Re: Andre EDP Loops

[Hedewa7@aol.com]

>At 09:11 PM 9/13/2002, Louie Angulo wrote:

>>Thanks Andre you are really doing some wonderful
>>futuristic stuff there!

kim said:
>I agree!
me, too --- very much so.

then, someone said:
>>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...

to which kim responded:
>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.
right.
but: importantly, to me:
if storage and *recall* were implemented in an edp which could take 
advantage 
of these features as *creative* opportunities --- and not merely as 
archivery, as in the paper i'd writ for the now-deceased electrix-repeater 
development team --- i believe you'd find some rather interesting ways to 
employ 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".
..... but in ther manipulation thereof, yeah:
i gotcha.
see above.
storage and recall as FURTHER manipulation-capability.

>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.
..... and q-bert, spooky, et al are manipulating pre-recorded materials;
i just want those add'l materials to be ones that i made myself 
earlier-in-the-same performance, yesterday, last week, etc..... but from a 
loopV flying-edit perpective.
is that a 'wrong' approach, somehow?

>Working
>with the repetitive elements, playing against them, changing them, keeping
>some elements repeating while fading or destroying others.
i submit that there's still something further that might be done w/*fast* 
storage and recall.

>So what is the "loop" then? If you are going to save something that is
>a 
>constant evolution, what do you save? 
in my small corner of the world, there are some loops that are 'done', eg, 
'finished' elements that might be used in a 'compositional' process, and 
then 
there's the looping that is completely about the process.....
the integration of (at least these two) systems is what intrigues me, as a 
musician.

>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?
personally, i do both things, and enjoy that.
 
>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...
me, i like that, too, but --- as a system --- it's not the be-all and 
end-all, for me, as no system (beyond my own physical and conceptual 
limitations) seems to be.....

>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....
totally understood.....

<snip>

>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.
understood.
it may be possible to incorporate live playing w/the 
loop-based-composition 
approach, though:
i'm know that i'm still trying to do that, w/my own music.

>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. 
i thought that was worth seeing in-print, again.

>play live!
okay! i will, if you will!
*-)
best,
dt / splattercell