live looping

Comment

Comment by Bernie Sirelson on September 23, 2009 at 1:45am

I am so glad this group exists... My duo, Telescope, is all about live looping. One member, me, plays keyboards, and the other, Van Alpert, plays the looping machines (one Electrix Repeater and two Electro-Harmonix 2880's, along with a bank of "tuned" delays).

I've just uploaded several pieces, one of which, "Happy Hour" is one of our improvisations. (the other two are "through composed pieces) Please check it out. Feedback is most welcome.

Comment by looppool on December 29, 2008 at 2:50am

Yeah, I hear you man...............but I guess it's kind of like playing any instrument.............you have to get excited about each little thing as you learn it. I remember taking the erase heads of our three tube tape echoplexes back in '82 and leaving the long unsynchronized tape loops running during intermission as we left the stage...............we thought we had fucking invented the wheel, blissfully ignorant of the whole history of
Terry Riley and others who had way beat us to the punch.............but in a way, we HAD invented the wheel...............it's just we couldn't claim it historically.........do you see what I mean? I encourage newbies to come perform at the festival every year (including some people who've never even stepped foot on stage) precisely BECAUSE they have this feeling that what they are doing, as simple as it is, is great. I guess my point is that encouragement always seems to be more efficacious when learning stuff than discouragement which was the reason I made such a long winded reply to your comments. The dialectic is great, though and thanks for writing in. I'll get to your music as soon as I get over this last week of too many parties and too much work. And will you seriously consider coming to perform at Y2K9 if it's possible. It would be great to hear your shit live!

Comment by Steve Layton on December 28, 2008 at 11:42pm

I've heard these, Rick, and what you're talking about is just what I was praising in the new possibilities. The only reason I was venting that warning is just because there are still too many people out there who cop out for the simple way, and think it's some great thing still. What I'm getting at is the loop -- or whatever other bit of tech -- isn't something apart from your instrument. We need to treat it as an integral part of the the whole instrument. So that it doesn't just run in the background, but is a vital part of the players chops.

Comment by looppool on December 28, 2008 at 10:26pm

Hey Steve, I hear what you are saying.

At the same time however, and in defense of live looping, I need to ask you how much you have followed the growth of the international live looping community that has sprung from www.loopersdelight.com, the mecca of that scene, specifically in the last three years.

That world has just exploded with creativity and also with the radical increase in sophistication of both looping hardware devices and software programs, especially in the last three years as I said.

The annual looping festival that I put on every year, drew 55 artists from all styles and genres from 8 countries in 24 hours of continuous performance on two stages.

This year's festival was by far the most creative and sophisticated of the 8 annual festivals we've had.

Additionally, this festival that started in 2001 has now directly spawned or inspired 70 festivals in 20 countries in the past 5 years alone.
Loopers Delight is getting over a million hits a month as well.

So, with a radical increase in the number of people using this mode of expression; a radical increase in the number of looping hardware and software solutions (including in Mobius- software and the Looperlative-hardware the ability of the user community to innovate the software capabilities as a community which highly accelerates new techniques and modes of playing) there has been an attendant rise in both sophistication and creativity.

Have you checked out the music of Andre LaFosse, Bill Walker, David Torn, Steve Lawson, Jeff Kaiser, Andy Butler?

Each of the above has a distinctly different approach to looping and is at the top of their game currently. None of them is doing much with static loops.

Additionally, there are tremendous amounts of things you can do that you couldn't in the tape loop era , the early digital delay era or even the early
digital dedicated live looping era to create flow and to eliminate the stasis that you speak of as not liking. There is a really good thread at the current LoopersDelight daily digest on exactly that: how to eliminate the stasis and the cliches that the stasis could represent and there are some very creative solutions to this subject.

Additionally, and I reveal myself as a person who has still not exhausted
the musical possibilities of using non-feedback changing combinations of static loops in my own work, just the mere ability to have synchronized or unsynchronized loops (as in Mobius, Looperlative or the up and coming
software version of the Echoplex EDP) has allowed a multi-instrumentalist and found sound artist like myself to further mine the possibilities of sound sources outside of the conventional musical world.

I just did a show where I only used Dayglo Orange Plastic as a sound source.
I did an entire show by beating, scraping, banging, blowing and strumming
different objects not thought of as instruments.

Using five different frisbess (and putting objects inside of them occasionally, I" able to make a fascinating drumset that is created entirely by using 'terrace dynamics' through the use of static loops that are synchronized in lengths or multiples of lengths.

This 'drum set' doesn't sound like anything anyone has done before and the fact that I can do this very quickly, in real time in front of an audience who sees me recontextualize an object that nonone normally thinks of as a musical instrument means that I have the opportunity to widely expand the timbral frontiers of music (even if I use normally prosaic static loops).

Lastly, I have to say that a frequent spurn to creativity is being confronted by incredible limitations.

If a great and sensitive musicians with a highly developed and sophisticated aesthetic is confronted by a large gourd and asked to make music from it, interesting things are bound to happen.

How many times have we seen a guitarist, as an example, use their guitar in such a novel way that it reinvents the instrument for people?
Not every day, mind you.

I"m a very sophisticate drummer/hand,stick and finger percussionist who has made his living for 30 years, professionally in this mode but I am continually taking on instruments from other musical groups because it expands my aesthetic and increases my 'tool bag'.

Live looping has made it vastly easier to expand my timbral and instrument choise approach precisely BECAUSE I can clone myself with even a completely static approach.

I highly encourage you to check out the latest developments in this world if you haven't already, and I'd also love to officially invite you to come perform your own creative take on this use of technology for your own creativity.

It's in the 3rd weekend of October 2009 in Santa Cruz, California.
If you are interested, please write to me at looppool(at)cruzio(dot)com
and I guarantee you that I'll save a 30 minute performance space for you if you want to come meet a lot of these folks and play yourself.

with respect, Happy New Year to you,
yours, Rick Walker
www.y2kloopfest.com
www.youtube.com/DaygloOrangePlastic

Comment by Steve Layton on December 28, 2008 at 8:48pm

I've used my share of live-looping going way back. But after 35+ years of hearing stuff made this way, I have to say I get really turned off the when the looping is too obvious. The single fixed length slow-decay layering thing (the old "one tape / two deck" effect) needs a really creative player working hard to offset the regularity anymore, to make me prick up my ears. Especially now that we can fairly easily be using multiple loop instances of any length at once, and can bring them all in and out at will. Even in the darker, pre computer days, I tried to get more variety in how the looping worked. On my page here at NNM, #26 on the playlist, is a piece from 1989 called "Johnny Quest"; over the (hardware) sequenced sampler & synth stuff I did two passes with a Casio wind controller driving a Yamaha TX81Z. The "horn" lines are going into a small Boss digital delay box, but I am busy working all its controls while playing -- cutting it in and out to pick up and drop phrases, and varying the loop length and feedback constantly.

Comment by Johnny & Faith on December 28, 2008 at 7:06pm

. . . not to mention Stardust, Golden and Billion Year Old Carbon too!!

Comment by Johnny & Faith on December 28, 2008 at 7:05pm

We are Borg. lol . . . We are Colossus. We are Guardian. We are One :D

Comment by Andrew Violette on December 28, 2008 at 6:48pm

Our mind is a live loop. We are Borg-Violette!

Comment by Richard Lainhart on December 6, 2008 at 3:54pm

Hi! I use live looping a lot in performance, but these days usually as a way to build density in instrumental parts that then get processed further, rather than as end in itself. That is, I try to avoid the obvious periodicity inherent in looping by using very long loops (up to 60 seconds) and then further obscuring the periodicity by processing the looped sound with plugins or Kyma.

I've been working with live looping since 1973, in the days of the Time Lag Accumulator (two Revox tapes decks with tape run between them.) These days, I use a computer and Pluggo Long Stereo Delay for my live looping and processing.

Comment by paul bailey on December 5, 2008 at 8:28pm

i just started to figure out the sooperlooper (edp clone+). it's a standalone looper, and also works as a plugin. i'm still getting used to it. my main issue was getting the jack osx software to work with the sooperlooper and my digi 002. the documentation was hit and miss, but message boards were pretty helpful.