Re: New to the list and (almost) new to looping.

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Sjaak <tcplugin@scarlet.be> wrote:
>> Anders Bergdahl wrote:
>> It just seems like most players here come from more Jazz/progressive
> (what ever that means)
>> musical background than I do. Whats great about looping music is that
> it defies genre.

I can't see the phenomenon you mention, "looping music". To me the
looper is just another instrument and the choice of staying with or
crossing between musical genres is rather up to the individual IMHO.
However, we all use different sound source instruments to feed our
loopers audio, and that may certainly cause a wider genre spread than
what you may found on a trumpet player mailing list - just to pick an
example.

And the musical taste is wide on this list; for example, there are
lots of guitar players on the list that like the music of Robert
Fripp, but I can't say I'm a very big fan of that approach (well, I
like the theory of it but not always the way it sounds). Talking
guitar sound and playing I appreciate more the way of playing and
forming the tone that comes from the early Delta Blues players,
refined by Jimi Hendrix into an amplified tone (must mention Johnny
Winter as well). But except for Hendrix and some early Jeff Beck stuff
I tend to not like the music very much in which this guitar expression
usually comes out. When I first learned to play guitar I couldn't
understand why all those bands had to put in vocals and organize the
music into blocks as "verse", "chorus" etc. As a teenager I made me
listening reel-2-reel tapes where I only recorded intro, solo, outro
and weird breaks of the songs (crazy, yes I know ;-)  I especially
loved to hear the drummer and bass player wander off into different
directions during a guitar solo. I was a sort of multi-task lister and
had problems finding music that calls for that lisitening. So I would
say "musical frustration" is the background I'm coming from. It was
great to discover "jazz" because in that "genre" you could find music
played with no restricting block organizing - only players making
noise that relates to other players and I loved the sincere attitude
in letting the listener experience how the music is being born -
rather than being performed as a kompsition. "Ku-lu-se-mama" with
Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders especially comes to mind here. It was
also nice to discover Terje Rypdal back in the late seventies because
he used an electrified guitar tone to play a music that did not rely
to a defined genre (wonder why the record shops filed it under "jazz".
Maybe because the drummer use a lot of ride?).

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com