Re: Repetitive Miniatures

[Daryl Shawn <highhorse@mhorse.com>]

My pleasure...I once bought a box of 100 30-second loop cassettes 
(answering machine tapes) off Ebay for one red cent. Soon I realized 
that for the kind of looping I do in regular playing, I like shorter 
homemade straight loop tapes of about nine seconds, which can also be 
flipped over for reverse effects (the answering machine tapes are a 
Mobius strip that can only be played in one direction). In fooling 
around with a 30-second tape, I built up a loop, and at some point I 
felt like it was "finished", a complete piece of music to which nothing 
else really needed to be added. I let the sucker loop in the background 
for a good hour or so and really enjoyed how, even in hearing exactly 
the same thing over and over with no long-term development, my 
appreciation of it would change and I'd notice different things.

So I'm going through these tapes - occasionally cutting them up or 
making different kinds of loops out of them - making these wholly static 
pieces. I listen to them all the time, myself, always just letting them 
percolate one at a time for a good while. It's a different kind of 
listening experience, and certainly an interesting creation experience 
too, as the nature of tape looping precludes the possibility of having a 
metronomic beat. Building the loop is pleasingly unpredictable.

Daryl Shawn
www.swanwelder.com
www.chinapaintingmusic.com

> I'm intrigued.  Can you share the orig. thread?  More about repetitive
> miniatures and your ideas?
> -Qua
>