RjDj

» see rjdj.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

RjDj only ever shipped on iOS, and that single fact accounts for most of what follows here. I know this company from reading about it. In Turkey between 2009 and 2012 the iPhone was priced as a luxury object and the phones around me were Nokias running Symbian, so a company whose entire output was iOS apps had no path to my hands at all. I had a Last.fm account for years without knowing that one of the men behind it had gone off to do something much stranger.

Companies House has Reality Jockey Limited registered in London from 20 March 2008, and the public story has Michael Breidenbruecker starting it late that year with a team of four. Breidenbruecker had co-founded Last.fm, which CBS bought in 2007 for 280 million dollars, so he was in the rare position of being able to fund a genuinely uncommercial idea and have people take it seriously.

The idea was reactive music. Generative music composes itself and ignores you; interactive music waits for you to press something. Reactive music used the phone's own sensors, mostly the microphone and the accelerometer, to feed the composition while it played, so the piece was assembled against whatever room you happened to be standing in. What RjDj shipped to a customer was never audio. It was a program, which the company called a Scene, and the program made the audio on the spot.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what reactive music meant ~

The technical substrate was Pure Data, Miller Puckette's graphical signal-processing environment, which is free software and which almost nobody outside academic computer music had shipped in a consumer product. RjDj built a library called rjlib on top of it and open-sourced that, so a composer who wanted to make a Scene had building blocks to work from. It was about the most obscure foundation a consumer product could have picked, and the layer that made it usable went out for free.

~ nolan and zimmer ~

In 2011 RjDj did the thing that made it briefly famous. Inception The App was built with Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer, and it took Zimmer's score and ran it through the reactive engine, so the brass came in over whatever your microphone picked up from the street or the office. It reached number five in the American App Store charts. The Dark Knight Rises Z+ followed and also charted in the global top ten.

Later in 2011 came Dimensions, an audio game with a Ghost Dimension that only unlocked between midnight and one in the morning and played Zimmer music when it did. Breidenbruecker later said the original design had been more ambitious than what shipped. That is the sentence that explains the rest of this page. The demos worked and none of it scaled into a business that could pay four people indefinitely.

~ how it went quiet ~

The Internet Archive puts a date on the retreat that no article does. rjdj.me served a nine-kilobyte site through July 2012, and on 13 October 2012 it dropped to four kilobytes, which is what a company homepage looks like when the product pages have been taken out of it. That stub held, barely changing, until July 2015. By September 2015 the host was answering 502, and from 4 March 2016 the address returns 404.

Wikipedia's account is that RjDj closed its website and withdrew its apps from circulation in 2013, which fits the shape the captures show. Reality Jockey Limited itself was left sitting on the register for another nine years and was finally dissolved on 24 May 2022, long after the last person had any reason to think about it.

~ what survived in the code ~

rjlib outlived the company, because that is what open-sourcing a library does, and the Pure Data world carried on without needing a startup attached to it. The apps did not survive, and they could not have: an iOS binary from 2011 built on a custom audio engine stops working as soon as the platform moves under it. RjDj sold software instead of recordings, which was the whole intellectual point, and it is also exactly why there is nothing left to play.

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