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Dig if u will my research paper Chapter 9



Chapter 9
Contemporary Live-Looping
In this chapter I will describe the changing trends and new forms of
composition that are emerging from within Live-Looping today. It is
obviously difficult for me to assess the impact that an artist may have on
Live-Looping without the value of hindsight. So I aim to look at the 
aspects
of the genre that stand out the most and relate them back to the historical
context I have set out in the previous chapters.
Contemporary Looping
The 1980s was the digital age, whose children were the first group to grow
up emerged by a mass media culture overloading their senses with digital
information. It is perhaps fitting that Live-Looping should mirror this
paradox, that now people are hearing the live performances of instrumental
and vocal artists like Amy X or Andre Lafosse relayed to them in a sampled
and digitised form. Through modern technology live performance has become
digitised, edited, processed, and sampled. New technology and attitudes to
technology have encouraged new narratives to be formed between Live-Loopers
and their equipment. Hardware has spawned new control and editing options
while software has allowed Live-Loopers the freedom to design new and more
complex Live-Looping devices that are configurable to different
compositions.  
Andre Lafosse and the Turntablist aesthetic.
The culture of DJing or Turntablism has made the manipulation of recorded
music in performance a widely accepted form of musical dissemination. Dance
music and Hip-Hop have made the aesthetic of cutting and splicing fragments
of music in composition normality. It is perhaps interesting that
Live-Looping should see a visionary artist emerge with a similar aesthetic.
Describing himself as the ŒTurntablist Guitaristš, Andre Lafosse mirrors 
the
aesthetic of the cut-up, cutting and splicing his guitar performance
replaying this digitised music back at the audience. He jumps between his
recorded loops like a DJ switches records, seamlessly blending one loop 
into
another and jumping back in time to replay previously recorded phrases.
Turntablism, to me, is about taking an apparatus that is ostensibly 
designed
for playing back a recording, and using (and imposing) the architecture of
the playback apparatus to actually sculpt the sound itself.
Lafosse has applied this approach to his guitar and Looper set-up from the
following standpoint,
if a DJ can make new sounds by scratching a record and playing the mixing
board controls, then the same kind of concepts and principles could be
applied to looping. The guitar (in my case) would take the place of the
record, and the EDP and foot-controller could act as the turntable/mixer 
end
of the equation.  
By focusing some of the skilled aspects of his performance on manipulating
the output of his guitar, Andre has in a sense chosen to use his
Live-Looping device in a soloistic way. The sounds he produces are 
therefore
governed by the techniques of manipulation he has devised for the EDP in
conjunction with his guitar. This is in much the same way as the vocabulary
of sounds a turntablist produces are defined by the techniques they have
developed for their mixer in combination with their record decks.
Fragmented music
The form of fragmented composition can be traced back to Musique Concrete
where composers would create complex fragmented phrases by inserting many
pieces of tape together. The processes pioneered by Schaffer in 1948 of
insertion, repetition, and the reversing of material are still highly
visible in contemporary Live-Looping, the difference being that now this
vocabulary of techniques are being carried out in real time. However
although these techniques can be traced back to Musique Concrete their
appearance within contemporary Live-Looping is more likely to be derived
from the influence of modern dance music.
Lafossešs compositions have an aesthetic basis in common with dance music
and the jagged highly edited sequenced sounds that have characterised the
form. However, through his vision he achieves this aesthetic live combining
it with improvisation, which adds a feeling of experimental electric jazz 
to
the music. Lafosse has in a sense redefined the medium of the Live-Looping
device freeing it from merely providing a surface for the layering of 
sound.
Andre uses the Live-Looping device to create angular loops of sequenced
sound that evolve as he replaces elements within it. This goes beyond the
aesthetic of cutting and splicing, itšs the aesthetic of ordered 
replacement
in live-performance calling many to class Lafossešs music as Glitch music.
Lafosse has pioneered Glitch music within Live-Looping. Glitch music is a
new genre of musical composition that has been so named after its 
fragmented
sound. This can be heard in Lafossešs early Glitch compositions such as
Spastic Meditation (2001) or Instant (2001) where he creates unplayable
collections of fragmented phrases. Lafossešs style of musical
composition/improvisation is still very young and I believe we are hearing
an artist just beginning to realise the potential of his talent. The
development of Lafossešs style can be heard on his more recent compositions
like the mesmerising track Asana (2002) where he manages to create
beautifully layered textures which are then transformed via his insert work
(insert is a function on the EDP). This piece contains a specific type of
interplay where the listeneršs sense of a lead line or melody is 
continually
shifting between the guitar and the Live-Looper. Lafossešs most recent 
track
entitled Siesmic (2003) is perhaps his most rhythmically aggressive use of
the insert process and is in some ways reminiscent of experimental electric
jazz music.
What Lafosse has pioneered in a sense is the technique for the live
sequencing of non-midi instruments. Sequencing has traditionally been the
territory of synthesisers and samplers, but Lafossešs technique of Glitch
music allows this to be applied to any audio signal in real time. Andrešs
influence has also lead to a greater focus on the innovative functional
capabilities of the Echoplex, his looping device of choice, causing other
people to integrate new Live-Looping techniques into their performances.
Other Live-Loopers
Other Live-Loopers are taking the aesthetic sound worlds of modern dance
music and finding ways to generate this live. Artists like Armatronicšs 
seek
to invoke the soundworld of modern electronic music but via an 
improvisatory
methodology. With his racks of drum machines, synthesisers and live-looping
devices Armatronicšs starts with all the banks empty, no loops programmed
and seeks to improvise electronic music live. His music revolves around the
idea of an improvisatory performance where every creation is different and
has an inbuilt unpredictability. This opening up of electronic music to
chance in live-composition demonstrates a break from the traditional idea
that electronic music has to be non real-time form of music creation.
With the popularity of DJ culture having peaked we may see a resurgence in
the importance of live generated material as opposed to pre recorded live
manipulated material. We are seeing an increasing convergence between
electronic music and that which is made by conventional instruments.
Live-Looping is very much a part of this allowing an instrumental performer
to access the vocabulary of electronic music through technology. This could
be especially significant in the field of modern dance music as it has
struggled to be created or performed other than in a largely pre-recorded
format. The live sequencing of live instruments could open this genre up to
more radical performance opportunities.
Aesthetic Trends
Contemporary looping has seen a trend towards an ambandonment of the
traditional live-looping aesthetic of a surface of continuous sound so
popularised by Terry Riley and Robert Fripp. This has been replaced by more
jagged and conventional song-based structures by artists like Amy X. In a
sense looping is shedding its traditional sound of slowly evolving musical
textures for the contemporary aesthetics of the music of mass or popular
culture. This shift in stylistic aesthetic can also be put down to the
change in attitude of the current generation of Live-Loopers. Thanks to the
mass media revolution people expect to have their attention grabbed
instantly and held. This change in attitude is illustrated by Andre Lafosse
First and foremost, I knew I didn't want to play ambient music.  I wanted
something that could grab and hold the listener's attentionŠ If I'm going 
to
make music, and especially if I'm going to go in front of an audience to do
it, I don't want to be ignored - I want to capture people's attention, and
hold it. 
Live-Looping has also become characterised by the sheer versatility and the
range of aesthetics that people are producing with it. This can be directly
attributed to the growing complexity of the equipment used to make it.
Digital looping devices as opposed to analogue tape have allowed
Live-Loopers to access the sound worlds of dance music and popular song
structure with an ease that simply wasnšt possible with tape. It is perhaps
most significant when these new capabilities are used to take the essence 
of
a music genre (e.g. Lafossešs innovative take on turntablism) rather than
the simple emulation of the sound world of other genres via different 
means.
Emerging Trends
Live-Looping is also creating a new emerging form of interaction between
musicians. Live-Loopers are beginning to synchronise their devices together
so that they can improvise together into a looped form that maintains a
consistent timing relationship. This creates a new kind of interaction
between musicians as they are reacting to a delayed form of recorded
improvisation leading to all sorts of interesting frictions between
performers and a new set of rules of engagement.
Control
The physical relationship between a Live-Looper and the control of their
technology has undergone significant changes. Performers are now able to
interact with the recorded material using all sorts of digital control
methods not possible with analogue technology. Through the use of
programming languages like Max/Msp and configurable physical controllers it
has become the artist/programmers role to decide the limitations of the
interaction between the performer and their looped material. This is 
perhaps
best demonstrated by the female singer Pamela Z through her use of the
programming language Max/Msp in conjunction with the midi controller the
bodysynth. Through the physical gestures of her body she controls (via the
bodysynth) pre-recorded phrases and the Live-Looping and manipulation of 
her
voice. In this sense she has tailored the physical gestures of her body to
the manipulation of sound creating a particularly theatrical relationship
between her gestures and the audiences perception of her use of technology.
Amy X chooses a similar approach to Pamela Z of valuing the theatrical
approach to audience communication, choosing to use drum pads to trigger
looping functions,
it fits in well with my animated and very theatrical performance; I can 
make
a big motion that results in a musical event, and the audience sees that
happen quite clearly. It's important to me that it's clear to them what I 
am
doing and that all the sounds are being triggered in real time. This way
they really get to observe the process, and that, along with the personal
nature of the songs, creates a connection and intimacy with the audience
that I find missing from most looping performances.
Live-Loopers are enlisting the help of Max/Msp programmers to transcend the
limitations of their hardware devices creating more personalised systems 
for
particular performances. An example of this would be the French 
Live-Looping
clarinettist Michel Aumont who is working with Max/Msp programmer Phillippe
Olivier to produce a patch that transcends the limitations of hardware
loopers allowing him to deconstruct and remix the different components of a
previously layered loop. This is a field of software-related musical
composition that is rapidly expanding and there are now very capable
Live-Looping patches freely available for all the major musical programming
languages Pure Data, Max/Msp, and Csound.
Traditionalists
Although contemporary looping has been characterised by new forms of
composition there are still those who are continuing a detailed
investigation into the possibilities of Live-Looping in its traditional
tape-delay format. One such artist would be the American composer Jim
Fulkerson who could be described as an elder statesman of the looping
community. ŗFulkerson started working with tape-delay in 1968 at the
university of Illinois and states that his interest in tape-delay based
composition has remained the same throughout his life. Fulkerson describes
himself as a Minimalist who has continued to be fascinated with the idea of
the surface structure created by tape delay and how the instrumentalist can
guide the listener through this structure" .
However, although Fulkersonšs technical use of tape-delay has remained the
same he has contributed many interesting ideas to the compositional use of
this form. Fulkerson has developed a range of new techniques for the
trombone and through the use of tape-delay has found a way to use these
techniques in musically interesting way. The layering process of tape delay
allows Fulkerson to paint textures and instrument effects creating a
seamlessly flowing soundworld normally unfamiliar to the trombone. This can
be heard on the piece Co-Ordinate Systems No. 10 where Fulkerson plays his
trombone with woodwind mouthpieces creating a landscape of sound that has a
distinct electronic quality. I would argue that Fulkersonšs use of
tape-delay has allowed him to show the extended voice of the trombone that
he has developed. The form of layering allows Fulkerson to make sense of
these seemingly unusual and bizarre instrument sounds creating an 
orchestral
effect. Fulkerson has also been responsible for taking Live-Looping into
many contemporary art disciplines ŗespecially experimental film and new
dance˛.