Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
On Monday, February 13, 2006, at 08:29 AM, Kevin wrote: > At 12:16 AM 2/13/2006, you wrote: >> Every now and then we discuss ideas for the Looper's Delight >> Essential Listening section. It's that time again! >> This time around, I'd like to focus on the 1980's. > > For the 80's I'd like to nominate: > > "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" by Brian Eno and David Byrne. > This is one of the most influential looping albums of all time with > its use of polyrhythms, spoken word and of course intense looping. By > comparison "Remain in Light" by Talking Heads should be considered a > side-project of this work. > > The "M-Base" movement headed by Steve Coleman and Greg Osby took jazz > type looping in a completely different direction that has been > enormously influential on jazz/rock/funk/noise/hiphop/looping artists > here in the US Pacific Northwest. (Relatively) famous folks > influenced by this would probably include: Bill Frisell and Wayne > Horvitz. Unfortunately M-Base is almost totally unknown. Recordings > are very hard to find because Stefan F. Winter's recording company, > JMT Productions of Germany, went bankrupt. The M-Base movement of the late 80's/early 90's was certainly an influence on this jazz/rock/funk/noise/hiphop/looping artist in the PNW :-). However, I'd disagree on a few points. Frisell and Horvitz, while possibly influenced by M-Base, were already pretty much heavily "on the scene" in NYC when the M-Base collective sounds started to come out, both have extensive catalogs of releases that predate M-Base, and were both a big part of the 80's downtown NYC scene (Zorn, Knitting Factory, et al). Wayne Horvitz once told me an interesting anecdote about how John Zorn started practicing his sax seriously again after hearing Coleman for the first time :-). Also, I don't recall much on the way of live looping on the M-Base scene, as I recall, most of their stuff was played live (and brilliantly), but their approach to very tightly locked-in polyrhythms is certainly adaptable to live looping. Also, you may be pleased to learn that Stefan Winters new label, Winter & Winter, is re-issuing a lot of the classic JMT catalog. Here are some of my candidates for classic looping albums of the dark '80's. I'm extremely busy at the moment dealing with gigs and car issues, but if I get a chance, I'll write up some reviews of these for the LD site as soon as I can. Paul Dresher and Ned Rothenberg: Opposites Attract (New World 1991). This (unfortunately long out of print) disc pairs guitarist/composer/system builder Dresher with, IMHO, one of the greatest reeds players on the planet for a set of heavily looped, rock-influenced pieces. Dresher built a custom 4-track analog tape-based looping system and the 2 began collaborating in the mid-80's. However, the highly rhythmic nature of the music, combined with the inaccuracy of the tape-based system, caused them to shelve the project until 1989, when cheap digital samplers arrived on the scene. Moving a number of the tape loops onto samplers, they created a set of compositions, and added NYC new jazz luminaries like Bobby Previte, Mark Dresser, Samm Bennett, and, in a relatively rare avant-jazz setting, contrabass guitar virtuoso Anthony Jackson. The music is not dissimilar to Fripp/Belew/Levin/Bruford-era King Crimson, with sax/bass clarinet/shakuhachi replacing one of the guitars, and a downtown NYC sensibility. Brilliant stuff! (Postscript: I just glanced at the essential listening section on LD.com and noticed I'd already submitted an extensive review of this disc already. oops:-) Scott Johnson: John Somebody(Elektra Nonesuch 1986) and Patty Hearst: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Elektra Nonesuch 1988). Guitarist/composer Johnson did some very novel pieces for the time, using tape loops of spoken word and driving pitch/rhythm/harmonic content from the loops to write instrumental parts to accompany the loops. On "John Somebody", he takes the phrase, "Do you know who's in New York? Remember that guy John somebody? He was a, he was sort of a b..." spoken by a women with something of a brooklyn accent, and builds a very cool wall of prog-rockist guitar around it. On the soundtrack to Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst bio-pic, he uses scattered bits of dialog from the film to generate a spooky and effective score for strings, keys, guitar and percussion. This soundtrack, unfortunately out-of-print, is much better than the film it accompanies, IMHO. Coincidentally enough, my wife pulled out the Patty Hearst soundtrack last night and we were once again amazed by it. Other IMHO important discs missing from the loopography: David Torn: Cloud About Mercury, Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back and Fear of a Black Planet, Early Illbient-scene stuff from NYC like DJ Spooky, Sub Dub and We, and probably a million other discs I'm not thinking of at the moment. Also, would it be to early to acknowledge Ted Killian's Flux Aeterna as a looping classic? It's one of those discs that still catches my ear when it pops up in iTunes. I played this for the band on the tour bus after we met Ted at a gig in Ashland, and the guys were amazed this music came out of such a nice and unassuming guy. :-)