RE: The importance of accidents in music.

[looppool@cruzio.com]

    I purposefully allow a lot of chance to occur in my own 'found sound'
meets conventional song approach to live looping.

I love John Cages' definition of music as being "organized sound".

Frequently,  I will do fairly random things with not so random sets of
timbral variations and then sit back and organize the results so that
it becomes 'musical'.    I suppose that is why I love the whole
'quantize replace' or 'sus8ths' approach in what I do.

Initially, I also was really intrigued with Steve Lawson's early use of
random filtering to make previously prosaic looped parts come to life and
have more variety in them.   I've actually never owned a unit that did
that, but I tried similar experiments with a more 'beer living on a
champagne budget' approach.

I also love juxtaposing long ambient loops against shorter rhythmic
ostinato loops.

Additionally,  I have become very fond (and practised very, very hard) a
technique that I call 'random time signature' 
improvisation............one that I developed myself that uses groupings
of rhythmic notes that have two things in common.  1) they share a common
Sub Pulse  and 2)  they are always separated by one and, rarely,  two
notes of rest between each group.

This is a great exercise for a soloist to attempt and then be able to find
one's way home after completely losing oneself in the process (not being
able to find the downbeat of whatever time signature one is playing in,
currently).

The whole 'unrounded multiply' technique in the EDP, and later in the
Looperlative  is another great way to use randomization to create new
rhythmical patterns.

I use to use the random slice function in the LP-1 and then to rerecord
the results to a new track where I truncated the loop, constraining it to
a new time signature.

I also put a new function into the LP-2 mini looper,   RANDOM RETRIGGER,
though I've discovered that is works better in theory with long tones than
with anything with transients in it (because the transients can occur in
the middle of a randomized sample which destroys the sense of ostinato
rhythms).