Re: real time groove loops

[Andre LaFosse <altruist@earthlink.net>]

Kim Flint wrote:

> Good, groovy rhythms come from your body, not your head. That's the
> most important thing I learned from my attempt to learn west african
> drumming. 

Didn't you study with Alfred Ladzekpo?  He and his brother Kobla have
been running the African program at my alma mater CalArts for many years
now.  Small world (or at least a small circle of left-leaning West Coast
colleges).  Anyway...

> The rhythm has to be in your body or you never get it. I 
> find that
> being physically involved in a rhythm has much better results than 
> just
> thinking about it. And clicking a mouse just isn't that physical....

What if you took a program like Steinberg's Recycle! to chop up the
different sections of a drum break, but then assigned each different
section to a series of electronic drum pads that could trigger them? 
You'd basically have a number of groove sub-sections (maybe no longer
than two or three eight-notes each) that could be played in a live,
spontaneous manner.  If the fragments are short enough, and the tempo
fast enough, you could be doing enough to really be "playing" the
rhythms yourself, even as the sampled bits fill in ultra-precise details
of the groove. 

I also recall seeing an MTV news story many years ago about a guy (don't
recall his name) who has designed a suit that had percussion pads all
over it.  So he produced rhythms by striking these different pads all
over his body. including kick drum samples in his boot heel which he
triggered by stomping the ground with his foot.  Kind of a strange
visual spectacle...  It would definitely be more physically involved. 
Just don't get that snare pad on your knee confused with your nose...

> I'm wondering what an actual *instrument* might be that could allow a > 
>music
> like drum and bass to be created in the sort of musically intuitive, 
> live,
> improvisational fashion that I love, and allow for all those
> characteristics
> that I like in drum and bass. Most likely, it wouldn't much resemble
> any
> traditional sort of instrument, although it might likely have elements > 
>of
> those. (old ideas are often good ideas....)

Well, it depends on a lot of what characteristics you really want to see
translated from d&b into a live realm.  I think the idea above about
triggering fragments of a break live is one answer to that, but you've
still got to sit in front of a computer long enough to chop the breaks
and then assign them, unless you had a system whereby the rhythms from
an incoming source were automatically tempo-measured and chopped up,
then assigned to various triggers.  And you'd have to give yourself over
to the tempo dictated by the subsets of the different breaks.

> >It would be great to see something like that come to pass, but I just
> >don't see how it's fundamentally possible,
> 
> Not being able to see how it's possible is the thing that separates us
> normal folks from the geniuses! It's the Matthias' and Don Buchla's 
> and
> Einstein's who are able to envision these things and bring them to us,
> usually long before we are able to accept them. I have the foolish 
> faith in
> human ingenuity that's telling me that somewhere, sometime, someone 
> will
> find the answer. The sooner the better, actually....

I don't mean to adopt any sort of cynical, naysayer stance, and you're
faith in human ingenuity is far from foolish (as I think you'd agree). 
But I fear that the shroud of normality surrounding my worldview
prevents me from understanding how to go about having one's cake and
eating it too.  

It's like somebody wishing they could experience the sensation of being
immersed in water without having to get wet; or a stage play director
wishing that he could integrate the characteristics of a quick-edit
action sequence in a film into the realm of live theater performance; or
a live band of musicians wishing that they could get the same sense of
freedom and abandon that comes from playing live on stage in front of a
crowd when they go into a studio to record behind sonic baffles in
seperate rooms from one another with headphones on to get sonic
isolation of their different instruments.

There are ways of bringing these various dualities closer together, to
be sure, and trying to bridge these gaps can wind up leading a person
towards something altogether new and unexpected, which they might not
have anticipated stumbling into in the first place (which in my opinion
is often better anyway).  But in each case, there's a certain
fundamental difference between what goes on in these two different
realms, and I don't think you can expect to bridge the gap between them
without losing a certain amount of the characteristics of each one.

So in dealing with the issue of, "How do you make an inherently
pieced-together work of art happen spontaneously and improvisationally,"
you've really got to think about what kinds of trade-offs you want to
make.  How do you paint a painting spontaneously?  How to you compose an
orchestral arrangement spontaneously?  How do you record an album
spontaneously?  There are ways to do all of these things, but they don't
lead you to the same places that you can go if you do things in a more
setup-time method.

I read an interview with Rupert Parkes not long ago, where he said that
the piecing-together process is one of the most fundamental aspects of
what he does, and that live performance has no interest for him, and no
relavence to what he does.  Then again, I heard talk on Usenet of an
upcoming Photek performance in Canada (?!?!), so maybe he changed his
mind...

-- Andre "Deep thoughts with Looper's Delight" LaFosse