Looper's Delight Archive Top (Search)
Date Index
Thread Index
Author Index
Looper's Delight Home
Mailing List Info

[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Date Index][Thread Index][Author Index]

Good Times Review of the Santa Cruz Loop Frestival



This is a nice written by Michele Bensen for the local Santa Cruz free
weekly paper (Good Times).
Link to the entire article with a nice photo of Max Valentino:
http://www.gdtimes.com/pages/night.htm

As a rainstorm raged outside the beautiful Art Deco walls of the old Rio
Theatre there was quite a storm of another kind brewing on this venue's new
stage. Tuesday night's world premiere 'Bass Looping Festival' was a great
success story for hosts Rick Walker and Laurence Bedford. The avante garde
event journeyed into the untapped areas that electronic musica can truly
offer an audience. The concept of a 'looping festival' held the promise of
musical expansion and also some risk into the unknown creating an
exponentially, mind-expanding musical terrain.
Rick Walker was the couturier of the evening and shall remain so as the
musical director of this new ongoing series, which will explore the
underworlds of electronic music. Walker's history and leadership of the
seminal New Wave group Tao Chemical, Tao Rhythmical and the innovative 
World
Fusion ensemble, Worlds Collide, proves he has always managed to be at the
razor's edge of inspiration and innovation. 
Trey Donovan took the stage barefoot and gave a stellar performance on his
Chapman Stick, often switching mid-song to add notes from his electric 
bass.
The interface of the two sounds was rich and gratifying. Max Valentino came
up next and played an extra large acoustic bass that looked like a large
guitar rather than an upright bass. The sounds had a crisp resonance unlike
the bassy bottom end sounds that emanate from a traditional bass. His third
tune of the evening was "Sticks and Tones" (I love the title) which proved
his refined ability to be a solo bassist. "Time is Rubber" had unflinching
integrity and filled the hall with a stir of emotion.
A bassist who displayed a Buddhist approach to playing was Scott Kungha
Drengsen. He played meditative drones with chordial cathedral-like melody
lines. His usage of a foot-operated sequencer, coupled with his own version
of special effects, created an 'otherworldy collage' with accents similar 
to
Scott Lafaro's slapping techniques. Drengsen is proficient on six-string
fretless, five- and eight-stringed basses and six-string electric
doublebass. He chose to incorporate multiple bass in his movie
soundtrack-like performance.
Englishman Steve Lawson at last took center stage with the spirit of Jaco
Pastrious woven into the tapestry of his technique and his grasp on the
language of bass artistry. He brought forth the textures of a fuzzed-out
Jimi Hendrix riff or seduced you down a jazzy cobblestone road in New
Orleans with "Blue Moon." His hypnotic trance jazz/blues crossover piece
"Blue Sticks," had a Zen-like quality to its melody lines. Next you found
yourself "Drifting" to distant lands and uncharted looping terrains with
this fine composition of experimental artistry. Lawson conjured a sense of
time traveling, as he placed the e-bows on the lower strings, resulting in
continual watery feedback loops of sound that evoked images of an aquatic
world. Lawson's candor in between songs were tongue-in-cheek, with its
brilliantly dry delivery, in his lovely English accent.
The showstopper was a duet with Rick Walker playing his drum mallets upon
the strings of Lawson's bass, as Lawson played the upper strings on the
bass's fretboard. I wished that I had a recording of this moment.