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Looper's Delight
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Having just driven the Great Loop from Los Angeles to San Francisco, passing through both Santa Cruz and San Luis Obispo along the way, I was "out of the loop" during this discussion. However, in my usual didactic manner I want to bring up a few historical points concerning the genesis of looping as we know it, arguing that San Francisco was probably the wellspring (though probably not the current hotbed). Although people had been making tape loops and using tape delay and overdubbing techniques before her, Pauline Oliveros can rightly be credited as a foremost practitioner of live tape delay performance in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She got her first tape recorder in 1953 and was soon using it in unusual ways. Pauline started threading tape between two decks to get long delays (thereby anticipating Eno by more than a decade and very likely giving him the idea). P.O. wasn't alone in this, of course. Since the scene that grew out of the S.F. Conservatory new music concerts and evolved into the San Francisco Tape Center was inherently collaborative, musical ideas and techniques flowed quickly through the community. Terry Riley was also a major figure in this group, and his use of tape delay and repetitive musical patterns was probably a formative influence on many contemporary loopers (I'll credit both him and Pauline with my first use of tape delay in 1975 - in Santa Cruz!). Terry in turn had an influence on Steve Reich, who was also working at the Tape Center. The tape loop-based pieces "It's Gonna Rain" (1965) and "Come Out" (1966) opened the door to Reich's later pattern/repetition/phasing pieces for instruments. Evolving alongside tape techniques was Don Buchla's modular synthesizer, and it is interesting to remember that the analog step sequencer was introduced as part of the Buchla 100 system, in response to Mort Subotnick's musical needs. It's also important to note that during this seminal period the Bay Area (and indeed other places along the West Coast) we also centers of great interest in world music. Gamelan, African drumming, and other non-western musics were being studied and performed in universities and such specialized schools and music centers as the Ali Akbar College of Music and the Center for World Music. The cyclic and contrapuntal character of many of these musics were essential influences on developing loopism. I arrived in the Bay Area in 1974 and started doing electroacoustic music when I moved to Santa Cruz the following year. All of the musical influences mentioned above were heavily "in the air" and were effectively part of a new music commmon practice. A few composer-performers such as Ingram Marshall, Henry Kaiser, the Electric Weasel Ensemble (including Don Buchla and Allen Strange), and later on Paul Dresher, were performing with delay and loop systems. By that time Pauline was at U.C. San Diego, the Tape Center was well established at Mills, Gordon Mumma was at U.C. Santa Cruz, Daniel Lentz was in Santa Barbara. There was a free flow of live electronic music up and down the state, and clearly this is becoming so again. -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com http://www.cybmotion.com/aliaszone http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?autostart=rz