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Thomas Dolby: LIVE LOOPING
Wow, I just got from a very stimulating show, watching Thomas Dolby hit
the
stage for the first time in 15 years (except for a short tune up gig two
weeks ago in SF).
Not only was it a wonderful show in a wonderful venue (The Independent is
now hands down,
my favorite music venue in San Francisco after having seen Elbow and now
Mr.
Dolby there).
What was very exciting is that every act on the bill used live looping
techniques extensively.
Genie (who had such a wonderfully creative show at Y2K5) opened up and
was
really well
recieved with his mixture of psychedelic delay drenched guitar, human
beatboxing and
amazing manipulation of 2 DL4 Line 6s...................sometimes while
multitasking with
playing slide guitar........while beatboxing................while using
his
fingers on one DL4
in his lap and his toes with a 2nd one on the floor.
The the excellent group LoopStation performed with, again, Line 6 DL4s and
what looked
from my vantage point to be a Boss gigadelay.
The group is a cellist and a singer and they were really wonderful and
amazingly full spectrum
in their passionate pop songs. They were very, very well recieved by
the
crowd and I was lucky enough
that their cellist gave me one of their CDs to listen to , which I can't
wait to put on my hard drive right away.
I asked them to come play Y2K6 and he seemed interested so cross your
fingers. This was one of the more
interesting live looping acts that I've seen and both the cellist and the
vocalist used liberal usage of looping
in the set.
Dolby's set was just sublime replete with wonderful visuals. He had
several cameras on his person and there were
frequent images from one of them in black and white on the large screen.
The cameras were fish eye lens and it
was really cool to see him manipulate his gear on the big screen. He
also
had beautiful looped images
accompanying his songs...........including some very powerful emotional
imagery of submaries, torpedoes and the ocean
during his song, "One of our Submarines".
I'm not entirely sure of his setup except to say that I know it's well
documented as of yesterday on his website and that
he was basically looping inside of LOGIC on a Mac.
He seemed to have a nice blend of actually playing parts on keyboards;
singing; looping occasional keyboard parts (which I realize could have
been
real time midi looping or an internally run VST live looping pluging) and
then some obviously sequenced
parts.
The canned-ness of it didn't bother me in the slightest because he really
was multi-tasking and playing a lot.
He was in fine voice and my only complaint was that I wish his show had
been
longer than the slightly less than an hour that it was.
His equipment failed him twice during the show but he was very
entertaining
and called attention to the fact.............Every time it screwed up he
promised the crowd that he would throw t-shirts to the audience and he did.
At one point he dedicated a song to his wife (the reason he moved to L.A.
apparently) and she just coincidentally happened to be standing right next
to us. I was graciously taken to the show by Glenn Javaheri and his
girlfriend who also gave me some video that he shot at the 1st Bass
Looping
Festival at the San Jose Museum of Art, years ago with Steve Lawson and
Michael Manring.
It was a wonderful concert and I felt so proud to be in this community and
see how high profile some of what we do is getting.
This is the first 'normal' show I"ve seen where everyone on the bill was
live looping extensively.