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]

Re: looping with other musicians



Hi Steve,

This just popped into my head as I was reading your post, so I thought 
I would mention it.  Did you ever consider that you built up an 
audience doing one type of performance, and then switched styles on 
them to some degree?  People who like to listen to free-form 
avant-guard looping may not be very interested in songs, even if they 
contain loops.  In fact, looping may have very little to do with it.  I 
would argue that if you had done the song style performances first and 
then switched to all improvised sets you would get a similar reaction, 
although probably with very different comments.  Have you ever 
considered somehow distinguishing between your song-structured 
performances and your improve performances and keeping them separate?  
Maybe giving them different band names?  Just a thought.  As a fan and 
a musician I have found my own tastes to be guided by the expectations 
of a CD or performance.  I guess some of it would depend on how similar 
your improvisations are stylistically to your songs.

On Oct 13, 2004, at 11:10 AM, steve.sandberg wrote:

> I've been dealing with the issue of the "church lady" aspect of 
> looping in
> solo performances recently --
> went through a period of complete improvisational looping concerts, 
> with
> lots of morphing of loops and varying of loops on the edp --
> then the pendulum swung the other way and i did a recent concert of 
> almost
> all songs and compositions, using rhythmic loops to create a 
> percussive bed
> for the song --
> i thought the song aspect would make the music more accessible to 
> others --
> much to my surprise, many of my listeners (who had been to several 
> other
> concerts of mine and had followed the process) REALLY missed the free
> looping stuff -- and these are not people who are into free or avant 
> garde
> music at all.
> They felt that the whole concert was on a kind of restricted emotional 
> level
> from beginning to end and missed the spontaneity and thus wider 
> emotional
> range of the free looping --
> so future concerts will be more of a mix --
> plus i'm discovering that it's often better, if i'm going to sing a 
> song, to
> just sing it without a rhythmic loop - the loop, even with cool vocal
> percussion, seems to put a straight jacket on things and rather than 
> adding
> to the emotional presence seems to subtract from it.
>
>