Support |
Andre wrote: "For instance, someone who really loves ambient music hears me, billed as playing "live looping," and assumes they don't like "live looping" because it's all glitchy and aggressive and angular. Then they never get to hear your own very beautiful and ambient music. Or the other way around (and an all too common scenario): an IDM fan hears a Robert Fripp or Brian Eno album, and assumes that all looping is ambient, so when I come through town and they hear I'm a looping guitarist, they never bother to check me out because "they don't dig ambient." You have just provided a wonderful example of why I love being all inclusive in the looping festivals that I have produced, played in and promoted. At such a festival, an audience can potentially see the truly wonderful diversity that exists between you and Matthias............Me and Tom Heasley............ John Whooley and AmyX Neuburg. It's an impressive amount of aesthetic diversity. I'm even with you, that I don't always like everything that is put on at those shows but I do like that people felt supported to progress in their art and that they had and active goal that helped them to proceed, actively, with it. You know, Bill Graham in his formative years of producing shows in San Francisco specifically booked the Duke Ellington orchestra with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Gordon LIghtfoot and Canned Heat (I saw that show on my 16th birthday......lol). He did it purposefully because he feared that the emerging hippy movement would become to insular and uninformed. It was, frankly, one of the really wonderful things about the early Freak days in Northern California. FM radio had you listing to Odetta followed by the Jefferson Airplane followed by Ravi Shankar followed by Cream, in my estimation. It promoted a level of artistic and cultural diversity that has really been lacking in my estimation in American culture of the last decade or so. We can only do little tiny and relatively unambitous things to combat that narrowing of aesthetics, but I think it is a cool thing to do. I'm all in support of you or Kim or whoever if you don't agree. I've loved seeing the great purple-pony tailed one at each of the shows that I've seen him at and we agree about very little, philosophically, I think. Even though I've bonded with him and Mark Sottilaro as the only other wierd, artivficially dyed hair guys at these shows..............LOL Whether or no, we all (you, Kim Flint, Matthias Grob, Stuart Wyatt, Steve Lawson, and all the others who have been part of these recent discussions) have the ability to be accepting of each other. If we are truly strong in what we believe, we know that the way another person feels doesn't need to have much impact on us (unless they are trying to actively steal or physically harm us). I don't think anyone here wants to steal or harm each other. Trying in a self conciously naive and hippified way to bring peace back to our list, Rick