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Looper's Delight
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As far as some people's expressed concern on the "static" nature of Fripp's looping work, I think it's a somewhat unavoidable part of the process he uses in creating the loops. A lot of Torn's work is edited in the studio, which gives a lot more flexibility in arrangement and dynamics. Given that most people have only one loop device in their rig, you're going to be limited to adding information into the loop. Even if you've got an Echoplex, the Undo feature isn't going to allow you introduce a radical, appealing change to what you're doing. It just lets you remove the last layer or two, depending on how much memory you've got installed. That's not much of a compositional manuever, and unless you've specifically planned an overdub to be removed for effect, I doubt that Undo really functions as other than a "Whoops!" button for most people. I avoid using it because maybe one in 20 loops strike me as fatally flawed. Too often I've had started something and either made a mistake or what appeared to be a mistake, and found five minutes later that I've mutated it into something beautiful. That's part of my concept, and it may be a personal preference, but from what I've read of Fripp's approach, it also includes the acceptance of hazard as a crucial part of the piece. I prefer to spray information around for the first few minutes without thinking about it too much, and then see what seems like a good idea. Several people have stated that they prefer "1999" and/or "Radiophonics" to "Blessing of Tears" (for those of you not familiar with the texture of those records, the first two are more dissonant and angular, although both have streches of more "pretty" music, whereas "Blessing" is mournfully beautiful all the way through, or, droningly facile, depending on your viewpoint). For general listening, I prefer "Blessing" because it's more tranquil. If I put on "1999" or "Radiophonics" while I'm at work, even quietly, people start to ask what I'm listening to, in a tone that suggests they hope it's nearly over. They're spicier textures, much like "Thrakattak" (again for the unfamiliar, an hour-long release of group improvisations which often sounds like horror-film music right before the bogeyman jumps out of the shadows), which I love, but I'm not going to put it on everyday. It's like listening to Ligeti--it's uneasy listening, and few people can listen to it for long without getting a little edgy. Someone said that "Blessing" was a fairly easy texture to imitate, and I'd agree, but I don't find either "1999" or "Radiophonics" difficult to imitate. Once you're familiar with the form, it's not difficult to imitate the "generic" disturbed Frippscape (even going back to Eno/Fripp's "Index of Metals"). That's not the point. Fripp has spoken repeatedly of how music truly occurs in the interaction between the audience and the performer, and listening to recorded Frippertronics or Soundscapes is very different from experiencing it in person, even if it "sounds" the same. Most people don't get a chance to attend a Soundscapes show, and fortunately the CD's are available. With Frippertronics, only the backing tracks were released. The shows that "Let The Power Fall" were drawn from consisted of material similiar to the album tracks with Fripp soloing in real time on top. There are bootlegs of this, but Fripp has only released a few examples of the final product. Despite that, I think there's a lot of value in the backing-loop tracks. Other looping artists, such as David Torn, Michael Brook and Steve Tibbets, work primarily in a studio context. Loops are used to build tracks upon, but it's not the same sort of high-wire act that live improvised looping creates. You gain control of dynamics and structure, and perhaps lose on the magic of the moment. Understand that I'm not knocking Torn/Brook/Tibbets, I've got and love all their stuff, but it's a different path. The live Brook that I've heard is based on playing with pre-recorded backing tracks. I'm not sure if Tibbets has ever really toured, and Torn probably won't doing much touring in the future, due to health and the economics of the road. Our loss. I don't think it's possible to have improvised looping ever match the shifting dynamics of edited studio work. Even if you had multiple loops available to you (say four 32 second loops) with the ability to mix them in and out, how well could you keep track of what's going on, and how good of a job could you do, in real-time, towards organizing it into a structured piece? It's a noble goal, but in the same way that you can't improvise a concerto, I don't think it's possible to whip up a coherent piece in public. I wasn't attracted to looping so that I could cut-and-paste instrumental songs on the fly--I wanted to chase longer forms and textures, in a raga-esque manner. Going back to Fripp's use of loops, it doesn't show up much in his studio work, except as what I think of as "background fairy dust". There a few notable exceptions--the version of "Here Comes The Flood" on Exposure comes to mind, but even then I think he had ten minutes of Frippertronics and stuck Peter Gabriel's piano/voice performance on top, with a spoken word section from John Bennett, and then went to work editing everything together. Indeed, the bulk of Fripp guest appearances in the last few years have been of the background-Soundscapes variety, and some people have speculated that he just sends the interested party some tapes and lets them pick through to find what might be useful to them. I'm not saying this is a bad idea. Travis Hartnett