Lain_9 is a Buenos Aires-based live coding artist whose practice centres on the real-time generation of music through code. Working principally with TidalCycles and SuperCollider, Lain_9 performs algorithmic music in which the act of writing and modifying code is the performance itself — visible to the audience, subject to error, and irreversible in its temporal unfolding. Active within the TOPLAP community and the Buenos Aires live coding scene, Lain_9 represents a strand of Argentine electronic practice rooted in transparency about process and scepticism toward the illusions that most music technology maintains.
Artistic Practice
Live coding is a performance practice in which music is generated by writing and executing code in real time, with the code projected and visible to the audience. The approach has its philosophical foundations in the hacker ethic and in a broader commitment to demystifying the technology of music production: nothing is hidden, no pre-prepared sequences are running in the background, and the performer’s decisions — including mistakes, revisions and dead ends — are part of the work as it unfolds. Lain_9 works within this tradition, bringing it into contact with the specific textures and concerns of the Buenos Aires experimental electronic scene.
TidalCycles, the primary tool in Lain_9’s practice, was developed by Alex McLean and is designed specifically for live coding rhythmic music. Its pattern-based syntax allows rapid construction of complex polyrhythmic structures, and its integration with SuperCollider — the underlying sound synthesis environment — gives the performer access to a broad range of synthesis techniques. The two tools together constitute a complete live performance system: TidalCycles handles pattern generation and transformation; SuperCollider handles the production of actual sound.
The algorithmic music tradition that Lain_9 works within has a history extending back to the mid-twentieth century, through the stochastic compositions of Iannis Xenakis, the process music of Steve Reich and the generative systems of Brian Eno. Live coding extends this history into the networked, real-time context of the twenty-first century, adding the dimension of transparency and the possibility of audience participation in understanding the compositional process as it happens. Lain_9’s engagement with this tradition is active and informed — their performances reference and respond to the wider conversation within the TOPLAP community about what live coding practice is and should be.
Tools and Methods
TidalCycles runs on top of SuperCollider, using the Haskell programming language as its syntax. This is an unusual technical choice — Haskell is a functional programming language with a steep learning curve — but it produces an expressive and concise pattern notation that suits real-time performance once mastered. Lain_9’s fluency in TidalCycles is the result of sustained practice; live coding, unlike many performance disciplines, rewards the kind of incremental daily engagement that builds genuine technical intimacy with a tool.
SuperCollider, the underlying synthesis environment, is a powerful and complex system capable of producing virtually any kind of electronic sound. Its open-source status and its adoption within academic music technology contexts give it a particular cultural position: it is simultaneously an experimental research tool and a performance instrument with an active user community. Within the live coding context, SuperCollider’s synthesis capabilities are addressed through TidalCycles, but Lain_9 also works directly in SuperCollider for sound design that sits outside the pattern-based framework.
The TOPLAP community — the global network of live coders whose manifesto, written in 2004, articulated many of the key commitments of the practice — provides both a social context and a set of shared values for Lain_9’s work. Participation in TOPLAP events, including algoraves (dance events built around live coding performance), connects the Buenos Aires practice to the international network of artists and researchers working in the same domain. Algoraves in particular represent a significant development in the live coding scene: they bring the practice into contact with the physical, social and political context of dance culture, testing whether the values of transparency and process are compatible with the demands of a dancefloor.
Selected Works
Lain_9 has performed at algoraves and live coding events in Buenos Aires, contributing to a local scene that has developed around the city’s experimental music infrastructure. Their performances are typically undocumented in conventional terms — the nature of live coding means that performances are unique and non-reproducible, and the communities within which they circulate tend to value presence over documentation. What persists are code repositories, session recordings and the accumulated knowledge of a practice developed over multiple years of performance.
Their connection to the Amplify DAI programme — the British Council and MUTEK initiative that connected digital artists from Latin America, the UK and Canada between 2018 and 2025 — situated Buenos Aires live coding practice within an international frame that recognised its significance as a strand of contemporary digital art. Within that context, Lain_9’s work represented a practice defined by its commitment to open processes, shared tools and the productive exposure of the conditions of its own making.
[EMBED: TOPLAP stream archive / algorave.com — search Lain_9 Buenos Aires]
