Cylob’s Chris Jeffs discusses his homemade DJ program, and his unusual controller setup.

As Cylob, Chris Jeffs is a pioneer in cutting-edge acid techno, with forays into breaks and some irresistible singles featuring synthesized raps and singing. As a DJ, Jeffs uses the Kombine BeatHarvester for performance. If you have not heard of it before, it is because the KBH is Jeffs’ own home-brewed program for playing live, coded painstakingly in the text-based music language, SuperCollider.

“Basically, it started with four virtual ‘decks,’ two on the left and on the right. There’s a crossfader between each deck on each side, and one going between the two sides, all controlled by the Monome.” One of a fairly recent generation of tactile controllers for computer music, the Monome consists of an array of buttons (128 in Jeffs’ case), customizable for any number of purposes. Jeffs has also recently added the iPod Touch to his controller arsenal, thumbing an X/Y controller application similar to the Korg Kaoss Pad, while his fingers fiddle with the Monome. As to DJing with buttons instead of analog-style knobs or faders, Jeffs explains: “The kind of DJing that I’m doing is quite digital anyway. Pressing a button and having an effect happen, it’s like a ‘playing’ style of DJing, rather than twisting knobs.”

Since 1998, Jeffs has created used the Cylob Music System, a sprawling series of programs designed in SuperCollider. About the circumstances behind the creation of the KBH, Jeffs explains: “I was using [Native Instruments’] Traktor, and there were a lot of things about it which I found quite frustrating. I wanted to make my own thing, and now I’ve put loads of features in there that no sane software company would want to have in a program.” As to what these insane applications are, Jeffs alludes to the ability to skip back and forth on the beats in a track, or trigger BPM-synchronized delays at different fractions of a beat, all with the push of a button.

Such an advanced program is bound to come with its obstacles, as Jeffs recounts from the initial performances with the first prototypes of the KBH, in 2007 and ’08: “The first time I was playing it in the actual gig situation, I had about four or five crashes. Everyone’s looking at you, and it makes you feel like even more of a twat if it’s because you’ve written your own thing and you can’t blame anyone else. I guess I just consider that part of the adventure!”

The KBH is set to automatically beatmatch tracks, with the BPM determined by Jeffs before he performs. Having a program take over beatmatching has been a relief for Jeffs, who recalls, “it’s nice manipulating a bit of vinyl, but I was never technically skilled enough.” Instead, the focus of the KBH is to take the possibilities of DJing to new levels: “If you mix a few tracks together, and they’re all skipping all over the place, it turns into a new sort of meta-track when you get it right. I was thinking more along those terms, rather than just simply beatmatching.”

The big question for any such innovative program, the—are there any plans to release the KBH to the public? Jeffs is reluctant about the idea: “The [problem] with releasing software is that either everyone ignores it and isn’t all that interested, or you just get loads of mail, saying, ‘Oh, can you do this or that, how does this work, it’s not working?’ I don’t want to have to bother with that stuff. It doesn’t bother me that I’m the only person using my own tools—it’s a source of pride, as well.”

Cylob’s music and programming developments can be followed at http://cylob.blogspot.com.

Words: David Abravanel

as featured in Issue 27