“This is not an assembly line. I’m literally just a girl making art”: For DJ_Dave, there are no musical shortcutsAny lifelong muso knows well the joy of finding their chosen instrument: the first time you hear the growl of an analogue synth, the frets of an electric guitar. For DJ_Dave, or Sarah Davis to her friends, it was the sight of an LCD screen – blank, save for a few lines of multi-coloured text.
“There was totally a ‘click’ moment,” Dave enthuses. “I was like, ‘oh my god, this is it.’ I knew this was exactly how I wanted to make music, exactly how I wanted to express my creativity.”
DJ_Dave on the MusicTech Cover. Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
What looks like creativity to Dave looks like an extremely strong online banking password to most others: (“bd bd hh bd rim bd hh bd”) is a drum sequence, and (“c2, eb3 g3 [bb3 c4]”) denotes both melody and harmony. You see, Dave is a live music coder by trade, and her instrument is Strudel. Using this open source programming environment, she’s able to conjure up a world of airy synths, angelic vocal chops, and thumping beats. Now based in Los Angeles and hard at work on her first full-length album, Dave is gearing up for a tour of the US, Europe and the UK alongside horsegiirL in the second half of the year.
If you’re wondering exactly what ‘live coding’ is, you’re not alone. Up until recently, this stuff was largely confined to experimental music meetups, academic hubs, and aptly titled ‘algoraves’ where practitioners take turns showing off their skill at manipulating command line interfaces for real-time music making.
Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
“It’s an environment where you write code and the output is sound,” Dave says simply when asked to explain how it all works. Skipping all the fancy graphic user interfaces you might get in Ableton Live or Bitwig, live music coding relies on written instructions to generate everything from simple sine waves to complex sequences. “It can be any type of sound, any genre of music. My specific genre of interest has always been dance music.”
Emerging in the mid-90s as an offshoot of Europe’s Demoscene – a DIY-centric subculture where digital visual arts and computer music combine to produce weird and wonderful results – live coding has grown into a vibrant, albeit niche, community. Dave first encountered it by chance during her college years; while completing a degree in fashion she decided on a whim to enroll in a class on live coding. By the end of it, she was hooked.
“Screen-sharing is nerve-wracking… I don’t always remember to clean up my files before I perform!”
The Covid pandemic initially kept Dave from performing live, but over the coming years she built a reputation as a skilled performer – and one unafraid to push against scene norms.“I was predominantly performing outside of live coding spaces,” Dave recalls. “Not even intentionally – I also played at algoraves – but I would go play at these random clubs in New York. That just hadn’t really been done before.”
It was also the kind of music she was making: dance tunes with more than a dash of pop sensibility. Dave went from playing small NYC venues to multi-night stints at buzzy joints like The Echo in LA and even Grimes’ Met Gala afterparty. She began performing live vocals during her sets, and also to automate parts of her code, which allowed her to step away from the laptop and take centre stage when needed.
However, there’s one area where Dave holds true to the ‘traditional’ aesthetics of live coding: sharing her screen to allow the audience to see the code as it’s being written.
Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
“It is nerve-wracking,” she concedes. “My coding process feels intimate, similar to how anyone would probably feel about their music production process. And I don’t always remember to clean up my files before I perform!”
Despite the understandable anxiety of having thousands watch you programme a musical algorithm on the fly, Dave emphasises that transparency lies at the very heart of live coding’s appeal. “The way it’s performed is so direct,” she states. “I’m cueing these sounds, people are watching them be triggered, hearing the music be created in real time. It’s such a cool way for audiences to see the full production process, start to finish, happening right in front of them.”
For a time, Dave experimented with bringing some of the now-standard EDM spectacle to her shows, with visual art overlays atop her lines of code. However, she’s increasingly stripping all that back to give audiences maximum insight into how the music comes to life.
Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
“I make sure the code is visible as much as possible,” she says. “When I get on stage, I can almost guarantee that I’ll be performing to some people who have never seen live coding before and it’s been such an interesting learning process for me to think about how to catch them up to speed, to explain what I’m doing without speaking.”
Educating the masses isn’t just something Dave does on stage. In 2024 she co-authored an academic paper on live coding in pop music, and embarked on her Always Learning Tour of college campuses in the US, where she’d give coding classes and public lectures in the day followed by performances in the evening. As most of the tools required are free and open source, the only real obstacles to the growth of live coding are a lack of public awareness and the need to master some basic console commands – something Dave has been trying to rectify.
“There is so much room for improvisation. The random outputs, the mistakes – I’ve always embraced that”
“Not a lot of schools offer a class on live-coding music and I want to try to bring this to people where I can,” Dave explains. “I was introduced to live coding in such a helpful way: having someone sitting in front of me, telling me the history and being there to answer my questions. It was such an invaluable introduction that I’ve always been so grateful for.”
Live coding is something that typically happens in the moment – with sounds and structures often wholly created or dynamically modified on the fly. This presented something of a challenge when Dave began recording and releasing her music.
“There is so much room for improvisation,” she exclaims. “The random outputs that it’ll give me, the mistakes – I’ve always embraced that. So, in the beginning, I would record the music as raw as I could. The first three songs I put out in early 2020 were recorded straight out of my live coding environment; I didn’t structure them, and there was no mixing or anything. I just bounced them and put them on Spotify.”
Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
These days, Dave leans more on DAWs for structuring her song arrangements but makes clear that everything still starts with code. “I love doing vocal chops in Strudel because every single time it sounds amazing. So, I make a vocal loop and then run that stem for a really long time, maybe for three minutes, and then take that into Logic Pro and find a section that I like. I don’t cut things up too much because I like when it sounds a little fucked up. So, there’s always these live elements present.”
As she works on her first full-length album, Dave says she’s balancing a “concerted effort to hone my sound” with a desire to break new ground. “I’m working on a lot of high-energy dance songs for the album,” she says. “But I also want to let myself go into other areas, other sub-genres that I haven’t really been able to do before.”
She’s also drawing from her experiences as a producer and a remixer. Having worked with Grimes and remixed Tove Lo but also Channel Tres, Dave says a lot of what she loves about remixing has found its way back into her own production process. “I love taking pre-existing sounds and manipulating them to sound brand new, and so I was always drawn to remixing other people’s work,” she says. “Creating the album, I was like, ‘well, if I love remixing so much, why not just remix my own songs?’ So, I would finish a track and then take part of it and remix it into a new track.”
Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
In 2026, generative AI, vibe coding, and social media’s propensity to stoke controversy all make technology a contentious subject, especially in music. Despite, or perhaps because, her creativity is so intrinsically linked to computer programming, Dave is not taking a rose-tinted view of how technology writ-large is influencing the world. “I am tech positive in some ways,” she allows. “But tech just felt a lot more fun when I was younger. Growing up, I was obsessed with gadgets, with classic early-2000s technology, and the aesthetics that went along with it all. It shifted for me when I started learning about planned obsolescence, because that is some bullshit.
“We as a society have been purposefully pulled away from our own power,” Dave continues. “I mean, I know this kid who made his own WiFi router – that is the type of shit that really excites me about technology. It’s putting technology back in our hands and making it fun again.”
For Dave, the allure of live coding is the music – but also the people, the culture, and the promise that technology doesn’t have to be standardised and streamlined. The rough edges, the anarchic spirit, the individualities and idiosyncrasies that have been ironed out of the modern internet still exist in subcultures like these.
“I like when it sounds a little fucked up. There’s always these live elements present”
“What I’ve always loved about live coding is that it has these really authentic, really punk roots. It has always been this transparent interaction with technology. The people that are involved in live coding are genuinely awesome, have good morals, are smart and amazing. Being involved in this community has made me feel a lot more optimistic about tech.”
Against the pervasive background noise of AI, productivity plugins, and frictionless user experiences, there is something inspiring about an artist making digital music line by line, beat by beat.
“It always cracks me up when I get emails telling me to try some AI coding tool that will read my screen and suggest what to code next, or when people leave comments telling me that I should use blah, blah, blah because it’ll ‘streamline the process’,” Dave says, rolling her eyes. “What process? This is not a corporation. This is not an assembly line. I’m literally just a girl making art. There’s nothing to shortcut.”
Words: Clovis McEvoy
Photography: David Milan Kelly
Location: Martinsound
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