Pastagang mantras

The mantras that slide along the top of the screen in nudel (and dotcool) aren’t just for show. They emerged as reminders / pieces of helpful advice: To remind you of things during the jam to help you out.

They didn’t start out that way, but they soon became that.

Anyway, in this blog post I’ll go through each one (in order) explaining what they mean.

Do it

This was added by someone at Errorcamp as a bit of a joke but then people realised that it’s good advice for jamming and hierarchy-free stuff in general. If you have an idea for something that should be done, don’t talk about, don’t ask for it to happen. You should do it.

This happens quite often within the room. Someone might ask for a change. Like “can we turn down the drum it’s a bit loud? maybe we could add some changing dynamics over time?” The advice is to do it.

Everyone else is busy doing their own thing, please help by doing it: Yes you are allowed.

“It’s running a bit slow on my computer: Please can you remove some effects?” If you find yourself asking this, do one better by doing it yourself.

The “do it” mantra also pops up in in-person events, like AlgoRhythms where there are many jobs that need doing, like moving benches and tables. You don’t need to ask someone else to do it or for permission: Please do it.

Or not. I’m a mantra not a cop.

Anything can happen

This is kind of a forced mantra. It didn’t grow organically so it doesn’t have so much meaning but it’s a reference to the running gag in my talk at ICLC where I said “anything can happen” a lot. The recording isn’t released yet but I did recreate it at the end of this livestream.

If anything, the mantra is a reminder that anything can happen during a jam, which means both good and bad things can happen, so you should prepare yourself for that!

It also hints at the lack of rules and anarchic nature of pastagang. Sometimes some people say that certain things are or aren’t allowed, and this mantra gives an opinion on that: That anything can happen. Or in other words: “There are no rules”.

Mantras repeat

One of the earliest mantras, this phrase introduced the concept of mantras to people and how they work.

Notably, mantras aren’t random: They cycle through a set list in order, which means that one mantra can follow another. For a period of time, they were random, but now they’re not.

Speaking of which, this mantra leads into the next one…

We love repetition

Perhaps the oldest mantra in this list, pre-dating pastagang by a long way. Yaxu puts it best:

When I was a (failing) student the first time around in the 90s, I came up with “MDMA generation, we love repetition” as a joke while messing around with a synth, if I recall correctly, and later reappropriated it…

For me though, “algorave generation, we love repetition” as a statement sits in the context of UK university computer music departments around 2010, with their institutionalised electroacoustic music culture where virtuosity is all about the number of genelec speakers in your multichannel array, and where repetition was regarded more or less as pure evil.

I don’t know whether you’ve heard of this guy Adorno but for some reason he’s taken seriously by music academics despite every quote I’ve read from him coming across as unhinged… He reckons repetition is “psychotic and infantile”. Believe it or not, these people group together all music that isn’t electroacoustic or European classical as ‘popular music’ and repetition would be a mark of that.

I think there’s a small world mindset inherent in rejecting repetitive dance music and it doesn’t take much imagination to link it to racism, homophobia, classism, etc.

So basically, to say “we like repetition” is a kind of rejection of that kind of weirdo performative seriousness that we were talking about in the pub. ;)

And he adds:

Also it’s stuck around because it’s one joke that you can keep making forever!

Thanks yaxu

Following on from the previous mantra… “thanks yaxu” is a phrase that people write after jux(rev) or similar in their code. It’s an in-joke that you can do during your sets and jams to give a wave to other jux rev fans in the crowd. Often followed by a cheer or a whoop from those watching.

It has some variations too. During his ICLC performance, yaxu himself wrote “thanks pastas” after a jux rev. There’s also the infamous double yaxu where you do too jux revs in a row.

Jux rev is considered to be a crutch by some, and by writing “thanks yaxu” next to it, you’re drawing attention to it / lampshading it. It’s a way of reaffirming that crutches are okay.

Part of the joke is that your jux rev won’t sound good unless you write “thanks yaxu” after it. It’s like a prayer or a superstition, like crossing your fingers. Of course, it’s [just] a comment: It does nothing to the code and that’s the joke. But as we know, live coding is about more than [just] what your code does. An integral part of live coding is that other people can see and read your code. This little joke can only exist because of that.

Another part of the joke is that it’s absurd to thank yaxu for “telling me about jux rev” (which is how the mantra first formed) as it’s such a small thing compared to everything else he’s known for / heralded as. So “thanks yaxu” is a bit cheeky: It’s a willful ignorance of the wider context of live coding.

Wow jokes really get ruined when you explain them.

The first mantra that was added to dotcool. It was originally added [just] to make it clear that the website you were on was not flok but a flok wrapper. But the unexpected part was that people started making music about the mantra, and there’s a whole collection of early pastagang music about normalising sharing scrappy fiddles. It served as a prompt.

The mantra itself comes from arroost, where it was used to encourage the community to make it okay to share stuff that makes you a bit vulnerable.

I’ve written and spoken extensively about this mantra already so I’ll spare you the time this time!

Let code die

The big one! Perhaps the most prevalent mantra for some reason. This means a lot.

When you participate in a live jam, everything you do is ephemeral. Everything you write or contribute will die as the jam moves on. Even if it gets recorded, this moment will pass and the jam will eat up your code and spit it out and forget about it.

It can feel sad to lose your code. If someone deletes or changes your code, it can make you angry. But this is what happens: It’s time passing.

This is the mantra I find hardest to articulate and it’s the one that newbies show most resistance to, I think.

It places emphasis on the changing of code, not on the creation of code. Participating in the jam can mean: Writing code, editing code, and also deleting code. One is not necessarily better than the other: The focus is on the experience and process, not any artifact we end up, and especially not a code artifact! Heavens above!

Letting code die is something I still struggle with but I do notice that the more magical moments happen when I let code die more freely (both mine and other people’s). It’s quite an amazing feeling when you jam with people who can let code die freely (including the code I wrote).

If you don’t let code die, then that’s not a very nice thing to do, because it means you aren’t making space for other people.

Pastagang puts it best:

of course, code can only die if someone has written it in the first place. there are always periods of growth where code gets more. at some point, there is so much code that new code doesn’t have a chance to fit in. when pruning a fruit tree, there is the rule of thumb that you should make enough space so that a dove could fly through.

it’s vital for the tree’s health to cut it regularly, removing dead branches to make sure the tree gets enough air and light. the best time to cut a fruit tree is in the winter, and so is it the best time to let code die when it has cooled down. there is a cognitive aspect to it too: the more often something gets repeated, the more it fades away in your perception.

when playing an acoustic instrument, your body has to do hard work when repeating something over and over again. the longer you beat that drum, blow that horn, sing that note, the more your body will beg you to let the music die. so you will stop sooner or later, or change the pace. when making music with code, you “just” need to use your fingers once to pound your keys.

after that, the machine does the body work, sucking current out of your wall, shifting electrons around to finally move that membrane. after the initial thrill of a fresh sound, it is easy to forget that it’s still running. you’re probably busy writing more code somewhere else. the mantra of let code die tries to remember you to check your branches and cut them regularly.

when you do decide to let code die, you make space in the code itself, but also space in time where that sound used to play and space in the frequency domain where that sound used to live, space, that, yeah.

“Let code die” also has links to the tadi web Which is very obsessed with death. The tadi web involves a “slippy mindset” where you learn to bounce back from losing all your code and working in a way where losing all your code is not disastrous. The mantra is a more palatable version of the tadi web’s advice to “embrace death”.

You must delete

“You must delete” pre-dates “let code die”. “Let code die” actually grew out of “you must delete”.

In early jams, people started to realise the importance of deleting, but of course it was difficult to follow through with that at first. You feel worried about deleting other people’s code or you grow too attached to your own. When given a choice, you might choose to not delete (oh no!).

So here comes the mantra “you must delete”. It makes deleting easier by removing the choice. When the “you must delete” mantra appeared at the top (which happened approximately every ten minutes), people followed the tradition of deleting everything in the room: Their own code as well as other people’s. It was a steady reset ritual.

This can be a melancholic moment, so people started saying phrases like “let code die” after the mass delete, and it stuck. Almost a year later and people still type “let code die” as a way of acknowledging the loss of code after it gets deleted.

If you delete someone else’s code, you can type “let code die” to remind them that it’s okay: This is the passing of time. The code had its moment and now it’s time to move on.

If your code gets completely deleted by someone, you can type “let code die” to show them that you understand.

It’s basic hygiene: You have to clean things up: You must delete.

Make space

“Make space” follows on from “let code die” and “you must delete” because it’s the reason we do those things. By deleting something, we make space for something and someone else. It’s not mean to delete: It’s mean to not delete because then you’re not making space.

There are other ways of making space. One classic is to create a literal area in the flok room for someone to use. Things like “Todepond solo here:” help to make space for individuals.

“Nudel is a space” has been occasionally thrown around as a mantra too, and things like cursorland take that further.

The wider movement of pastagang is about making space more generally. It gives people one extra creative outlet / direction: One where there isn’t too much pressure. That’s the idea anyway.

One small example is the pastagang paper that gave some people some space to share their thoughts within a piece of writing. And it’ll give some people some room on stage(?) to talk about it.

There is only one room

This is a lie. There are now three rooms: The main room, the dente room, and the twirl room. But at the time of writing, this mantra was true, and there still is only one main room that nudel, dotcool and flok all point to.

This mantra is the reason you need to “make space”. It’s because there is limited space.

There’s also some ultra vague metaphor with planet earth: There is only one planet and we all share it.

This mantra hasn’t ever picked up much steam.

BAD CODE ONLY

In capital letters, this mantra is one of the oldest. It was written to try to encourage beginners to join in. When someone says something like “I’m bad at coding” or “ bad at music” or whatever, you can point to the top of the screen and say “Look. You’re lucky. BAD CODE ONLY.”

A secondary purpose of this mantra is to dissuade people from trying to show off or impress others, because all that does is raise the bar and that stops people from joining in.

In that sense, it’s not wordplay or a trick or a paradox where you try to write bad code and end up writing good code. No: You must try to write bad code and successfully write bad code to lower the bar.

The “bad code only” mantra has picked up a lot of attention, especially here in the London scene. For example, it was seen in a poem written during the April 2025 algorave:

Good code goes to heaven
Bad code goes to algorave

And it’s repeated at least ten times per meetup, with the same purpose as in pastagang: To encourage people to join in.

Be talentless

This is the newest mantra and no one knows what it means yet but two pastagangers have promised to write a blog post about it.

energy YES, quality NO

This is another mantra that pre-dates pastagang, often routed back to Thomas Hirschhorn’s 2013 post, often brought up by heavy lifting.

The mantra encourages you to respond to music and visuals based on the energy it gives it you, NOT on the quality you judge it as having (or not).

It kind builds on the previous mantra: “bad code only”: We shouldn’t aim for code quality: We should go for ENERGY instead.

Energy is about the interpersonal where judgements on quality are cold and detached.

The goal is not to do something GOOD. The goal is to do something TOGETHER.

Fuck off AI music

Sorry I’d love to explain this mantra but I’m part of the fuck off ai music movement?

Everyone sees the same mantra

This mantra used to go next to “mantras repeat”, but that was moved away to pair up with “we love repetition” instead.

Similar to “mantras repeat”, this mantra was added when the rolling mantra system was first introduced as a way of introducing it to people and teaching them how it worked. Apart from that, you could interpret this mantra as another way of reminding jammers that they are connected to other humans through the room. Part of our vision is shared.

Shave your head. It’s pastagang time.

Perhaps the wildest, this mantra was added by an enthusiastic jammer mere moments before they went up on stage to perform a pastagang set at ICLC. They made the change from their phone and unfortunately broke nudel. Luckily another jammer in the crowd fixed it from their phone while the laptops were getting plugged in.

For sure, this mantra captures some of the more manic mob chaos that pastagang can bring. There’s a taste of doing something mad that you might regret, like opening Pandora’s box. Why not?

Forget everything you know

This mantra replaced an older one: “Let go of what you know”, which was originally a reference to the final lines of the source of the cellpond.

The new mantra took its place because a jammer wanted to convey a stronger version of its message.

The mantra has links to the “from scratch” live coding movement where you start a set with an empty code file. The mantra takes it further though. You must truly forget EVERYTHING you know before stepping into the jam so that you truly start with nothing: entirely from scratch.

Scales aren’t real

… but I am! Scales are just some thing that some guy made up at some point. You don’t need to follow them. You don’t need to use them. You can commit scale crimes. They aren’t the rules. “There are no rules”! It’s all made up. Scales are not real.

This mantra first appeared in random conversations with random newbies in the pastagang room. It’s common for beginners to say something like “Oh no I can’t: I don’t know anything about scales” to which a common reply is that “scales aren’t real”.

Of course scales are real as a concept made up by some guy but they aren’t real as a real part of the universe like you and me. They’re [just] an idea and we shouldn’t be limited by them.

The pastagang paper taught me that I’m not the only one who’s been excluded from music before because I didn’t know enough about scales. “Scales aren’t real” is a rejection of anyone out there who uses scales or any part of music theory to be snobby and to exclude people.

The scales we typically know and use keep us limited: They direct us towards a narrow path of music because scales aren’t real and they’re often stuck on semitone tracks in western music. They were [just] made up by some guy but you can invent any scale you want, and there are loads of different scales to pick from if you look beyond western music. There’s no fixed set of scales. A scale only needs a start and an end and some notes in between. They’re not real. Scales are not real!

But I am!

As you may have noticed, the mantra “scales aren’t real” is usually followed by “they’re just something some guy made up”. The word “guy” here might seem weird but it refers to how guy-dominated the historical music world is perceived to be, or at the very least, presented as.

Persist in your folly

This is the final mantra at the time of writing, but mantras change all the time. They are not fixed: Mantras are not real. They’re [just] something that some person made up.

And I don’t know where this mantra came from but I know it’s been there a while, so maybe someone else from pastagang can add to this section. I’ll make space for you.

MORE DETAILED EXPLANATION GOES HERE:

(space saved for more detailed explanation)

There are many more mantras that have been added but then removed. This post only represents a small snapshot of the process of jamming a list of mantras. In usual pastagang fashion, anyone can add, edit, or delete mantras by editing this file. If you want admin access, ask for it in an issue. That’s how I got admin access.

It’s super hard to trace back who originally wrote each mantra because files get moved around, reformatted, refactored, etcetera.. And it’s all very fuzzy anyway as we all prompt each other to make and do things. So we say that it was pastagang that made this list, not any individual.

Pastagang didn’t necessarily make the mantras (some mantras even pre-date pastagang) but pastagang made the list.

I bet you might try to guess which mantras you think I was personally involved in and which ones I wasn’t, but I bet you’re wrong! Because I know people are biased towards assuming more from loud people like me… which is tyrannical.

But yes, at times the mantra list has gone down to only one or two mantras and then grown back up again. Tomorrow it might look completely different.

The way the mantra system works has also completely changed multiple times and will probably continue to do so.

And you might think that I don’t get to say what these mantras mean, because I didn’t make the list, right? I’m only guessing, at best, in most cases.

Who is to say what pastagang meant by that?

But no, I’m fully entitled to say what they mean because this is a jam and I’m a jammer too! If anyone doesn’t like it, they can change it (when I hit upload on this post).

I think there are different kinds of hierarchy free organisation. Some where no one is in charge, which means that NO ONE can speak on behalf of the group. And then there’s groups like pastagang where no one is in charge so EVERYONE can speak on behalf of the group. Time will tell which one’s better.

In the year 2025, everything is shit. Everything is fucking awful.

I see lots of people looking for movements to be part of or things to believe in. Unfortunately, that can too often mean becoming indoctrinated by the manosphere or intoxicated by the abusive magic of AI.

“Make America Great Again” is a mantra that too many people gripped onto because it helped them make sense of the world and it helped to reinforce their beliefs. But more than that, it offered a community and a movement that they could be part of, however toxic it might be.

But adopting a mantra is always a choice: We choose our beliefs and we choose the people we associate with.

Today, you may or may not choose to adopt any of the (current) pastagang mantras into your work or life. Either way, they’re there.

This blog post was written by pastagang. Anyone can edit this blog post.