'stretchy' loops (was An Oxymoron Replies)

[Steve Lawson <steve@steve-lawson.co.uk>]

>>>Steve Lawson really turned me onto the idea of playing really long loops
that 'hint' at metricity and then memorizing the loops until one can play
against them.      Since getting turned on to this cool concept (I think he
played one loop for 17 hours while he
did e-mail and farted around his house until he had every 'event' of the
loop memorized)  I have been experimenting with the whole
idea of stretching time within a fixed loop length.<<<

I've been doing this again recently with Lafosse-ised glitch fest loops,
playing random noisy messy loops, dropping bits in and out with the insert
function on my EDP, and then listening to it till I can properly 
'harmonise'
it (I use the concept of harmony in the loosest sense, but they lines are
rhythmically consonant...)

I was rather lucky that  as soon as I started playing solo the concept of
stretching time within loops seemed to me to yet another low maintainance
way of letting looped music 'breath' and of taking away that aspect of 
thing
being 'wrong' by not having an absolute metric measurement of timing -
instead, having a relative sense of 'space' and phrasing between the notes
and the different sections within the loop... Interestingly enough, the 
tune
of mine that I guess delved deepest into this is a tune called 'No More Us
And Them', the title of which came about after a conversation with Rick
about the Dalai Lama... :o) What goes around comes around.

One of the other spin offs of working on rhythm from a 'control and
awareness' point of view rather than having metronomic time as your 
absolute
reference is that when playing Hip-hop/UK Garage/Drum 'n' Bass and Latin
rhythms where the beats are displaced. Two of the three sessions I've had
this week have required a non-metronomic reading of rhythm, the first was a
hip-hop remix track, and the second a whole slew of UK Garage/R 'n' B type
grooves...

...and I still can't work out what Pino is doing on D'Angelo's Voodoo
album!!! 

big love 

Steve 
www.steve-lawson.co.uk (new CD with serious DL4 loopage available to listen
and order here...)