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Hi again Terry, You said, >> I think my Terry Blankenship - Entering The >> Silence CD was unique for 1985, and my Trance Godz >> Trance World CD from 2000 used looping in a way >> that no one had did before. I asked, > Could I ask you to expand on this, and provide some > details as to what you really feel most strongly are > the unique aspects about them? And you replied, > I can't. If you can't hear it I can't explain it to > you. Terry, every track of yours I've heard has featured rubato E-bow drones that ebb and flow in shifting layers. Now, I consider myself reasonably well-versed in the concept of guitar looping, and I've heard many, many guitarists and bassists do the ambient ebowed drone thing, and I really don't hear anything in your particular use of this technique that dramatically sets it apart from countless other examples of ambient looping I've heard. > I'll see if I can > dig out some reviews from when those recordings first > came out. They got some amazing reviews at the time. I'm delighted that you've gotten good press for your work, Terry, but what I'm asking you to do is to place your work in the proper historical context of a technique which MANY people other than yourself and Robert have been using for at least 35 years. If these reviews can do that, then I'd be happy to look at them, and perhaps educate myself as to subtleties that I might be missing. If they're simply praising your music, then I'm glad you're getting recognition for your work, but that doesn't negate the historical reality of the situation, regardless of whether you or any of your reviewers might have been aware of the greater context of what other people have been doing for five decades. > Listen to my track "Fire Dance". > http://www.mp3.com.au/track.asp?id=8223 > > The fact of the matter is that I was doing this before > everyone except Fripp and Eno. Whether anyone is aware > of it or not. Terry, "Fire Dance" is dated as being made in 2000. and I hear some layered Ebowed guitar loops floating around some dance rhythms. If you honestly think no one other than yourself has looped Ebow guitar between "No Pussyfooting" and your 2000 track, or even done that with dance music as a foundation, then you're in very desperate need of an education. If, instead, you're referring to the 12-year gap between "No Pussyfooting" and "Entering the Silence," then you're still wrong. Terry Riley's "Rainbow in Curved Air" came out five years before the first Fripp and Eno record. Other people from the San Francisco Tape Music Center, like Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, and Morton Subotnick were doing very similar work concurrent with Terry, and continued to do so afterwards. David Torn started looping around 1975, ten years before your solo album was released. Jazz guys like Jaco Pastorious, David Friesen, and Les McCann were doing it in the '70s. Paul Dresher put out an album with guitar looping on it in 1983 (http://dresherensemble.org/recordings/pdrecordings.html), and had other tape looping work dating several years before that. Terry, you're a very good musician, and you have an impressive resume. But if you want to come onto a six and a half year old looping mailing list and offer up your own albums as examples of "essential loop recordings," you really need to put them into a proper historical and technical context if you want to be taken seriously. > If anyone else was attempting anything > even close back then, I certainly wasn't aware of it. Here are a couple of historical essays written by people who have done their homework: http://livelooping.com/researchpaper/index.htm http://www.audiomidi.com/classroom/software/loops_part1.cfm?cpid=70 Both of these are written by guys who have listened to many, many hours of looping, culled from the mid-sixties to the present day. You yourself say that until you joined this list a month or so ago, you didn't even know anyone other than yourself and Robert have done this. Not being aware of a few decades of history doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. If you want to be recognized as some sort of pioneer of looping, I would very respectfully ask you to make at least a cursory effort to place yourself into the existing, well-documented historical basis that already exists. Anyway... --Andre LaFosse http://www.altruistmusic.com