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Looper's Delight
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On the issue of live performance of looped music: I saw a concert lately that, while not exactly loop music in the Torn/Fripp/etc sense, used a lot of loops, sequences, pre-recorded music, mixed with live musicians. The bands were Loop Guru (great name, multi-lingual pun), DJ Spooky and Meat Beat Manifesto. There were 3 very different approaches to live performance in an electronic setting, with very divergent results. Loop Guru had 5 people on stage, 3 percussionists, a bassist/guitarist, and a female vocalist. Their approach seemed to be that the musicians provided the visual element, while most of the sound was sequenced (or possibly playing from DAT, I really couldn't tell). The bassist played very simple lines, while executing every tired guitar as penis substitute arena-rock stage move. The vocalist danced more than she sang. The percussionists jumped around a lot. Bluntly, they sucked, even though the music was kind of interesting. It just seemed that the musicans sound was not particularly integral to the overall sound, and that they were just there for show. DJ Spooky, as I mentioned in an earlier post, was fully transcendental. With 2 turntables and some effects, he created an amazing live collage that was closer to a jazz improvisation than dance music. One thing that made his performance so amazing was that even though he was using pre-recorded materials, the entire structure and ordering (and decosnstruction) of the materials was totally dynamic. Meat Beat Manifesto had a live drummer, a keyboardist and a guitarist on stage, in addition to Jack Dangers, who sings and pretty much plays everything on their records. They did a good job of balancing the sequenced material with the live material. It was clear that Dangers was doing live mixing from the stage, and there was a loose and dynamic quality to the performance that I appreciated. As far as my own experiences, I have played totally improvised music for the last few years, in a couple of contexts. One is a power trio called Minus, in which I play bass and occaisional live electronics. The guitarist and I both use JamMans (JamMen? JamMani?), but looping is just one of many techniques we use. We're very intense, at best we approach a certain shamanic vibe, and I don't particularly worry about visuals because the music requires such total concentration. I think we're not uninteresting visually, because there's is a pretty direct correlation between what the audience sees and hears, like when I'm bowing the bass with a serrated-knife, and the audience connects the ugly arhythmic glob of noise with that. The other context in which I perform is a pretty quiet, though I would not call it ambient, live electro/acoustic group sometimes called Sleep Deprivation. It ranges from a duet to a quartet with different musicians, often a percussionist or acoustic/electric guitarist. I play computer-controlled synths, samplers and effects, using real-time control software I've written in MAX, no sequencing or tapes, with a lot of live looping and sampling of the other musicians. While this stuff is sonically interesting,I've been told by audience members that it's hard to understand just what I'm doing. I'd rather that the listener's just concentrated on the sound, but since the music is difficult and often unfamiliar to them, some people want a visual component to help them "get" it. I haven't really figured out how to do this, though Louis Hyams recent message about visualizing computer information has some interesting possibilities. ________________________________________________________ Dave Trenkel, NEW EMAIL ADDRESS: improv@peak.org self promotional web-site: http://www.peak.org/~improv/ "A squid eating dough in a polyethelene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?" -Captain Beefheart ________________________________________________________