Re: FIRST LOOPING MEMORIES

[Richard Zvonar <zvonar@zvonar.com>]

At 2:51 PM -0800 12/14/01, Rick Walker (loop.pool) wrote:

>How about a FIRST LOOOPING MEMORIES THREAD?

To put this time line in perspective, I was born in 1946, started 
elementary school in 1950, and graduated high school in 1963:

Long before I ever became aware of looping per se as musical process, 
I had a fondness for "weird" science fiction movie music and novelty 
sound effects. I was a regular listener to the Big John and Sparky 
radio program (1950-58), wherein Sparky's voice was a sped-up 
recording, and marveled at the sounds of theremin and homebrew 
electronics in films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), 
Invaders from Mars (1953), Forbidden Planet (1956).

The first time I ever saw someone demonstrate double tracking was on 
the Walt Disney TV show, circa 1955. Peggy Lee did the voices of the 
two Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. Around this same time I used 
to hear Les Paul and Mary Ford's jingles for Robert Hall clothes on 
the radio. Lots of multitracking and tape-speed manipulation.

When "The Witch Doctor" came out in 1958 I became a big fan of David 
Saville, and after he released the "Chipmunk Song" later that year my 
friends and I started playing around with tape recorders to imitate 
chipmunk voices. But this was just a lot of fooling around; my only 
real musical activity from childhood through high school was as a 
singer.

It wasn't until my late teens that I got serious. In 1965 I got 
psychedelicized, both chemically and intellectually, and in 1966 I 
started playing quasi-professionally in a band. Although the band 
itself was strictly folk rock/psychedelic with guitars (a little 
banjo), bass, drums, and vocals, my listening went far beyond. During 
1966-67 I rapidly got an education about electronic music, musique 
concrete, and live electroacoustic music. Pieces that were essential 
to this education were Steve Reich's "Come Out" (1966), Pauline 
Oliveros's "I of IV" (1967), Luciano Berio's "Thema (Omaggio a 
Joyce)" (1958).

In 1969 I saw/heard John Cage and David Tudor perform with the Merce 
Cunningham Dance Company and I composed my first multimedia piece for 
film with four spatially-separated tapes of manipulated sounds. I 
followed this with a film for three synchronized films, an adaptation 
of an Ionesco play called "Salutation" for three actors. Many of the 
techniques and compositional structures in this film were related to 
musical loop processes, i.e. layering, repetition, multiple 
perspectives on the same material.

After a few years playing more straight-ahead rock music and making 
more straight-ahead films I found myself in Santa Cruz in 1975 and 
enrolled in Cabrillo College, where the music department had a New 
Music Ensemble and an Audio Arts program directed by Bob Beede. Bob 
had a Buchla Music Easel, and I started performing with him and a few 
others. A lot of what we played was improvised "pattern music," 
inspired by Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and other so-called 
"minimalists." Our typical setup used a delay system made of two 
4-track reel-to-reel decks with the tape treaded between them. As I 
recall, we didn't normally use regeneration on the signal path, so 
the effect was mainly a straight canonic repetition with only a small 
amount of feedback due to bleed into the microphones. Having four 
tracks of tape allowed us to have individual delays routed to their 
own speakers in a quad sound system. On one piece we had short delays 
from two playback heads of Machine #1 in the front channels and long 
delays from Machine #2 in the rear channels.

I moved to San Diego in 1977 to attend graduate school, and for two 
years I lived with Paul Dresher. Paul was very much into tape delay 
systems at the time. At home he would play guitar through a funky 
system in his bedroom, using a couple of cheap old tape decks, but in 
the tape studio at school he was using the half-inch 4-track (with 
erase head defeated) for some serious loopage. These experiments led 
to the design of his 4-track performance looper, based on a modified 
TASCAM 40-4 deck and a voltage controlled matrix mixer. A pair of 
long metal arms supported a 20-30" tape loop, and in addition to the 
stock Record and Playback heads, the tape deck had and additional 
Playback head mounted at the halfway point in the loop. The outputs 
and feedback paths from each of the three heads could be controlled 
through the VCA mixer by means of a set of 24 foot pedals, and the 
signal routing was done manually with push buttons. This system was 
built in collaboration with music department technician (and 
guitarist) Paul Tydelski.  It is the system Bill Walker referred to 
at the Kuumbwa gig in 1984.

Partly because Paul was becoming such an obvious master at tape-based 
looping, I followed different avenues. I spent a lot of hours working 
with the school's Buchla 100 Series modular system, which had four 
analog step sequencers. I also did a lot of work with tape loops as 
part of some of my tape pieces, but most of the time this was used to 
prolong individual transient sounds from percussion instruments and 
the like. I also used some loops in the backing tape for the Diamanda 
Galas piece "Panoptikon" (1982), turning the sound of her ring 
modulated voice into a huge chugging engine from hell.


-- 

______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
http://www.zvonar.com
http://RZCybernetics.com
http://www.cybmotion.com/aliaszone
http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?autostart=rz