Whilst not strictly ‘darkfloor’ in nature it will interest many of you.

The incredible live performer Beardyman has announced and released a 20 minute (well 19.5 minutes for the pedants) promotional video showcasing his new system.

A system some 6 years in the thinking, researching and development.

It’s a custom built audio system put together by four developers including Dave Gamble and Sugar Bytes. The Beardytron_5000 mkII is at its core three iPads connected over wifi using a multi-threaded music engine and in Beardyman’s own words is immensely complicated.

Beardyman has plans to release the software at some point. For now, if you haven’t seen the Beardyman throwing down his completely unique and quite mad take on things he’ll probably be at plenty of festivals this year. Check out some dates here.

Those of you in the UK can catch him abusing the Beardytron system during May at the following venues:

02/05 – Waterfront, Norwich
03/05 – Leadmill, Sheffield
06/05 – Koko, London
08/05 – Arches, Glasgow

Beardyman:

After 6 years of frantic research and development, its here. The Beardytron_5000 mkII, and i can’t wait to share it with you.

For the last year and a half i have been working on the system which will allow me to finally realise the ideas i’ve had in my head all this time which i’ve never had the means to produce. Now i do.

This new system is immensely complicated, but it has to be. What i now have at my disposal is the most complex and fully featured live-production system ever devised. I can start from nothing and get a fully formed track in as long as it takes to imagine it. Real-time music production. This has never been possible before. My old set-up was never suited to task, but i got pretty good at using it live and working around its many flaws… Now however, i can design my way out of any problem i see. This has seen a team of 4 developers pushed to their limits to achieve my dream of being able to drag musical ideas out of my head and into the real world at the speed at which they occur to me.

It’ll never be truly finished, because it’s potential is limited only be my imagination and ability to fund it’s development. But know this… Every time i test a new feature it fires off a thousand new ideas… Basically what i have here is a platform for innovation. At some point i will commercialise the hard work that has been done on the system, but there is no date set for software releases yet or any idea what kind of form any resulting products would take. Still, i feel it is now time to share the fruits of my labours with the world, and i invite u to join me on my ongoing journey into the unknown, to see what lies behind the great mirror, to sample the fruits of the fun-fun shrub, bathe in the cramnumbulant majesty of its myriad splendours. Be… Feel…. Die.

If you can catch him perform I can’t recommended seeing him enough. Not only is he ridiculously talented in the music production wizard skills, he is very funny and a great showman.

Although from 2009 this video of his is still a massive favourite.