There is a unique convention associated with live coding, that the performer shows their screen:
Yeah, showing our screens is a political statement! It is an important reminder for people that algorithms are there to be interacted with; torn apart and manipulated. There is a really human aspect to coding: interfering and contorting these things that we sometimes feel so separated from.
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This piece is co-published with support from Disclaimer, a journal by Liquid Architecture, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound.
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