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Looper's Delight
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"Lance Chance" <lrc8918@louisiana.edu> inquired: > whoever cares to reply. you consider your loop work: > > 1 totally ambient, atonal, arrhythmic At times any of the above. I consider my work 'situational' at times, in that it is more attuned to soundtrack work - and this can be 'ambient', atonal, AND/OR arrhythmic. > 2 I get it, "there is no number 2", right? :) > 3 a little of both, some of both (rhythmic, but atonal) (atonal, but > rhythmic) At times, that too. > 4 Whither "4"? :) > 5 song oriented, rhythmic, tonal Like I said, whatever comes out comes out. I am fairly committed to the idea of combining the mode of a 'pop' song with 'ambient', looping, atonal, and/or arrhythmic material. My favorite examples of this would be Peter Gabriel's first three solo albums, and of course the beautiful "Sacred Songs" by Daryl Hall and Robert Fripp. I'd love to play with folks who have that same concept at heart. If they exist. One of the nice side effects of the ambient-pop mixture (or its variants) is that 'regular' folks who would otherwise turn their noses up at stuff minus the 'pop' element find themselves listening (and with interest!) to non-'pop' material. I have always thought that Bowie's negative attitude towards the "Let's Dance" period left out this very important factor. It was great fun and not a little satisfying to introduce 'normal' folks to Bowie's older material, such that their attitudes would be like the following: 1974: "BOWIE?!? Ewwwww!" (leaves party) 1982: "Wow!" (add to this singing along with "Let's Dance" etc.") 1982: "This is GREAT! Who is it?" (while listening to "Diamond Dogs", etc.) I could say the same for Pink Floyd, which so revolted a friend of mine in the late 70s that she'd start saying things like "Ooooh, the WALLS are BREATHING..." before leaving the room. Come "The Wall", and her wedding reception, what was on the play list for dancing? "We don't neeeed noooo education...." Go figure. I went through a series of insecure stages where I was trying to compose material "that people would like". It's all pretty disappointing stuff to me. I played it for a few friends at various times while apologizing for the content and sound quality, only to be told that they liked it. Perhaps if I'd have had the looping material done years later, it would have been more fun for me. I did find however that it was quite capable of being combined with ambient concepts/elements. So when "Sacred Songs" was finally allowed to be released, I had a huge "eureka" effect myself. But the pop-ambient combo thing is about as close as I come to trying to classify my work. Now that I've been able to scare my wife into letting me compose in the front room of the house - we've not moved upstairs yet as it's not finished! - this week I'm working on material for submission to a body-building film called "No Pain, No Gain". I turned down a gig years ago that was to be for a Japanese porn film, because they couldn't guarantee that abuse of women wouldn't occur to my music. Then I came across the bit in "Emmanuelle" where "Larks' Tongues in Aspic" is used - however unauthorizedly - during a rape scene. I've now lowered my bar of contention on this, to the effect that I won't do work for snuff films. That's about it. Did anyone see aurora last night? Steve Goodman * EarthLight Productions * http://www.earthlight.net