Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
On 23 jan 2006, at 15.36, mark sottilaro wrote: > Other than a few friends and love partners I > don't think I've ever seen a non audience member at > one of the loopfests. Yes, that may be correct if the gig is announced as "loopfest" or whatever in that vein. But there is also another way: if you actively seek out just any audience out there to confront them with your music without much "arty presentation". Seven days ago I was more or less driven into that scenario from circumstances I wasn't totally aware of, initially... I had been booked to play at a "beer bar" on their traditional "folk singers night". I warned The Man that I was going to play instrumentally and improvised and "nothing catchy at all", but they asked me to come and play anyway because they would like "a broad program" for the night. So I brought a saxophone, Möbius laptop, FCB1010 pedal and two small Faderfox hand MIDI button mixers to catch the tube. Well at the place it was kind of scaring to see the audience and hear the first three acts. Some were rather good and some were quite lousy (easy to hear which major artists they tried to mimic) but they all performed Well Known Cover Songs. So I really thought no one would like my music at all when I got on stage. In the kind ambition of being less "abstract" I started to beatbox a rhythm into a loop. Then I created, on a second track, three loops that corresponded to three major chords and kept playing melodies through different combinations of those chords - while also inserting new notes into the chords (on passing by) to make the whole tune morph a little. Some twelve minutes into the twenty minutes gig I created a new very long loop on a third track while mixing down the beat track and the chords track - I thought this could be some nice chilly part with floating spaces... kind of ;-) Finally I noticed I had only two minutes left so I mixed in the two groovy tracks again, hacked it up a bit by Susbst Insert with zero feedback and finally kicked the "empty all looping tracks" button on a rather loud "bruuup" note. Dead silence. I had forgot to check out the audience, although I had heard them talking here and there while I was playing and now I just thought they were so happy because I had stopped playing "bizarre non folk singer music". But I was totally wrong! About sixty percent really liked it and many came up to me for a chat, wanting to tell me how much they had appreciated "hearing something different and cool". Some put on a satanic grin and thanked me for confronting "those poor souls that didn't get what you were doing" (the other 40 percent) and some guys said they had had a great time studying the face expression of everyone in the audience while I was playing. I could tell not many of them had understood what I had actually been doing, in a technical meaning, but who cares as long as they liked the show! One guy in particular thought I had brought with me "prerecorded parts that I triggered from foot pedals". Strange, because this guy used to be a musician himself (having played with a "local hero" Swedish guy that once was responsible for having Albert Ayler recorded when AA was here in the sixties). Wow! I also picked up a booking for quite prominent "arty" gig later on, since a certain person happened to be at that beer bar by a lucky coincidence. Maybe they liked me because they actually were there for the beer and socializing and not very fond of folk singer amateurs and my gig simply made it possible for them to finally "come out"? ;-) Well, a funny night it was. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.looproom.com (international) www.boysen.se (Swedish) ---> iTunes Music Store (digital) www.cdbaby.com/perboysen