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Looper's Delight
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> it's funny, i always think of "mindless guitar wankery" as > bad EVH clones and stuff from the 80's--didn't think i was even > close to doing that, but who knows. ...which of course is the problem with reviews... people's reference points are so skewed by what they listen to, or more importantly, by what they DON'T listen to, that if you are working in an area that people don't get, then they will latch onto whatever the nearest reference point they can relate to... I remember playing a Metheny Group CD to a friend of mine who said 'oh yes, it sounds like Shakatak'... Shakatak??? doesn't sound anything like Shakatak, but that for him was the only reference point he has for electric instrumental stuff with tunes! I was recently dismissed in a review (albeit a review of the headline act, not really of me) as doing 'frippertronics on a bass', with the following comment along the lines of 'oh well, I guess it pays the bills'... if I met the guy who wrote it again, I wouldn't know whether to laugh at him for his audacity in writing about stuff he knows nowt about, or deck him for being so offhand about what I do... I'd probably just ignore him... The problem is that if you made an album that this reviewer liked, then the next one will hate it for all the same reasons that reviewer #1 would love it... forget about them, and do what you do as well as you can do it. Of course there is always the possibility that you suck, and that the review is doing you a favour, but unless they provide irrefutable proof that they totally understand what you're doing and still don't like it, you are far better of ignoring lazy put-downs like 'mindless guitar wankery', and getting on with the business of making music. That's the problem with believing the good reviews - it takes a while to get your head round the more 'constructive' ones. There are certain people whose take on what I do helps me to see what I'm doing - there's a review of my first album up at www.krimson-news.com in Sid Smith's diary entry at the moment (he wrote the Crimson Bio, which is excellent if you ignore the typos...) where he writes about it in a way that sheds some light on what I do. Dann Chinn, who writes for Misfit City and the Evo Digest, always does reviews that enlighten me about what I do. Andre's review of Conversations was an eye-opener, and as a result, his comments on aspects of my new CD (some lovely, some constructive) were listened to and weighed in the light of him having a pretty good understanding of what I'm doing... move on, make more music, petrol bomb the bad guys... :o) namaste Steve www.steve-lawson.co.uk