Watch a short documentary on the journey of Endlesss from personal instrument to next-level collaborative music creation software – a 30-year story of naïveté, inspiration, grit, and good fortune
How do you transform a solo artist's dream of real-time music creation into a collaborative experience available to anyone who wants to make music? That's the journey of Endlesss, which began as a flexible custom instrument and innovative vision by founder Tim Exile, and has evolved into a global community of creators entranced by the immediacy of expression and an emphasis on music as something we make together, and not just a product we consume alone.
"Endlesss is an instrument. But it’s also a place. It’s a virtual place where you can come and play this instrument. And it’s an instrument that’s designed not for perfection, but to keep you in a forward motion of creativity, whether you decide to be creative alone, or whether you decide to be creative together with other people. At its center is a workflow derived from a workflow I spent the best part of a decade or two refining as an artist and musician who wanted to play and improvise and be communicative and improvisational." - Tim Exile
In “We Made A Door,” you can learn more about the circuitous path that led to the creation of Endlesss, and the resulting explosion of real-time collaborative music creation and growth of a global community on the iOS app and Endlesss Studio.
From Exile's playing the violin from the age of four, to falling down the rabbithole of electronic music after encountering bootleg rave tapes in the early 1990s, it's the story of one person’s realization that they could – and should – turn their own creativity into a platform for other people to be creative.
Chasing different forms of expression brought Exile into the world of Native Instruments and Reaktor, and led to the invention of his Flow Machine, reflecting a dream of electronic music as a vivid and improvisatory live performance which highlighted the beautiful feedback network between instrument, artist and audience. This Flow Machine was a conscious rejection of perfectionism, prioritizing real-time creation over weeks spent tweaking, editing and polishing. It came to represent the possibility of making tools for other people to make music, turning the Flow Machine into an instrument that other people could use in an online, digital space.
The result, after long periods of experimentation and exploration, is Endlesss - an amazingly quick app and cloud-connected looper that encapsulates everything the Flow Machine was built for, but fitting in the palm of your hand, and connected to a worldwide community that shares their creativity in a never-ending musical journey.
