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RE: Thomas Dolby: LIVE LOOPING
Thanks for the report. I'm going to see if I can get tix to one of the NYC
dates.
Best wishes,
Warren Sirota
Come hear *The Sandbox* at The Monkey in NYC, April 23rd, 8PM - details at
www.warrensirota.com/sandbox
> -----Original Message-----
> From: loop.pool [mailto:looppool@cruzio.com]
> Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2006 5:41 AM
> To: LOOPERS DELIGHT (posting)
> Subject: 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.
>