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Looper's Delight
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We had a thread a while back about shoegazing vs. eye contact with the audience. Well, at a recent performance I was completely oblivious to a couple of guys with a camcorder taping my set until afterwards when one of them approached me during that 'making sure to get all of my instruments, accessories and cables into the cases and get the hell off stage so the next act can get on' phase of a gig when you really can't chat all that much. He told me that he was a television producer and stuck a sheet of paper in front of me on which my signature would give him the rights to the footage in perpetuity. As it was for a local program (two stations in Boston and Cambridge), I signed it. THEN he went on to describe the program's slant: it was to be about how electronic music might be the death knell for players of traditional musical instruments, blah blah blah, the same tired old argument that greeted the invention of the fortepiano, the mellotron, the synthesizer, the sampler, etc.... This afternoon, a CD-R arrived in the mail containing an mpeg file of the program. With it was enclosed a note reading "This show is currently being shown on CCTV and BNN. [Channels 10 and 23 in the Boston area; the show is called "Our Town"] Enjoyed your work! You have to get it out of the 'church basement' and into the mainstream." About 18 minutes into the program, the commentator, Art Foley, seated in front of a well-stocked bar, delivers the following speech: "Let's get into something really controversial, and that's music. I had an opportunity recently to go over to the Zeitgeist Gallery and they had an exposition of 'electronic music' and they had all these boxes with electronic gear and they would 'loop' and 'resample' and do all kinds of tricks with a note that they would either strum on a guitar or play on a saxophone or whatever... We did a Big Band about six months ago, an interview with a Big Band and the opinion was expressed at the time that we may be seeing the end of traditional instruments... [Wistful, concerned expression...] So take a look at this, and don't close your mind to it and think in terms of if you could see something like this in, say, a cocktail lounge. This type of music does not have, you might say, an association with it, it's almost like people who juice their vegetables and fruit, turning it into juice, they eliminate the digestive process. As a result, the stuff dumps right into their bloodstream, and they say this is, of course, very beneficial. Again, this music does not have the normal association with it; as a result, it DUMPS RIGHT INTO YOUR MIND! [Big hand gestures] So it is... it's POWERFUL! And again, don't turn it off; give it a listen and see what you think. Is this gonna be THE FUTURE OF MUSIC?" (That's followed by ten minutes of me looping. The first few minutes is a bit embarrassing, but it gets better when the loopage kicks in, and plays right to the end through the show's credits.) Dumping pureed music right into your mind, -t- __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com