I met pastagang

I played in Linz with pastagang, the live coding group I've been jamming online with since last summer.

I've been meaning to write about pastagang here for a while, and now that I got to meet (a part of) the members in person at AMRO 2026, it seems like the perfect time!

pastagang is a live coding jam group that anyone can join. The main thing that that means in practice is that we jam together, making music using code on a site called Nudel.

Usually, this happens online at unplanned times: just hop onto the site at any time and find a few people there to jam with. That's the way I had been interacting with pastagang since last summer.

Somebody on the pastagang Discord suggested we apply to do a workshop and performance at the Art Meets Radical Openness festival, and we ended up getting accepted! It was my first time at AMRO, but I'll save my notes for a future blog post.

Thanks to AMRO, I got to perform IRL with pastagang. Just like the online jams, our performances are also fully improvised and done on Nudel. The difference is that (some of) the pastagangers are also there in-person to perform, joined by whoever's online nudel.cc at the time of the performance.

This is what it looked like for us:

And this is what it looked like for people joining online:

Sorry, what?

There's a lot to unpack in those clips:

We are making music using code, a practice known as live coding. We do this using a language called Strudel, which is Javascript-based and so it runs in the browser, but there are many other languages in which you can live-code. I discovered Strudel when five different friends all sent me DJ Dave clips within one month. I quickly went down the live coding rabbit hole via Strudel's Discord, where I also stumbled upon pastagang. In retrospect, it's strange I didn't know about live coding earlier, since it would so clearly be my thing.

There are many people at once. I paused the video and counted 14 cursors. There were six people live coding in person during our performance, and the rest were online pastagangers that were summoned by the Nudel doomsday clock that we'd had up on the site for the past three weeks, counting down to expire at the end of our AMRO performance.

It's chaos. It was particular chaos this time because of the number of people, but Nudel jams are never easy listening. They sound ridiculous, but they're so addictive to take part in. A pastagang performance is likely more fun for the performers than the audience, which is exactly why we try to turn the audience into performers as well. You're all pastagang!

Gesamtjam

To describe pastagang as a live coding jam group is correct but reductive. The group has a particular ethos derived from extending the logic of the jam to beyond Nudel. Pastagang distills the spirit of the jam into mantras that float slowly in a ticker at the top of Nudel.cc. Some of the important ones:

Energy YES, quality NO

The jam is ephemeral, music only heard once and then discarded. That is freeing: go out and try things, who cares if it's bad? It's a low-pressure environment, nobody will hear or remember any mistake you might make. Don't be shy. Try, add, change, delete!

Let code die

As programmers, we're taught to save frequently, version everything in git and make backups of backups. But in some cases, this hoarding instinct doesn't make sense. When jamming in Nudel, people's first instinct is to just keep adding more code and more sounds, cluttering the sound space. Sometimes, to make progress, we need to let code die. Don't comment it out, just delete.

Do it

Pastagang takes the jam approach to code as well: everybody is made an admin of the code repositories, meaning you can go and change anything and your change will immediately be reflected in the live Nudel.cc website (e.g. you can add another mantra) - or you can go and change the homepage, pastagang.cc.

Death of Nudel: LESS likely than you think

If you're a programmer, chances are that reading the paragraph above raised your pulse to drum-and-bass level BPMs. Literally anybody can break the website at any time, make it display a picture of their genitalia, or even wipe it altogether. But somehow, this mostly has not happened. After all, Wikipedia also works. Changes are reversible, and there are far more good actors than bad ones.

Unless?

But when you go to nudel.cc, as of the time of writing, what you'll see is:

Despite what the mantra said, Nudel is dead! We used it for our performance (~10 days ago) and destroyed it at the end, at 3am.

The story of why we decided to kill Nudel is too long to tell here but boils down to the fact that we felt it's time to move on, and that pastagang doesn't scale: we lack moderation, and it's somewhat easy for one person to ruin things for others. Of course, we knew this wouldn't scale, and that's ok! Not everything has to.

If you're curious, check out the pastagang blog for some context - you might need to use Wayback machine since the site changes often.

This contradiction is hard to resolve: we want to be open to anyone joining pastagang, but having too many people will ruin things. We'll see if what emerges from Nudel's ashes will have an answer to that.