Re: the great Beyond.....

[pycraft@elec.gla.ac.uk (Dr M. P. Hughes)]

Bryan:

>The notion that anyone's work in this medium has
>any more viability than anothers is rampant bullshit, the likes of which
>does nothing to promote either the genre as a whole or our individual
>musical endeavours. Besides which it should be obvious that Fripp draws
>these remarks as a direct result of his achieving a greater degree of
>critical and (relative) market success than most if not all of the other
>players working with this technology.

But that's it - he is more known to us.  I'll tell you why I equate Fripp
with Looping, it's because from age 16 and first getting into KC until
about 2-3 years ago, as far as I was concerned looping was called
"Frippertronics".  Consequently, when I started looping I came at it from a
"Now I can do all that cool stuff RF does!" So ya loop footswolen chords,
noodle over the top of it and hey, this sounds like No Pussyfooting!  I
mean there's so many different ways to approach looping, but that always
seems to be the popular one.  Because he _is_ so popular.  And as for going
"beyond" Fripp,  what I mean is that I'm trying to break out of the
"ambient soundscape with noodling over the top" and try to approach the
whole issue differently.

Do you want to know who the original looper is?  I mean he wasn't a looper
in the contemporary sense, but boy did he write a peice that is crying out
for someone here to do a loop version.  Go listen to Pachelbel's "Canon"
and tell me that's not a looper's peice if ever there was one.

Andre:
>> So the moral of today's lesson: If you already sound more like Fripp 
>> than you want to, don't buy a Fernandes! 

the other Michael:
>I've already got one. <g> I've been using it for 2 years and it's a
>wonderful device. You can do things with it that Fripp hasn't done yet! 

Hey, just think!  Robert Fripp could be sitting in a room somewhere,
looking disparingly at his guitar and saying "but how can I go _beyond_
Michael Peters?"

Finally, Andre recommended listening to completely different avenues of
music in order to overcome copying other musicians.  Matthias (got the tape
yet?) went one step further in suggesting listening to _no_ other
musicians.  I'll go the whole hog and say _give up your instrument_!  OK
it's a bit extreme.  My wife has been ill (CFS) for some time, and for
about a year I just didn't have time to play.  Coming back to it
afterwards, I went straight into practicing music that was (a) completely
different to my previous playing (ie rote licks) and (b) compositionally
nearer to what I wanted to hear.  I think that the only way I achieved a
complete chance in style that I'd tried for before was by putting the beast
down for a while, although it wasn't for the best of reasons.

Michael

Dr Michael Pycraft Hughes      Bioelectronic Research Centre, Rankine Bldg,
Tel: (+44) 141 330 5979        University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, U.K.
    "Wha's like us?  Damn few, and they're a' deid!" - Scottish proverb