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Looper's Delight
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Wow, I just got from a very stimulating show, watching Thomas Dolby hit the stage for the first time in 15 years (except for a short tune up gig two weeks ago in SF). Not only was it a wonderful show in a wonderful venue (The Independent is now hands down, my favorite music venue in San Francisco after having seen Elbow and now Mr. Dolby there). What was very exciting is that every act on the bill used live looping techniques extensively. Genie (who had such a wonderfully creative show at Y2K5) opened up and was really well recieved with his mixture of psychedelic delay drenched guitar, human beatboxing and amazing manipulation of 2 DL4 Line 6s...................sometimes while multitasking with playing slide guitar........while beatboxing................while using his fingers on one DL4 in his lap and his toes with a 2nd one on the floor. The the excellent group LoopStation performed with, again, Line 6 DL4s and what looked from my vantage point to be a Boss gigadelay. The group is a cellist and a singer and they were really wonderful and amazingly full spectrum in their passionate pop songs. They were very, very well recieved by the crowd and I was lucky enough that their cellist gave me one of their CDs to listen to , which I can't wait to put on my hard drive right away. I asked them to come play Y2K6 and he seemed interested so cross your fingers. This was one of the more interesting live looping acts that I've seen and both the cellist and the vocalist used liberal usage of looping in the set. Dolby's set was just sublime replete with wonderful visuals. He had several cameras on his person and there were frequent images from one of them in black and white on the large screen. The cameras were fish eye lens and it was really cool to see him manipulate his gear on the big screen. He also had beautiful looped images accompanying his songs...........including some very powerful emotional imagery of submaries, torpedoes and the ocean during his song, "One of our Submarines". I'm not entirely sure of his setup except to say that I know it's well documented as of yesterday on his website and that he was basically looping inside of LOGIC on a Mac. He seemed to have a nice blend of actually playing parts on keyboards; singing; looping occasional keyboard parts (which I realize could have been real time midi looping or an internally run VST live looping pluging) and then some obviously sequenced parts. The canned-ness of it didn't bother me in the slightest because he really was multi-tasking and playing a lot. He was in fine voice and my only complaint was that I wish his show had been longer than the slightly less than an hour that it was. His equipment failed him twice during the show but he was very entertaining and called attention to the fact.............Every time it screwed up he promised the crowd that he would throw t-shirts to the audience and he did. At one point he dedicated a song to his wife (the reason he moved to L.A. apparently) and she just coincidentally happened to be standing right next to us. I was graciously taken to the show by Glenn Javaheri and his girlfriend who also gave me some video that he shot at the 1st Bass Looping Festival at the San Jose Museum of Art, years ago with Steve Lawson and Michael Manring. It was a wonderful concert and I felt so proud to be in this community and see how high profile some of what we do is getting. This is the first 'normal' show I"ve seen where everyone on the bill was live looping extensively.