Yaxu is the solo project of Alex McLean, who also works as part of collaborations including Slub, CCAI and Canute. He has live coded music since around the year 2000, co-founding the Algorave and TOPLAP live coding movements and creating the free/open source TidalCycles live coding language. He's performed widely including at No Bounds, Sonar, Glastonbury, Transmediale, Bluedot and Shambala festivals. He also directs the AlgoMech festival of Algorithmic and Mechanical Movement, currently planning the fourth edition for November 2020. By day Alex is a textile researcher, investigating weaving as an ancient digital artform as part of the PENELOPE project. He lives in Sheffield UK with his family of people and cats.
“Yaxu’s polyrhythmic and hyperreal strand of techno is showcased on cuts like Public Life and Cyclic showing that he is not just tes ng the confines of how music can be consumed but also how genres can sound. A truly forward-thinking in-flux of material” bleep.com
“Complexity emerges from simple instructions. With a few keystrokes, McLean transforms an arpeggio and a simple set of beats into complex polyrhythms that pan in decaying arcs” - Emily Bick
“Software artists such as Alex McLean are such hardcore outsiders that their art is in the computer code they write”, Grayson Perry