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Looper's Delight
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Happy New Years to Everybody! I think 2007 may be the cultural watershed year of this first decade of the new Millennium in much the way the 1967 and 1968 were defining years, culturally in the 1960s. We've been in a really flat place for a long time here in the United States (waiting out the Bush regime's end) but I think the tide has turned, culturally and artistically. The older paradigms of the music industry are dying rapidly (Tower Records completely out of business?). We are in a new phase where people don't listen to whole albums much anymore..................they are able to get the lion share of their music for free on the web and listen to it on I pods. A lot of things are changing which means that a lot of new ways of communicating are on their ways. The musical and artistic communities of the future are starting to be built now through places like this website, tribe.net, myspace, youtube.com, etc. The amount of information on many, many things musically is available almost instantaneously, now on the web. I spent the evening watching looping French pop vocalists, Russian world fusion multi-instrumentalists, 12 years old South Indian girls who are going to be the next generations' master drummers, online tutorials for Max/MSP and Jitter, directions for reinstalling my MAudio Firewire audio computer interface, all just sitting in front of my computer. I worked on Arabic maqams on my Armenian Duduk, my purple anodized pocket trumpet, my Rick Turner purple fretless acoustic/electric bass and my voice out of a book that I found online and ordered through the independent bookstore where my wife works. Ten years ago, ney five years ago, I couldn't have possibly had as productive and knowledge increasing a day as I did today. *********************************** Someone once said that artists are the Antennae of a Culture. Because they are so sensitive, they can frequently see changes coming in the culture long before they occur. It's an exciting time to be alive............... a challenging time to be alive, ecologically and economically. A lot of things are going to change and very, very rapidly. I think we are on the cutting edge in this musical movement of Live Looping of a lot of what's going to change and define the paradigms of live playing in the next decades to come. In the past years, a very large number of very famous and prominent artists had musicians in their bands who are using live looping tools. I saw a show with Thomas Dolby, Loop Station and Genie where EVERYONE was looping live on stage and there wasn't a single word about Live Looping anywhere. That made me really happy. We are finally starting to arrive in the musical landscape. I could not have written that paragraph 5 years ago. Things are changing. I feel happy and blessed to be part of this community that is so innovative and also so supportive of each other's artistry. Happy New Years everyone. May you all have a fantastic year, creatively. Throw caution to the wind....................................Put out a CD! Throw a festival! Buy recordings from your fellow artists. Let's do it!!!!!!