WHAT A LOOP HAS TO SAY

["loop.pool" <looppool@cruzio.com>]

Dennis Montgomery said:

"Before you start building a loop, do you
have a preconceived idea of what the loop should express or do you just
let the sound of the loop guide you?"


I have to say that because I have a strong tendency  to be both too 
intellectual in my musical approach
and also to controlling in my over all aproach to music that I have come 
to 
love
the fact that a live looping device can capture amazing serendipity.

I've fallen in love with playing an instrument that I don't have control 
of 
and looping a phrase that takes on
a lot of beauty do merely to the fact that it is repeating.

I've been playing a purple anodized, inexpensive pocket trumpet that I got 
for peanuts at the NAMM show.
I'll never be a good trumpet player in my life but I'm coming up with some 
very, very cool looping shit with it and I
may even have the courage to play it at the Boise Experimental Music 
Festival that I"ll be headlining at the end of April.
Scares the crap out of me to consider taking it but I think I"m gonna 
anyway.

There is something very beautiful to me about randomly looping something 
and 
then having it define where you should go next.
That is one of the reasons I love the EDP so much because I can at any 
given 
instant, use techniques that allow me
to suddenly recontextualize the fascinating timbral world into music.

John Cage said that "Music is just Organized Sound"

our looping gear allows us to organize an amazing pallet of sounds that we 
are not necessarily in control of.

If one is too controlling (one of my music and emotional character 
defects) 
then improvising live in front of an audience can
be a truly liberating experience.

I just did a featured spot at the first 3 day Dark Elektronika Festival in 
San Francisco (Binaural Dimensions).
I wrote a long detailed blog about this experience at tribe.net ( 
http://people.tribe.net/looppool/blog&topicId=1c50aa89-b3fd-4b9f-bb79-c789f114d2b6
 ) 
so I won't go into more detail here, but suffice it to say that I lost my 
DSP processor which meant that I was completely
unable to pitch shift,  square wave tremolo,  reverb or otherwise modulate 
my simple found sound sources for the concert.''

Everything that I had worked hard for the week before went completely out 
of 
the window in one fell swoop.  I was devasted.

This put me in an emotional tizzy and I felt like running away.  All the 
other acts were really heavy with huge subsonic slabs of electronica.
Anyway,  I apologized to the audience and said that the 'darkness' of my 
performance had to come from the way I was feeling and the
primal instruments themselves and not the 
processing.........................I thought I just sucked terribly but 
the 
context of the performance
pushed me into places I didn't want to go and people really liked what 
ended 
up happening.

A sweet woman said that she had seen every act at all three days of the 
festival and that she found my performance the most inspiring.
She said she wanted to go home and start making 
music.....................................lol,   I thought I sucked!!!!!! 
But Serendipity
and chance saved the day.   I was approached by many musicians over the 
course of the evening who complimented me on my performance
and I ended up loving the evening even though in the middle of the 
performance I though it ranked with the worst failures I'd ever mounted
on stage.

Yeah,   Serendipity and Live Looping..............................it's 
pretty dang cool to be on the edge and let your gear force you into places 
that make you grow as an artist.