The Historic and Aesthetic Origins of Live Looping

[Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>]

Maybe it's cutting to fine a distinction, but  because of our own 
involvement with live looping,
Terry Riley's work with the Time Lag Accumulator technique is a lot more 
interesting to me as an
historic origin of our movement than Stockhausen's use of tape delay in 
the formation of Musique Concrete.

Because tape delays' extension to the dedicated creation of long tape 
loops with the Time Lag Accumlator
is analagous to digital delays extension to create the first dedicated 
digital loopers,  we can say that
Terry Riley (with the assistance of his mysterious french audio 
engineer) is the Birth of our Movement.

Anyway,  I find the early tape history and all of Stockhausens' work 
very interesting but it's Riley's work
that I relate to and resonate with aesthetically, as a starting point.

The creation of Matthias Grob's Paradis Loop Delay (1993? 1994?) is also 
a spiritual starting point for me, personally and aesthetically because 
it was
the first piece of 'kit' that was invented specifically to create 
looping music in a contolled (and for me, rhythmic way)
as opposed to jerry-rigging a couple of tape decks to achieve a recorded 
loop as Riley and the French mystery engineer did.

Does anyone else resonate with these distinctions about our aesthetic 
and historical origins?

Rick Walker

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