Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
Since I have been one very strong advocate for the whole "Live Looping" concept , I wanted to weigh in on this fascinating discussion with an explanation of why I have personally fought for that particular semantic concept and tried, really hard to promote it. In order to explain this I just wanted to go on record about how I got involved and why I started becoming enamored of this term, Live Looping to describe what I and a few others were doing, only in our home town (not even knowing that there were others, like Miko B, just across our own town who were doing similar things until much later). In our beginnings with using looping gear live in front of a paying audience, when my brother Bill, Gary Regina and I were first enamored of using our brand new, 1993 circa Lexicon Jammans, I was fascinated by the concept of layering lots of (what were then very static) loops on top of each other. As a percussionist drummer and fledgling bassist/keyboardist/found sound enthusiast) I could make really interesting ambient or rhythmic loops and build a rather sophisticated piece of music that grew do to it's layered sophistication as opposed to the dominant paradigm of the day: sophistication through technical brilliance, mastery of one's 'axe' or adherance to particular styles of music. Personally, this allowed me to give myself permission to start learning very modest motifs and riffs on instruments that I had no business playing on stage in a older paradigm live performance. Just needing to know enough to record a single loop, this radically widened my timbral and melodic and harmonic palette. This was very, very exciting for me (and scary to, I might add, because I always ran the risk of the judgement of more accomplished musicians). For me, this began a whole new phase of thinking about music and was tremendously liberating for me. It was all I wanted to do (much to the chagrin of a lot of more typical local musicians who thought it was a shame that I was eschewing my former great love of the drumset and ethnic multi-percussion) but I was faced with a dilemma in my desire to play more gigs: How could I publicize them? The people coming to see what we were doing didn't know what they were seeing or hearing. They were enjoying the music a lot because we were able to create pretty cool psychedelic ambiances and layered percussion/bass/guitar/wind instrument loops to then play over the top of but I would find myself constantly explaining to people who would come up and enquire about the gear we were using. I've been a gear head all of my life and I have played hundreds of exotic percussion instruments and electronic drums, but I had never had the kind of response to my gear, specifically, as I was having after these initial shows...........I had already played professional for over 20 years in public and I was bowled over by the audience response to what we were attempting. I also discovered that when we approached venues about doing such shows that , despite the fact that we had been the leaders of some of the most successful bands in the past 15 years in Santa Cruz, that we still had to describe to bookers and publicistst and journalists and radio DJs what we were doing and justify it's difference from what we had played before. If we didn't explain what we were doing and why it differentiated from what we had done before, they just weren't interested and wouldn't publicize our gigs. I was faced with a dilemma, because I was completely enamored with the whole concept of minimalistic repitition and loops but I also realized that the rap and pop and film score world were full of "loop/sample" conciousness. What distinquished what we were doing from other music in our area was that we were doing it live in a way that was much more maleable in real time that just triggering pre-sampled or recorded loops. What we were doing was a bit more dangerous because we ran the danger of fucking up in front of an audience in a way that triggering pre sampled loops didn't represent. Consequently I didn't want to call it LOOP MUSIC. I wanted to draw a distinction. Anyway, I also discovered, from having done a ton of music business publicity for all of my own bands I led over the years, that it would not work to have to use two or three sentences to describe what we were doing. We had to come up with a publicity hook. What I discovered (by trying different approaches that all failed miserably) was that I needed a two word description that would at least provoke another question or two from the audience member, journalist or DJ who was enquiring. I'm not sure when Loopers Delight was started, but I was not a member at the time so I was considering these things in the vacuum of my own home town. There were only three of us doing it (to my provincial and limited knowledge). Anyway, I started using the term Live Looping. I don't claim to have invented it before anyone else (I'm sure I didn't, in fact) but I invented it for us in our insular musical situation. When I first discovered the CT Collective and started coming to Loopers Delight I discovered this amazing community of people who were just as turned on to this looping concept that I was. I was in heaven and felt like a religious convert (obnoxious whenever it happens but highly effective for prosletyzing.........lol) I actually subsribed earlier to L.D. but was brand new to the internet and had no concept of setting up a daily digest or e-mail filters. I think I got 40 or 50 individual e-mails from the list the first day or two I was subscribed and I hastily unsubscribed and didn't come back for another couple of years. Anyway, Steve Lawson and I started corresponding because of the list and he said he was coming to the West Coast and could I get him a gig. Steve had absolutely no draw in this area at all and I knew that I had to come up with some good publicity hook to interest people in his performance. We publicized the fact that he was doing bass looping to the press and to the list and got an incredible response, including a slew of bass players in the area who were intrigued about what we were doing and asked if they could participate. I had booked a little venue that held 45 people and the response was so great that I quickly scratched that idea and went to the Rio Theatre to ask if they would host a festival............contacted a bunch of the bassists and the first Live Looping Festival in Santa Cruz was born. LIVE LOOPING described what we were doing, but, more importantly, it provided a very strong publicity hook that really seemed to intrigue the journalists and DJs of our area. We began to get covers of newspapers, lengthy interviews on the radio (hell, Steve, Max Valentino and I performed on the largest internet radio station on the planet using that term........which just happened to be in neighboring Watsonville---KPIG). It was a hook that caught on quicker than any musical publicity campaign that I've ever been involved with it (and I was really into publicizing the early Santa Cruz New Wave movement and the early Santa Cruz World Beat movement in years past, which also got a lot of press in our area). It seems to work here and in the Bay Area, so I kept using it. It doesn't define me, musically ( I do lots of avante garde gigs, acoustic gigs, found sound gigs, all vocal gigs, funk gigs, jazz gigs, pop gigs, singer songwriter gigs, world fusion gigs)...........It's just a term I use when I want to try and sell an audience (or print journalists and radio DJs) on a gig where I am primarily working with live looping gear. The funny thing is that throughout all of our endless debates on the subject (some people think it's bullshit to describe this as a style of music or an accurate description of a living community..............some people feel really at home with it) Luis Angulo writes the list yesterday and titles his subject LIVE LOOPING IN ITALY, and, guess, what: we all either tune into it or we tune out of it. Think about it though, using that term is descriptive enough to get one to either read his post with interest or delete it with disgust (lol, not me Luis). Andre LaFosse doesn't feel represented by the term, nor does Mark Sottilaro..................that's really okay: Guitar Turntablism or Cycletronica are equally suspect titles and require lots of explanation to even understand by an uncomprehending public, but that's not the point..........................they either work for these artists as a way of getting people interested in hearing their music or they don't. Live Looping isnt' the end all or be all term for what we do. How could we use any term that represents the total commonality of this community...............we are too diverse. It's just a term that enough artists have agreed to that if someday what we do here in the totality of our experience at Loopers Delight and LiveLooping.com and the Cycletronica tribe at tribe.net has an effect on the greater musical world we can say , with some pride, that we were part of it. Even if we have very small numbers................even a small percentage of all who participate at Loopers Delight, it is what it is merely because we say it is and feel an allegiance to it. There were a lot of well known painters lumped in with the Impressionists in the late nineteenth century who hated the term and felt like they were not a part of any movement. A lot of artists don't like the idea of being joiners in ANY movement. That's totally normal in any population of artists. We tend to be iconoclasts.............hopefully, that's once reason why we can be innovative as artists. History and critics and fans lumped them in anyway , though, and their painting are in the Impressionist exhibits in Paris to this day. They also sold a lot of CDs......................errrrrr, paintings because of it. Andre, as an example of an artist that I really like and whose work I think is important, could not do what he does without the particular sophistication of the Echoplex with Loop IV software, which is a looping instrument primarily designed for live playing. I"m not saying that he wouldn't be brilliant and innovative in any thing he attempted musically...........I know he can be. I'm also not saying that he should only use that particularly paradigm for creating music in the future: I could care less (except to hear, with eagerness, what he comes up with), but he has used a looping device in a live setting to create much of what he has put out to the world. He might be really pissed off that someone would refer to him as a live looper but it wouldn't be far off the mark for someone to do so. If some people consider him a 'live looping' artist (to his chagrin) and like his work, he will still make some of the money he truly deserves for his art. If some people consider him a 'guitar turntablist', the same thing will occur, hopefully. Okay, enough wind from me.................I'm still going to produce 'live looping festivals' to try and entice more artists to participate and share with each other. I am a joiner. I like to belong. It's not for everybody. If the Andre LaFosses and Mark Sottilaro's of Loopers Delight (who may outweigh the Matthias Grobs and Rick Walkers) don't want to be a part of it, I'm really fine with that. I just hope we can stay friends and have mutual respect for each other. It's not a perfect world so it might not happen, but that's my hope. I"m going to keep producing the occasionally so called Live Looping Festivals. I hope everyone gets to experience one because they are a joyous and creative and stimulating celebration of a lot of what we represent in this ragtag community at Loopers Delight. If it's not your thing, I respect that too. yours, Rick Walker