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Looper's Delight
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Because I've produced the big loop fest in Santa Cruz for many years and because I've been fortunate to play several festivals in other countries over the past five years, I've had the great fortune to see some of the world's best live loopers do their thing in front of an audience. Tonight, I saw one of the most impressive shows I"ve ever seen a live looper play. I drove up to San Francisco and saw the Argentine singer/songwriter Juana Molina play to a sold out house at Yoshi's, SF, the beautiful jazz club on Fillmore Street. Man, oh man, was it an amazing concert! I felt like jumping up and down after watching it. This former famous television commediene in Argentina who gave up here life to return to music was firing on all cylinders. Using a very, very sparse setup that included a BOSS RC-50, a Lexicon reverb (couldn't tell but it looked like an older MXP-500), a Korg O1W synthesizer and a beautiful steel string acoustic guitar, she had seemless mastery of her looping. She also could go from playing almost childlike simple guitar/voice compositions with a delightful and very childlike voice to incredibly complex polyrhythmic multi-looped parts. She also occasionally used really dense timbral loops against very simple melodic parts and she also used a lot of very, very complex modern and dissonant harmony against, yet again, very simple and memorable melodies. Her rhythm playing was impeccable on both guitar, keyboards and voice. She really did beautiful things with backing her voice up with loops that were very wet, reverb wise against a very dry initial vocal style. She did tunes that were so simple as to almost be confounding and then would turn around and do a track that have up to 10 or 12 loops on top of one another in a cacaphonous but beautiful mass of sound. She even attemped one song in English............fucked up the lyrics (four different times) and had the audience shouting them to her (from the poem, The Love Song of Alfred Prusock by TS Elliot) and yet ended the song with the audience rooting for her and cheering that fact that she made it through. I have to say I was incredibly impressed............as impressed as I've ever been by anybody. She's a killer guitarist, a great rhythmatist (and this comes from a bit of a rhythm snob here), a beautiful and challenging timbralist (her synth designs were modern and edgy but always simple) and an engaging and frequently humorous performer. FIVE STARS on this puppy. Check here out Juana Molina