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Looper's Delight
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This afternoon I saw a very interesting looping performance by William Leavitt and Joseph Hammer, at an American Composers Forum Salon at Rocco in Hollywood. Leavitt played cello into an analog tape loop system that was in turn performed by Hammer. "Performed" is the operative word, because Hammer was interacting directly with the tape itself and with the transport mechanism of a 1955-vintage Ampex tape deck. The loop was about 24 seconds long, running at 7.5 ips; the tape machine was full-track mono. Hammer's performance practice is truly marvelous, and very pure. By eschewing the newer generations of digital gadgetry and focusing intently on the physical nature of a vintage electromechanical recorder, he is able to perform an idiomatic music that produces sounds comparable in some ways to others' digital loopisms but which has an organic subtlety of its own. For example, Hammer "punches" in and out not by tapping a footswitch that controls the record mode, but by physically moving the tape in and out of the magnetic field of the record head. Similarly, he can create a kind of multitracking by twisting the tape so that one an edge is in the field. Vibrato is created by pressing rhythmically on the capstan shaft, and pitch changes are done by pressing on the drive belt. -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com http://www.cybmotion.com/aliaszone http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?autostart=rz