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Looper's Delight
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A new friend of mine on MyPace, Aun , a talented electronic musician and looper from Montreal
just told me that he just picked up two old Delta Lab 1024 Digital Delays which were the first
affordable digital delay that had an infinite delay/loop capability (at a whopping 1.024 seconds of delay time).
His mentioning this just made a flood of memories come back to me of a concert I did with
Michael Haummesser, Jim Rutledge, my self (aka TAO ELECTRICAL), Bob Beede and Richard Zvonar.
I wrote him back this letter about it:
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Wow, what a blast from the past, Aun,
I use a Delta Lab 1024 digital delay to do the first
ever looping show I did back in 1982.
With it's very short infinite loop and ability to speed or slow down the delay time, I recorded a
vocal passage which said,
"It doesn't mean a fucking thing"
I then sped it up so that it was so fast that you just hear a rapid rhythm without any intelligibility and used it as the 'groove' for a piece of musical improvisation.
I did all of the recording at the sound check so the audience couldn't hear what made up my groove.
We played the improv and at the very end of the piece I slowed the loop down very, very gradually until at the last minute as it started to have intelligibility, I slowed it down to normal speed, let the sentence have
full effect and then ...............lights out.
Your mentioning of these wonderful delays just took me back to that performance which I had completely forgotten. Later in the show we each (three of us, a bassist, guitarist and drummer) made long tape loops on three old tube echoplexes that had the erase heads removed and one by one left the stage leaving the long loops to play out of sync with each other for the intermission of the concert.
The impetus for the Delta Lab piece was taken from an amusing anecdote that I heard about Allen Ginsberg who climbed all the way up to the top of a Himalayan mountain to find a famous ascetic buddhist priest who lived in a cave away from all human kind so that he could ask him what the meaning of existence and life was.
After a long arduous journey up the snow covered mountain, he found the cave, entered, saw the old
priest there and asked him, "What the meaning of life".
The old codger then replied in a perfect Oxford English accent "It doesn't mean a fucking thing."
Ginsberg turned, walked out of the cave and down the mountain...............enlightened..............lol
Later, let me know how much fun you have with those puppies.
yours, Rick
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I should also mention that the equipment that I used that night belonged to Michael Haummesser (aka Not Noise---look
up this brilliant musician on the web, you'll thank me for the recommendation).
I couldn't afford it in the day but sure was fun to use it. Michael turned me on to that whole world..............tape loops, digital
loops, prepared guitars, etc. Sometimes I feel like I am doing things that he was doing 25 years ago in my current work.
He's been a huge influence on me.