author : Renick Bell
Renick Bell
“Renick Bell is one of [the algorave] scene’s more flabbergasting producers,” writes Mixmag magazine. Resident Advisor calls him “Algorave kingpin” and writes that he “is one of the leading figures of the algorave movement, and watching him make his music is just as fun as dancing to it.”
Bell improvises percussive and bass-heavy algorithmic music by live coding with open source software, including two software libraries he has written. The older, Conductive, was developed in the Haskell programming language, and the newer, Konduktiva, was developed in JavaScript. Each performance is unique, unheard before an event even by Bell, with his live programming activity projected for the audience to see.
He has performed at hundreds of events internationally. In 2019, he was selected by Aphex Twin for the latter's first-ever curated event for the The Warehouse Project in Manchester, UK, where he headlined the Archive Room stage. He has performed at festivals such as Unsound, Berlin Atonal, Mutek, and Terraforma.
Recordings of his music have also achieved acclaim. In 2018 he released an album called Wary on 2018 Grammy-nominated producer Rabit's Halcyon Veil label and another called Turning Points on Seagrave Records, which was a critical success, including ranking 19 out of “The 50 best albums of 2018” by FACT magazine. He has released on Lee Gamble's UIQ label, Berlin-based Conditional Records, and Saplings Records, among others.
His music practice corresponds with a research practice of writing software and research papers on live coding, electronic music, art, and aesthetics, as well as teaching in university and other contexts. He holds a PhD from Tama Art University in Tokyo, Japan. Bell is now based in Saigon, Vietnam, where he is a lecturer in sound design and creative coding at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). He was based in Tokyo from 2006-2020 and lived in Taiwan from 2001 to 2006 and 2020 to 2023. He is originally from West Texas.