I’ve noticed this album title/cover used to correspond with what’s now “pastagang is dead”. What’s going on there?



“that’s how you know it’s pastagang”
“we are not here to make code. we are here to make changes”

the non-mantra answer is:

i’ve been trying to embody some of pastagang’s values a bit more recently, or—

like some other jammers, i’ve been enjoying collecting together albums over the past ?? months. it feels like an opportunity to tell a story (or something) by assembling different pieces.

within pastagang, the goal is never to make something static: there’s not a final artifact that one is trying to work towards. the fun comes from the process: the additions of new things but also the changes and also the deletions (blah blah blah we all know this already).

so i’m not sure how many people notice how much these albums change over time. songs get added to albums after their first release. or songs get removed. or songs get moved from one album to another, or they get edited differently (eg: trimmed), or whatever.

in particular, i enjoy watching along in the private drafts of the account! you can see people build up an album over a long period of time. unlike nudel, building up an album is slow. it usually takes a long time for someone to build one up, and activity often happens in a burst. (and while there’s a draft sitting there, it’s a good chance to add in something or change something in someone else’s album— i mean— they’re all pastagang’s albums anyway)

but yeah! for sure, i think this goes against what most people expect from an album, which is often a dead, static thing. but pastagang is not dead yet! so they keep changing.

sometimes i struggle to grasp this concept myself. at times, i feel out or discover a change i think should be made to an album, but i lack the conviction to “do it” because it goes against so much of what i’m used to.

but then i read bank those mantras for the thousandth time, and i look at all the amazing stuff that other jammers are doing, and i feel motivated / encouraged to overcome that!

anyway, yeah, ultimately, i’d been collecting together tracks for that “many heads” album for a while. i even have a load of personal notes written down about which tracks should or shouldn’t go into it. the idea for it popped up when pastagang started doing a lot of initNudelStream, when that first got created. i was planning to include only tracks that were made when there were literally multiple human heads present in the visuals. i noticed these moments usually involved LOADS of energy. the “how many heads do you need” title was copied from one of those early jams.

however, the phrase “how many heads do you need” grew and changed to mean something more symbolic about the anti-hierarchal nature of pastagang and its multi-leadered(?) approach. i even stole this title for a talk i gave about it, and the talk was all about jam-oriented programming and jam-oriented everything.

and, to me, the old album didn’t deliver on the promise of those concepts anymore. it was too much focused on genre and not enough on the politics or whatever of pastagang. every time i saw the album i felt a little bit cringe because it didn’t sit right with me that the album themed around many people being in charge was such a similar style of music all throughout. sure, there were other tracks that i was planning on adding that were vastly different, but there’s no way around it: the core of the album is already there.

i finally got the courage to do something about it! i actually wanted to keep those tracks together as part of something else, and the two opening ones actually come from a jam session all themed about pastagang dying and coming back to life, so it feels like there’s a much more interesting and different story to tell with that, so i renamed the old album for now, and i started rebuilding the NEW “how many heads do you need” album with a focus more on multiple pastagangers speaking. this was partly inspired by listening to pastagang’s recent cursorland album, which interleaves a sample from pattern club radio(?) over pastagang’s music, and also pastagang’s upcoming remix of all this year’s albums, which does the same.

OF COURSE, this is only true at this moment right here right now. if you view bandcamp right now, you’ll only see a SNAPSHOT of a PROCESS, not a STATIC ARTIFACT. everything can and will change. the album might get reverted. it might be deleted. it may sit still forever. the password is letcodedie. anyone can change anything. the password is letcodedie. you can do anything. there are no rules. except the code of conduct. but that can also be changed. let code die. let code die. this blog post can die too. anyone can edit it. what you are reading is only a SNAPSHOT. we are not here to make code. the password is letcodedie. we are here to make changes. the password is letcodedie. that’s how you know it’s pastagang.


and this is also why pastagang uses mantras: because it takes so long to write all of this out each time


back to the blog where “Posts can be incomplete and updated/enhanced/deleted from time to time.”