Re: Looper's Essential Listening revisited

[3nki <3nki@modaldub.net>]

sorry, i've been away for a bit...

On Feb 13, 2006, at 6:37 PM, Kim Flint wrote:

Once again: if you are going to propose something, you are required to also include at least 2 paragraphs of a review explaining why it is essential to looping. Explain the historical context if fits into, how it was influential, what techniques it innovated, etc.

kim

^ this is so absurd & sounds pretty fascistic i must say.

still, since i'm feeling expansive, some description for each title previously mentioned:

At 06:19 PM 2/13/2006, jb wrote:

let's not forget the seminal selt-titled CD:

Holland Skin Tunnel

guitar-bass-drum trio recording a sort-of (warm) white-noise, drone-like, spare, fast instrumental rock that has been highly treated, manipulated and so on, to the extent that it's almost noise. one could postulate this album pre-figured something more melodic like the My Bloody Valentine album 'loveless'. it's using the studio as an instrument ala brian eno, and altering the overall recorded sound of the group into one undulating mass of near noise that has "loops" of fast rhythmic guitar-drum-bass thrash coming through the haze. it sounds like loops in the playing, and so i think highlights a certain aspect of looping perhaps often ignored in more recent discussions of technology. the sound of this record is not for the faint of heart, but rewarding for those that can appreciate it.

and while we're getting off the beaten track, i can only assume someone

mentioned:

Muslimgauze

simple, 8-bit dub, or perhaps 'industrial dub', i don't know what people call Muslimgauze.. but it's almost all great, and there's a lot of it. to me it's one of the best examples of a certain historical 'low-fi' or dub aspect of looping and its entré into more trendy avenues. also reminds of a certain DIY, political sense of looping in various "underground" circles, historically at least if not so much today. reflects a 'hand-made' or dub style where "the seams are showing" in a production sense. sometimes dance, often drone, sometimes noise. lots of middle-eastern samples, dub beats, looped bass lines. reminds me of those old Akai samplers...

:Zoviet France:

this also reflects the historical "drone" influence on looping. more uniquely perhaps, they are a twenty-years-later example of something like the kind of tape manipulation made famous by Fripp and Eno in Paris in 1974 (was it?) or so. the bootlegs are out there i think... stretching tape from one machine to another, disabling erase heads and letting it pile on... various low-fi looping methods of long samples, mostly. these :zoviet france: recordings (late '80s to late '90s i think) with cassette decks and a few guitar pedals, instead of the earlier plate reverbs and reel-to-reel tape machines–at least, the earlier :zoviet france" recordings, which i think is the more relevant. their "sources" are long text samples or slow industrial machinery-type sounds, not the guitar playing of robert fripp. it's not The Same certainly, but i think it's important as, in a sense, an interesting Evolution from that earlier work, using similar methods and so forth.

that Ritchie Hawtin/Plastikman album where some experimental (german i

think) guy built a double-armed turntable to re-make one of Plastikman's

drone-y beats albums. primitive but all-the-more-effective-for-it looping.

if i recall, this was where *(someone-i-cannot-recall) made a custom turntable. it had a heavily-weighted plate, dual arms spaced apart to create a quick delay for the second output. these two outputs were mixed to make an awesome beat. the original tempo and eq were altered, the record played. the end sound was twice looped in a sense, as the original drums were a series of alternating loops, and the delayed extra tone-arm was like a loop of the aggregate. hypnotic, repetitive minimal modern electronic 'techno' beats, typical of Ritchie Hawtin (perhaps though a bit more minimal and slow). i wish i could find a reference to this specific album on the web.. perhaps it's too out-of-print. at any rate, an excellent flag for mr. hawtin, a master of minimal dance music and certainly of the Loop, on most of his recordings. again minimal and dub-style in some ways. perhaps "Musik" is a more readily available title of his.

anyway, these opinions are of course solely my personal "two cents", offered from my belief that they are interesting listening and could be of value to an interested person, and are in no way meant to encourage you to lie, gamble, cheat, or otherwise get into trouble.

-3nki

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