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At 09:11 PM 9/13/2002, Louie Angulo wrote: >Thanks Andre you are really doing some wonderful >futuristic stuff there! I agree! >That would be the EDP ultimate dream; stereo,loop >storing wav. tranferable,digital in and out,phono in >and perhaps a cool 2 tone deep water blue green color? >maybe someday... The "storing" part and the "transferable" part always seem like nice-to-have features. It would be a nice little check box to have there on the EDP brochure - You can save your loops and easily transfer them to PC! And yet, I increasingly don't find these features as things I have much need for. I'm not even sure how I would use them. Listen to what Andre does, or what Matthias does, or what a lot of people do now with looping, and the real music is not in some singular "loop". These guys are constantly manipulating the loops, creating, evolving, deconstructing them, playing against them. Doing it live! The music is more about the process of interacting with the loops in various ways. Working with the repetitive elements, playing against them, changing them, keeping some elements repeating while fading or destroying others. So what is the "loop" then? If you are going to save something that is a constant evolution, what do you save? If you are going to transfer it to the PC, do you transfer the thing left repeating at the end, or do you record the whole process? I think it's the latter. You do what Andre does, you plug a recording device in, press Record at the beginning, and Stop an hour later... The lack of a saving capability in the EDP is a limitation, but at the same time I found it oddly liberating after a while. I used to hate it when I had created a really cool loop and then had to destroy it later. It seems really negative at first. But after a while this create-and-destroy process caused me to realize that if I created something good once I could create something good again. A feeling of confidence grew out of that - I could rely on myself rather than a hard disk. From an improvising standpoint it was a great learning experience. It's certainly not a concept you can easily market, yet I'm glad to have had it.... Lately I've been re-listening to a lot of old 90's industrial music that I loved back in it's time. Even filling out my collections of various bands to get all the stuff I missed back when I couldn't afford more than the occasional cd. Godflesh, Meat Beat Manifesto, Puppy, Ministry, FLA, etc. It is really interesting to hear some of these bands develop over time to their greatest moments. Much of what makes industrial music work is the thudding aggressive repetition of the loops. But oftentimes that's where it failed too. Some of it just goes nowhere with that. For example today I listened to various Meat Beat albums. Early MBM just seems too repetitive and one-dimensional compared to their later albums. It has some moments, but overall it feels restricted by the sameness of the repetition. Whereas later albums really developed an ability to work with the repetitive elements more. Some things change while others don't, some elements mutate over time, some elements drop out and come back later. There's more song structure, and more depth. Did Jack just get better? or have better tools available? I don't know. Going from Storm the Studio to Satyricon to Actual Sounds and Voices it was really obvious, the music gets much more interesting for me. Yet even so, there is still a chunky feeling. "Ok, let's turn this chunk on!" "Now mute this chunk and sing over it". "Now let's fade in this other chunk and play a short wave radio sample!" It feels very constructed. Don't get me wrong, it's brilliant, I can listen to it all day (and I did....) but they never quite get the in-the-moment live feeling, and sometimes I really miss the energy of that. And maybe that's the point of where I'm going with this. I enjoy listening to people like Andre, (or so many others here) because there's something alive about it. It's loops and repetition that I always like, but it's spontaneous and live and on the edge at the same time. Not the stiffly constructed loop music of the 90's. It never feels like, "well I recorded this loop 9 months ago, and I have to use it somewhere, so how about here!" boooorrrring. You can only do so much with an amen break, a tb-303, an old metal guitar loop, and samples from blade runner and a porno, and it was already done better than you're going to do it anyway. I think it's time to move on from that. play live! kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@loopers-delight.com | http://www.loopers-delight.com