RE: memory and improvisation

[Kim Flint <kflint@loopers-delight.com>]

At 05:16 PM 9/24/2001, Liebig, Steuart A. wrote:
>Find the silence inbetween.  Sometimes you let it stay, sometimes you fill
>it.  Both the leaving and the putting are actions.
>
>** excellent point. knowing when to not play is really important  - - 
>something that i believe many improvisers forget about. i think it also 
>goes to back to my comments about creating form - - you can create form 
>in 
>the improvisations by not playing/leaving space and then creating 
>entrances.

An interesting point in regards to improvising loops as well. I have often 
noticed people fall into the looping lobster trap, where stuff keeps going 
into the loop and never comes out again. The loop space gets all filled up 
and layered deeper and deeper and it turns into the giant wall of sound 
loop that demolishes everything in it's path. And then they don't know 
what 
to do with that, so at the end they just turn it off, which for me as a 
listener is rather like running through a very thick and noisy fog and 
then 
suddenly colliding with a brick wall.

silence in the loop is good. leave some there to begin with. But also, 
learn how to add silence to the loop. when the loop has gotten busy, learn 
to take some things out of it to make it change to less busy. Add space. 
Learn to make it more empty, in addition to more full. learn to make it go 
down sometimes instead of always up....

compositional form is another thing that looping should make more possible 
instead of less. But many people get into the "ok I've made my 2 bar loop, 
now I'm going to let it repeat for 19 minutes while I put you to sleep 
with 
my noodling" style of looping. instead of curing insomnia, you might use 
multiple loops and move between them as a means to create a form, or 
multiple loops each with a variation of an original loop to give the loop 
some movement. Or you might take it a little farther, and rather than just 
switching between loops you *evolve* loops from one place to another, so 
you still have that looping continuity. Section A doesn't just switch to 
Section B, it evolves to become B. And then with the idea of form again, 
learn to do more than just evolve from loop A to loop B to loop C, how 
about evolving C back into A, before going on to D?

To me that is where looping is exciting, when it moves past the simplistic 
idea of a static audio sample that just repeats over and over, perhaps 
while being mixed with another static sample or two. Move past the idea of 
an immutable loop that gets saved and recalled and triggered and repeated 
but never itself changes, to where the actual process of creating and 
changing the loop itself becomes the form and then the music....

kim



______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com