Re: Performing solo loop improvisations

["Pedro Felix" <PedroFelix@worldnet.att.net>]

>For those of you who perform solo improv gigs, just you and a mountain (or
>molehill) of electronics: how do you go about creating a composition in
>real time?  It's great to sit in the basement and endlessly tweak those
>loops, but you can't get away with that in front of an audience.  Or can
>you?  Please expound on your technical, philosophical, etc. approaches to
>this situation.
>Scott Martin

My audiences have thus far been quite appreciative of my tweaking,....I
tried (at least at the outset of performing loop based music) to construct 
a
nice 20-30 minutes of looping on one of my loopers and taking my risks with
my other two looping devices. That worked well for a while, but felt a bit
safe. Of course after once encountering an EDP that read OO mid-performance
I quickly realized that I can't count on eveything that I thought might 
work
at home to work on the gig. So now I tweak and tweak and turn knobs and
occasinally give total silence (quite righteous as an effect, almost forgot
about it!). I find that there is no substitute to knowing your gear well, 
so
I try my best to put myself through my paces beforehand and let myself 
loose
at the gig.
I've mainly played for mixed audiences (poets, performance artists,
musicians and patrons),...seems that the poets like that I use a hand held
recorder with my poems, the performace artis like that i'm dancing on all
those foot switches, the musicians are usually a bit dumbfounded-which I
take as a compliment,....I get quite a bit of "man, that's a lot of gear"
before the gig and a lot of "whoa, you really use all those things, huh?"
after the smoke clears. So something tells me i'm on the right road.
PedrOOrdeP