BOSTON LOOPFEST

["Michael LaMeyer" <m.lameyer@verizon.net>]

Just finally getting a chance to post following an eventful week.  We had a
very successful and satisfying two days of loop music last week!!  Woohoo!!
Thanks to all of the performers and everyone who helped pull this off!
Frankly, I had a blast ... and learned a lot.

January 30, 2003
Michael LaMeyer
My birthday and first live looping performance, a very fun and crazy day 
for
me.  I'll leave an objective review for others to make, although I will say
that I'm not sure at all that I want to let the dat of this out into the
public ;-)  I found the video more interesting, particularily the footage 
at
the end where I accidentally turned on the metronome on my Repeater (which,
as any Repeater owner will know, produces a very loud and distinct click
track).  I had to freeze frame the footage to get a good gander of the look
on my face when I looked over at Peter behind the board with the most
wonderful WTF?!?! expression, guitar pick in mouth and all.  That had me
laughing and crying for a good long time.  I also apparently went well over
my time allotment, I was quite a flake that day ... sorry guys. :-\

Jon Wobesky with Jonathan Byerly
I thoughoughly enjoyed this exploration ... these two brought two suitcases
of toys plus bass, sax, and sundry for a found sound salad the likes of
which I haven't heard since I saw Rick's day-glo shenanigans ... and I 
don't
anyone there had seen a barbie doll used quite like that before ;-)

Ghost7 (Dan Soltzberg)
Unfortunately I only caught the last portion of Dan's solo bass looping set
as I had to strike my rig and drop it off at home, so Jeff or Peter or
someone else will need to give a more informed description.  But what I
caught was a lot of fun.  Dan was really into exploring the range of tones
he could get out of his intrument, bass burbles, overdriven lead,
scatch-n-slide bass-as-sound-installation ... I'd like to hear more, so 
good
thing for me that he plays locally.

Dave Dunbar
Peter got to get out from behind the board and sit down, as Dave REALLY
didn't need any amplification from us! ;-)  I think the most apt 
description
I heard of his set was "fluttering kettlestorms".  Dave played solo 
electric
guitar through sundry pedals + boomerang into two amps (a musicman and ... 
I
can't remember the other) and had us laughing aloud in delight as he threw
wailing, pitch-shifted, pan-tremeloed layers of really peaky guitar around
the room.  People were laughing outloud in delight as we all covered out
ears and looked about in shock at the way Dave was moving the air around.  
A
perfect closer for the first night.

Unfortunately, I didn't find the dat's I bought for the shows until Friday,
and all I had were 4 30 minute dats I scrounged up at the last minute for
Thursday.  We have complete DV footage of the shows (multiple footage
actually), but I think all of Thursday's performances didn't fit on the
tapes. :-(  Friday I had my shit together better, found my tapes, and got
complete audio of day 2.

January 31, 2003
David Kirkdorfer/UNDO
Right away we were treated to some delicious looping from David.  One 
member
of the audience that I spoke with, who was just getting introduced to
looping via our show, was plainly struck by the metaphor of looping as
'painting with sound' during David's set (and she'd never even heard of
David Torn's instructional video! ;-), she remarked that watching him play
was a very similar experience for her to watching someone paint.  Melodic
swells intermingled with gated, percusive beds, and transformed into a
blazing anthem when Jonathan LaMaster joined David on stage for a brief duo
before a segue into his own set.  We also caught some of David and
Jonathan's sound check on tape, which was some beautiful stuff, idle or 
not.
I only regret that I misprounounced his last name in the introduction ...
(sorry David)

Jonathan LaMaster
Jonathan began his set looping a 6-string electric violin (I'm pretty sure
there's a real name for this intrument, but I never caught what it was
called) and this sounded just gorgeous to me.  I thought I caught both
celtic and eastern european?/middle-eastern? motifs in his playing, but I'm
not necessarily an informed opinon here, Jonathan? Am I making this up? ;-)
He interspersed his bowed string looping with some subtle, atmospheric
electric guitar looping and singing in a more traditional song format
(imagine that at a looping show! ;-).  He closed with a piece performed on 
a
BOSS sample toy with pre-reorded loops featuring vocal snippets of the
leader of our country.  It was great to hear the diversity.

Notnoise vs. Repeatpeak (Philip Lampe and Michael Haumesser)
Absolutely gorgeous set.  This was definitely one of the highlights for me.
I'd heard Philip play before but he and Michael just blended perfectly
together.  It was very difficult to determine who was orginating some of 
the
tones.  Philip played Audiomulch and an acoustic sitar processed through a
VG-8!!!  Far out is all I have to say.  Michael had an array of keyboards
and pedals, and ALSO played guitar.  I could see his EDP, but I'm not at 
all
certain if he wasn't looping with anything else.  An apparent MIDI routing
issue at one point did little to distract from the performance from me.  A
blissful set.

RandomSalt (Jeffrey Lomas)
Boston Loopfest list-serv master and one of the three folks central to
putting this all together, Jeff did a solo acoustic guitar set looping a
REALLY nice Taylor and a handful of acoustic percussion through an EDP and
put on a really animated show (unfortunately, my DV ran out of tape, so I
didn't get any of his set on video, but at least I had plenty of DAT tapes
... if it ain't one thing ...) A perfect way to end the 2nd night!

Peter, Jeff, and I are catching up this week to do a post loopfest follow
up, collect as much of the media as we can so we can burn some copies for
the artists, and talk about what's next.  It sounds like we have a good
chance to get a regular thing happening at the Zeitgeist and we'll be sure
to let you know what's up with that.  Also, if anyone wants to help us out
with such an endeavor, Jeff's got an email address you can send to:
loopme@randomsalt.com

Thanks again to everyone who showed up to play and/or listen!!  Looking
forward to the next one ...

Love,

Mike