RE: usage of looping as genre etc.

[A.Willers@t-online.de (Andreas Willers)]

Dear Kim, dear all,

I agree to some extent with Kim's criticism of an overly use of the term
'live looping music', but only in a longer perspective. In fact I feel that
at this point in time it might just be a perfect promo tool to lift our
individual and common efforts off the ground.

Case in point: in preparing the Berlin Live Looping Meeting on July 4th in
Berlin as part of Rick's summer tour I had the first real serious
conversation with the man in charge for the German/continental distributor
of the EDP whom I tried to hook in vain a couple of times before (just
recently for the Frankfurt fare 2003 in combined effort with Matthias).
Dunno, but it might just have been a good step towards finally getting them
to do something for the promotion of the EDP.

Just as a realtime audio looping device can be a useful tool for live
musicians, composers, music students/teachers,  DJ's and more one musician
can do a lot with and without these things. Without musicality and
creativity any new technology become stale. But for example a jazz player
could get wider recognition for his/her use of a looper in his/her 
community
when it becomes known that there is a dedicated scene and maybe even an
audience for looping as such.

But of course I see the danger of a novelty thing rubbing off soon. So I'd
say do one thing without leaving the other, and most importantly focus on
good music. When I work on my solo programm which includes a lot of loops I
make a conscious effort of avoiding the dangerous cliche of monotonuousness
(sorry, that's MONOTONIE in German) that I often find irritating even in 
the
advanced and very interesting work of, say DT or Andrč. That means I try to
work with extensions of my own live audio without the typical scent of the
Holy Church of Ostinato. Also I try to keep a good chunk of my live 
material
strictly solo guitar with minimal sound effects.

Peace, Andreas Willers