letter from Timothy Crowe

["loop.pool" <looppool@cruzio.com>]

I got a very nice letter today from Timothy Crowe, the looping
percussionist who lives in San Francisco and is beginning to gig once a 
week
up there.
I really was intrigued and stimulated by what he had  to say about live
looping and asked him if I could reproduce it here.  It would be 
interesting
to see what peoples' responses are.

Here it is............thanks for sending it, Timothy.


snippet of a letter to Rick Walker:

 " You know like i do that live looping is full of potential.  i believe
it's the
most cathartic, liberating creative form of expression alive.  it's so
immediate
and yet you can stand out from what you just did and be in the 3rd person.
this is phenomenal.  it's much like painting to me.  you see your work and
make an adjustment.
a musician alone can't do this live.  a dj can't make executive decisions
about the actual
 source being delivered.  so to me this is the shit.  i'm gonna keep doing
it  till i don't.  and at this point not doing it is not an real 
option.....

 .... rhythm is in my opinion the most important part of live
 looping.  live looping is a rhythm itself.  think of how many times you've
 seen a technical glitch.  this is a corruption of the ryhthm and the 
spirit
 gets lost and suddenly we're brought back into "oh yeah this is a human
 using technology".

 the rave/dj scene has brought to us the continuum much like an african 
drum
 troupe.  the binary stage to audience five minute song then clap days were
 rewritten because of the dj.  the dj learned to work the energy of the
 spirit itself.  when you take a record that's been worked on for months by
 someone else and mix it with another one then source is not the issue.
it's the composition.  i love this shit.  but it drove away the musician.
live
 looping reunites these two for me personally.  and burningman has been the
 space for ultra creativity and exploration rewarded with love by people 
who
 are there to see/hear beautiful attempts which may end up in disaster.  at
 bm there is no such thing as a disaster it's all courageous beauty.  from
 working hard at my craft on the playa has come the visions and 
auralisions.

 so now i'm trying to bring it all together for myself.

 the most important instrument in all of this is the speaker.  without it
 there's no livelooping, dj's, rock shows.  the actual sound is just as
 important to me as what i'm doing with it.  i feel that most people out
 there are so wrapped up into their own way of making music that they've
 forgotten to pay attention to the physics of sound itself.

 i find myself describing live looping as where musician, dj and engineer
all come together.  i've always been a happy/mad scientist so thank goddess
this technology is here.  i'd be doing something else with my time if it
wasn't."