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Prompted by a recent article in the New York Times Magazine,
I’ve returned to the Looper’s Delight fold so that I can offer a
comment and an opportunity. Let me say up front that I am a student of music but no
musician. I am however a producer of musical programming at WHUS Radio.
My current production is “Moebius Trips,’ a show exploring solo live
looping as a musical genre. Inevitably my resources are restricted to
recordings or to live on-air performances. In his New York Times essay (May
18, 2008) John Wray discusses ‘The Return of The One-Man-Band.’
To me the singular mark of the one-man-band always has been that of a solo performer
creating all sounds in real time. That said I will concede that the magic
of live looping by a solo artist in performance is an acceptable
approximation. I have not witnessed a live performance by any of the
artists interviewed for Wray’s Magazine article. I have relied
instead on online recordings and on You Tube videos (many of them unacceptable
visually and sometimes aurally) of the artists in performance. From the
information available to me I have to say that the musicians chosen by Wray do
not fully merit the tag ‘one man band.’ Among Wray’s examples, Owen Pallett comes closest to
my perception of a live-looping one-man-band. Certainly his stage performances
do qualify - but his recordings do not. The latest CD, “He Poos
Clouds,” from Pallett’s so-called Final Fantasy solo project,
features Pallett and no fewer than seventeen other musicians and vocalists!
It is worth noting that Pallett is a multi-instrumentalist, as well as a
vocalist, but the violin appears to be his preferred solo performance
instrument. The artist Annie Clark, aka As for Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear), Wray’s third
exemplar of the modern one-man-band, his live shows are mere Karaoke. His
only innovation seems to be that he pre-records his own music and takes that
material on the road for his sing-along. As noted, my resources for broadcasting rely heavily on CDs
from live looping artists. I have been dismayed that so many of these recordings
do not represent live stage performances. In a finished studio recording
the cumulated sounds of a solo performance might be heard but the creation of
those sounds is often masked by being pre-recorded as a bed for the
instrumental or vocal. To my mind that makes the CD unrepresentative of
the solo stage performance. My own excitement about live looping comes from the progressive
building and layering of sound in which the on-stage soloist engages. I
view that process of creation, be it the incorporation of varied sounds from
many instruments or from just a single instrument, as an integral part of the
performance. Not being able to detect that building process in a studio
recording is nothing short of bait and switch. It surely works the
other way too. Someone who purchased a Final Fantasy CD might feel duped on
witnessing a live performance by Owen Pallett; no huge orchestra nor massive
chorus but just a guy with a fiddle, a weak voice, and some looping gear.
I suspect that many WHUS listeners would be unhappy if I played a recording
which misrepresents what they could expect to hear at a concert. I would appreciate comments on my observations. I
would also appreciate receiving finished recordings which truly reflect live
looping solo performances. Send any promotional materials to me at: Joe Cavanagh Producer WHUS Radio Thanks and best wishes to all. E-mail message checked by Spyware Doctor (5.5.1.322) Database version: 5.10000e http://www.pctools.com/spyware-doctor/ |