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Kim Flint wrote: > It doesn't surprise me at all that david would consider what he's doing > with loops to be very different from Mr. Fripp is up to. To me they seem > completely different, and like they approach looping in very different > ways. > It also doesn't suprise me that he got a bit miffed about it. It's a >little > bit disrespectful, don't you think, to take two innovative (and quite > different) artists and lump them together like that. He's not the only >one > either. I've heard a few other well known looping innovators express (in > private, of course) some amount of annoyance that they keep finding their > name in the same sentence with Fripp's. I think we have a loop of approximately three months' length going with this thread here... I wholeheartedly agree that if you take a good look at the music David Torn and Robert Fripp, you'll see that there are profound differences in the way they use looping, and the contexts in which they use it. *However*, I also think you've got to realize that in the grand scheme of the whole spectrum of music in general (or even looping in particular), you can't be too terribly surprised if these sorts of associations get made, particularly by those who don't have the sort of knowledge or interest in this sort of thing that most of us do. For instance, Kim, in your post from earlier today about jungle, you mention both Photek and Boymerang as examples of "darkstep" drum and bass. Now, I personally can't think of any two jungle artists more dissimilar than those two! Photek's stuff is extremely minimalistic, detached, chilly, intellectual, abstract stuff (about his own production aesthetic, he once remarked, "The absence of feeling sort of becomes the feeling.") On the other hand, Boymerang's stuff is very lush, sweeping, grandoise stuff, full of thick synth pads, echoey ambient sounds, and the like. To my ears, Photek's stuff sounds like a black and white experimental art film shot on a soundstage, and Boymerang sounds like a technicolor widescreen epic filmed on location. And I wouldn't put either of them into "darkstep" as quickly as I would others (though I'm certainly no expert on the genre). But at the same time, they apparently get lumped together, erroneously or otherwise, under a similar genre. (And I'm not saying you're wrong in this, either; jungle has so many different genre names and alleged deliniations that not even its own practitioners can agree on exactly what means what). And I think the same sort of thing can expain lumping people like DT and RF together -- they're both guitarists, they both play somewhere in the progressive rock/fusion/ambient quadrant (for lack of a better term), they both do solo guitar loop concerts, they've both served as sidemen to David Sylvian... hell, they even share the same rhythm section some of the time! So while I completely agree that there are very profound distinctions to be made between those two, I also think that there are legitimate reasons they're associated with one another. Overly simplistic reasons, to be sure, but not inexcusable ones. As for why Fripp always gets held up as an icon of looping, I've delved into that in much detail in the past. But to make the point in a different way (and maybe to get a different sort of thread going), might I suggest that we try and list as many different real-time loopists as we can? And when I say real-time, I'm referring to the sort of instantaneous, sample or delay-based looping of a source sound that tends to be the common link between most of us on the list. And part of the idea of this is to single out people who have a particularly strong image in the public or general consciousness for doing this sort of thing. Here's my beginning (in roughly chronological order): -- Terry Riley -- Brian Eno -- Robert Fripp -- David Torn -- Paul Dresher -- Bill Frissel -- Michael Brook Any others? Now, of the above artists, how many have made a consistent and frequent habit of doing their thing in front of audiences? How many of them have taken their looping and put it out in front of people in a way that really keys them in to what's going on? My point here is that if you want to eliminate misconceptions about looping (or anything else, for that matter), you've got to get a sense of why these misconceptions exist in the first place. Fripp isn't the be-all and end-all of looping, nor does he ever profess to be, so far as I'm aware. (And just for the record, he's not my favorite of the lot above, either.) But if you wonder why he gets pegged with the lion's share of the attention, look at who else has done as much intrinsically loop-based live performance as he has, for as long as he has. You might find it to beæa short list indeed. --Andre http://home.earthlink.net/~altruist Or worse, that fripp's is the only > name mentioned in a reference to looping. I don't think it's a disrespect > of fripp at all, more like annoyance that people don't seem to be really > listening to what they've done with looping, or that credit isn't being > given to the people who were doing this long before Fripp or who were >much > more innovative in their use of loops than Fripp has been. Fripp >certainly > popularized this approach for some people, but maybe it's time to give >more > credit out where it's due? > > kim "stirring shit up again" flint > > ______________________________________________________________________ > Kim Flint | Looper's Delight > kflint@annihilist.com | http://www.annihilist.com/loop/loop.html > http://www.annihilist.com/ | Loopers-Delight-request@annihilist.com