Before Ableton Live, before VJ apps, the AV act Coldcut were already making their own software for remixed audiovisual performance. Now, with the Ninja Tune label they founded, Matt Black is still championing the notion of performance that goes beyond pressing play.
I’ve never seen anyone pick up Ninja Jamm and not immediately fall in love with it. It’s just a tremendous amount of fun working with the built-in effects and quick access to bits and pieces of music.
The likes of Amon Tobin, Bonobo, and Roots Manuva are there, with a variety of genres. There’s also Loopmasters sound content, so you can make your own tunes from loops, too.
Now, as everyone else debates playback apps and streams, will listeners embrace more active “performance” of music? That’s yet to be seen. The app itself, perhaps a bit of a slow burn at the first, has gradually racked up 300,000 downloads on iOS. And now, it comes to Android.
It’s free; you purchase the content you want in-app.
In fact, it’s interesting to watch Native Instruments push Stems – Ninja Jamm was already on iOS showing four stems per track in this app. (Ninja is not yet on NI’s label list at the moment; I’ll ask them about that.)
Have at it on your gadget of choice:
There’s also a remix contest on:
http://www.ninjajamm.com/remix
— with some nice prizes and Roota Manuva as the starting point.
You have to admire what Ninja are able to do here. They have the app and the artists, making a complete experience for their fans.
If you do use this in some way, we’d love to know what you think.
Side note: the app makes use of two open source frameworks that make cross platform compatibility practical, OpenFrameworks and libpd.