A massively inspiring weekend at Tim Exile’s incredible studio and workspace, Timbers, just off Hackney Road.

Five of us spent the weekend with Tim for a workshop with a deliberately loose brief: creative pathfinding. How do you find your way out of the fog when you’re working on something and aren’t quite sure where it wants to go next?

The diversity of projects in the room was brilliant.

One involved a natural-language system for creating musical loops on the fly, which inevitably led to us trying to make a drum pattern sound like a horse?!

Another was an extraordinary cross-fading, looping ambient machine that was extremely up my street. Elsewhere, we explored the sonification of data from the Aurora Borealis, amongst many other things. Taken together, it was a pretty remarkable demonstration of just how far these technologies can be pushed when they’re put in the hands of curious people.

Much of the daytime was spent collaborating, experimenting and vibe coding small projects. Then on Saturday night, after dinner and an incredible spatial-audio playback of Jon Hopkins’ Ritual over Tim’s system, we each performed some version of what we’d been working on.

Mine was a collection of autobiographical soundscapes, performed using the new portable rig I’ve been assembling.

One thing became very clear to me that evening: just how much a visual element can add to a performance.

I’d had dashcam footage playing behind my set, and that became the seed for the next experiment. I’ve since started developing a web app that listens to the outgoing MIDI from my OP-XY and interprets it visually as blooms, distortions, warping and crinkles. The first tests worked surprisingly well, and I’m very excited to see where that goes.

I can say with some certainty that I wouldn’t have come up with it without the ideas, conversations and general cross-pollination of the weekend. That, I think, was really the point.

A special shout-out to the other Richard in the group too. After years of dabbling with musical equipment, he gave his first ever live performance on Saturday night. It was clearly a significant moment for him, and a real privilege to be in the room for it.

I’d highly recommend keeping an eye on what Tim Exile is doing. Alongside workshops like this, he seems to be in a constant process of probing at the edges of what’s possible with music, technology, interfaces and creative practice.

I came away with a head full of ideas, a new project I hadn’t expected to start, and a strong reminder of what can happen when you put a small group of curious people in a room together and give them permission to explore.