Sending again as the last one had the wrong title so may be missed
Hi all
This is a longish post because I'm posting text from sources at the end.
The
"Fifth Business" of live looping is the anonymous French technician
from Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française who implemented Riley's desire
for an Echoplex with a long delay as a pair of twinned machines with an
cabled feedback.
Riley's genius was in conceiving of the utility
of the long duration regenerative loop (he had worked with prerecorded
long loops in Mescalin Mix), and equally importanly, on its realisation,
he immediately knew what could be done with it in terms of performance -
he shifted from the idea of a cut-up version of Chet Baker's jazz to
what we now know to be live-looping. That's what great artists do. Look
what Matisse did with the idea of cutouts. And there's a certain wow
emotion I think everyone here remembers getting the first time of
becoming aware of the possibilities of Riley's "phantom band" in their
own praxis.
But the anonymous French technician, he keeps on
returning to my mind, about his identity - he wasn't surprised by the
request (he hadn't heard of the Echoplex) but thought about it and
presented a solution.
We know that for more than a decade
previously the GRM under Schaeffer had been experimenting with such
things as the Morphophone for experimenting with delays, and the amazing
tempophon with spinning heads that could do real time pitch shifting
with heads that rotated in the same or opposite direction of the tape to
make the apparent speed of the head at tape slower or faster for the
same moment in time. Now if this anonymous engineer worked in Paris for
ORTF, then he will certainly have known of it, and may have even worked
there. Given the number of experimental art musicians with a day job, he
may have even been a musique concrete practitioner himself.
I've
not been able to figure out who he was, with all the online material
available. I made a ridiculously long short list by getting the name of
every French sound engineer associated with ORTF around then (I was
going to try to write to them), but that wasn't much help as with the
number of possible identifiable addresses for each name the line of
research kind of petred out.
So that's about it really. Who is that guy? Look at the extracts under the sig.
If
anyone is interested in New York, Ken Dewey's archives for the period
are available to look in. It includes his accounts and correspondence,
so the name of the engineer might be in there
http://archives.nypl.org/controlaccess/160584?term=Riley,%20Terry,%201935-Alternatively anyone in Paris could inquire if employment or contractual records at ORTF go back that far.
If
there's anyone in the looping community looking for a research project
for an honours or masters project in musicology it might be an
intereting lead
Of course someone may know who it is, but the name is nowhere on the
internet and I am tired of seeing this blacksmith to the gods go without
a name.
ig
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Texts
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From SF Tape Music Center by Berstein
Riley:
Ken got me into a small recording studio at the Sarah Bernhardt Theater
in Paris. We took Chet Baker and his hand in. and I gave him some ideas
about what to record. Mainly. I wanted him to play, a modal piece, and
they picked So What? by Miles Davis. I told them to play the solos
separately, without the whole hand. So that I could cut it up and put it
back together later. And so this was the first project I’d done in two
years. Up until that point I had not been in a studio. I had not had any
equipment, nothing. So it was very exciting for me to finally hit
something that I could put my teeth into and feel real exhilarated about
working on.
Bernstein: Was the studio part of the French National Radio?
Riley:
Yes, it was the French radio, but they had studios in different places.
It just happened to he the Sarah Bernhardt studio where we did the
recording and used their studios for mixing.
Bernstein: And they- showed you a way to do tape delay?
Riley:
Yes, the recording engineer . . . it was funny because I had Mescalin
Mix and the Echoplex loop in my mind. I think I first asked the
engineer, “Do you have an Echoplex?" and he said. "No.” So I said, “Well
I want this kind of sound: RRRRRRRRrrrrrRRRRRR that’s got a long loop,
and do you know how you can do that?" and he said, “Oh, yes!" He
stretched the tape between two tape recorders and voili! and I thought,
oh, this is incredible, exactly what I want.
Bernstein: I really like the way you use tape delay in The Gift.
Riley:
I used some small tape loops, of course, and John Graham's voice. It
was interesting because I was working with an engineer who was a very
straight guy in a white jacket, you know [laughs] who looks like he’s
wearing a lab coat. I had to tell him what I was trying to do without
having my hands on the machine, which is a little bit frustrating. But
it was so wonderful to have really high quality, even though in those
days I guess it was mono, hut just to have these really high-quality
machines to work with, where you really could hear what you were
recording.
Notes to the Gift by Riley
The accumulation
technique hadn’t been invented yet and it got invented during this
session. I was asking the engineer, describing to him the kind of sound I
had worked with in Mescalin Mix [an earlier tape composition]. I wanted
this kind of long, repeated loop and I said “can you create something
like that?” He got it by stringing the tape between two tape recorders
and feeding the signal from the second machine back to the first to
recycle along with the new incoming signals. By varying the intensity of
the feedback you could form the sound either into a single image
without delay or increase the intensity until it became a dense chaotic
kind of sound . . . The engineer was the first to create this technique
that I know of. This began my obsession with time-lag accumulation
feed-back.
From Terry Riley's In C by Robert Carl
"Ken
rented an old chateau in the Valdoinois, south of Paris. All the actors
and everybody lived in it while the show was being put together. There
was a big barn connected to the chateau. We rehearsed in the bam I'd
come to the chateau at night and bring back the tapes I’d been working
on. We'd listen to them, and the actors would try to get a sense of how
to relate to the music. Occasionally Chet and the band would come out to
the chateau and we'd have a full rehearsal with everybody. Ken would
watch the whole thing and would try to get the actors to interact more
with the musicians, and try to get the musicians to be more involved
with the action.”
Riley decided to use his looping procedure as
the basic compositional technique, returning to electronic media for the
first time in a couple of years. [...] Dewey had brought in a French
technician from the National Radio (ORTF) to aid with the final mix,
Riley describes what happened next: “I described the effect [of echoing
similar to Mesealtn Mix] to the French engineer, a very straight guy in a
white coat, who fooled around and ended up hooking two tape recorders
together. Boy! When I heard that sound it was just what I wanted What
you do is connect two tape recorders. The first one is playing back, the
second recording, the tape stretched across the heads of both. As this
machine records, it feeds back to the other machine, which plays back
what it’s added. It keeps building up... ”54 What Riley had discovered
was a setup he would use for the next decade in solo performance, one of
the first major instances of interactive real-time electronic music. He
called it the “time-lag accumulator.” It allowed looping, but now with
the precise time interval between the initial sound and its echo,
defined by the length of tape separating the playback from record heads.
It also allowed for controlled layering of sounds, critically in real
time. By making the decision to also record the performers individually,
Riley created a rich inventory of materials that he could then combine
and elaborate into an entirely new counterpoint.