Re: Dig if U will our live looping flame war

["altruist@earthlink.net" <altruist@earthlink.net>]

Hi again Matthias,

>Nevertheless it would be extremely helpfull for me, if you could list 
>up my guidelines here, because I am not sure how people see me 
>and my 
>efforts to characterize our way to create music and helping to it...
>I hope I have been rather suggesting than imposing...

My personal impression, based on your posts, is that you feel "live 
looping" is the name you would like to use for a specific type of music.  
My understanding is that you feel this style of music is characterized by 
certain conventions of form, structure, and approach.  

The key comment you made, which leads me to this conclusion, is this:

"Similarly, not everyone that uses a looping tool plays Live Looping 
music.  It can aid any category of music."

This strikes me as being a very limiting and exclusive attitude, because 
where do you draw the line between "using a looping tool" and "playing 
Live Looping music?"

(I just re-read that and realized I'm sitting in my father's home at 1:39
in 
the morning on a Saturday night, typing a sentence like that.  What a 
life...)

Anyway...

>no "kind" of anything can be understood by one example.

But it might be MIS-understood by one example.

For instance, someone who really loves ambient music hears me, 
billed as playing "live looping," and assumes they don't like "live 
looping" because it's all glitchy and aggressive and angular.  Then they 
never get to hear your own very beautiful and ambient music.

Or the other way around (and an all too common scenario): an IDM fan 
hears a Robert Fripp or Brian Eno album, and assumes that all looping 
is ambient, so when I come through town and they hear I'm a looping 
guitarist, they never bother to check me out because "they don't dig 
ambient."

To me, there should be room for the ambient AND the glitchy stuff, AND 
the stuff in between and above and below it all.  My point is that if 
there's an actual style called "loop music," and you have so many 
different sounding people calling their thing that, and there are 
simultaneously lots of other people who DON'T use that label, but ARE 
using loopers in their music... then it becomes incredibly difficult for 
that phrase to mean anything.

And even worse, it means you and I lose a lot of sleep discussing this 
sort of thing on a Saturday night!

>>if a mailing list of a few hundred dedicated looping
>>enthusiasts can't find a way to agree on what "loop music" is, then is 
it
>>really a good idea to try and promote that concept (whatever it is) to 
the
>>world at large?

>good point!
>I hope the rest of the world will not be that sensible and 
>emotionally involved in the question and thus be happy to simply get 
>an idea about it and from there on follow what we do and select the 
>CDs and shows the will want to assist... :-)

But here again, I have to ask the same question: WHAT, exactly, is it 
that you want the world to get an idea about?  Matthias Grob's music?  
Looping as a technology?  Every possible musical style that could be 
played using an EDP?  Music that originates from Terry Riley's 
aesthetic, but which stops short of the sliced/glitch school of 
technique?
 
To me, the problem here is that "live looping" is such an open-ended 
term that it can't possibly accurately define anything very specific.  Not 
without having a very narrow aesthetic and technical focus, and thereby  
excluding a lot of musicians and styles in the process.

So it seems to me that the "better" approach would be:

1) Figure out what it is that "live looping" means to you personally
2) Isolate that specific thing you relate to and want to present
3) Find a way of distilling THAT into something you can define or 
market or otherwise promote, that can't possibly be mistaken for 
something else, and that doesn't infringe on terminology and music 
that's been made by countless people for three or four decades.

Anyway...  time for sleep, my friend.

Best,

--Andre LaFosse
http://www.altruistmusic.com

          ---> http://Matthias.Grob.org


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