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Best Looping Memories (was ' where's the delight...?')



these are my best looping memories..........please forgive me for changing
the thread name but I was thinking of newbies
searching the archives and thought this title might be easier to search.


> > 1) Does everyone remember their first time? -- looping that is?  What's
> > changed for you since then?

I remember seeing Jaco Pastorius with Weather Report use a short digital
delay loop of some
harmonics that he had played and then soloed over it amazingly as the band
left the stage.

I remember thinking,   'Wow, the whole musical world is about to change'.
It was several years
later before I bought my first Lexicon JamPerson although I predated that
with one performance
with old tube tape echoplexes that all three of us used to create long
unsynchonized loops
back in 1982.


> > 2) Do you have a special memory when everything seemed to click in a
looping
> > performance?  Could you pinpoint what seemed to be going on at the 
>time?

I remember playing at the 1st Big Sur Looping Festival under the amazing
canopy of redwood trees at the
Henry Miller Gallery in Big Sur.    I had just purchased a strange and
wonderful one string Vietnamese
zither the day before called a BAU.    I played this instrument with a 
slide
and the instruments own whammy bar
and then played an invented instrument I made called the Glass Ghatam and I
remember looking up at the redwoods
playing this strange, exotic and very, very simple looping music and
thinking, "It's a good day to die.................I've done
every wonderful thing I ever had hoped to do and now I'm doing things that 
I
hadn't even dreamt of doing two days before".
I felt really blessed that I had discovered the world of live looping.

Another galvanizing moment was when I saw Andre LaFosse use an old Roland
drum machine to retriggered his glitchy
loops that he had quantize replaced on his EDP at the Y2K2 Live Looping
Festival last summer.......................
the piece started very jagged and abstract and intellectual
and when suddenly all the little segments had been replaced there was an
amazing and very strange funk groove that
appeared magically.  It took everything in my power not to leap on stage 
and
start beatboxing wildly.  Only my respect
for Dre and the knowledge that it would probably have non-plussed him for 
me
to do such a narcissistic thing kept me back
but I remember, literally, having to sit on my hands to keep from jumping
up.
A truly amazing moment in my life............................then I knew I
had to finally get an EDP!!!!   LOL!!!!

> > 3) What was the last bit of music you did that just made you giggle 
>with
> > happiness that it had happened?

I was at the end of this summer's European/Brit Isles looping tour playing
with amazing group of talented and innovative Italian loopers from Firenze
(Florence).    It was in the middle of a beautiful ampitheatre outside a
modern art museum in the suburbs
of Florence (Prato) and the day had been incredibly hot.

I decided to play my last piece on the melodica (which had become my
favorite instrument of the tour).   I was just really in the zone:
and the most melancholy piece started coming out of me and I realized that 
I
was finally writing/improvising the piece that I needed to write to honor 
my
dear mothers' passing this summer.

It made me giggle with happiness and almost break into
tears............................all in the same song and I just knew that
my Mom
was really, really happy for me somewhere.

It came out so wonderfully (the whole concert) that I"m thinking of 
possibly
releasing a four to six song EP of my tour shows this coming fall.   I just
released a live CD this past year but the music I was playing was so
different and my headspace was in such a
different place.  If I do release it, I'll include all four tunes from the
Firenze show.....................just in the zone, as they say.

******************************************************

cool thread,  thanks for the suggestion.   It brought up a lot of good
memories for me.

Rick Walker
www.looppool.info