Re: FIRST LOOPING MEMORIES

["Dennis Leas" <dennis@mdbs.com>]

Richard, you have led a most fascinating life!

Dennis Leas
-------------------
dennis@mdbs.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Zvonar" <zvonar@zvonar.com>
To: <Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com>
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 10:56 PM
Subject: Re: FIRST LOOPING MEMORIES


> 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
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