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Looper's Delight
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Its interesting that I did not read any doubt, not the slightest thought, that a non pleasant recording can harm a brand or festival or musicians name. I know they say that bad propaganda is better than none, but I imagine that someone can simply turn away and not look at a subject any more just because the first experience was not enjoyed/understood. This happens easily when picking sentences out of o speech or sound sample out of a trance experience. Let me start with an example of my own experience: I have mainly been playing with non musicians in a group of up to 25 improvising happy noise making people. It worked amazingly well! For those who did it regularly, it was like a spiritual shower, leaving us fresh and optimistic, with a different body feeling and so on, while others came the first time and in the end had a huge smile on the face, saying: "I did not know I was able to play music!" but: I never recorded that music. Many asked me to, but in the middle of the trance I sometimes put my daily ears back on, just to realize that we were mostly making noise, out of tune, boring... so I did not want to disappoint anyone about it and left the great impression we had when the REAL energy was flowing and bringing us together, which is the essence, much more important than the recording. I then learned from it, that with solo looping I went through a similar process. I liked my first recordings and the trance went on all day while designing the looping tools, I did not care/notice that my friends did not like the recordings so much. Doing it live, I sometimes managed to spread the trance over some public and they became fascinated. After years even over a bigger public. Then, finally, a few people went off with my recordings - also because I carefully edited them all, taking out wrong notes, boring parts, and more and more the "experimental" parts, too, observing that the fans did not like them (a big advantage of selling cassette tapes: you can visit a client and look where he stopped your music :-) But after all those years of free music of mine on the net and a CD on CD baby and what not, the word of mouth is still not spreading my music - because its not good enough! So: there is a very long way from serious trance producing art to something that people actually buy. we have been talking a lot about commercial music and how bad it is and how successful musicians have to bend... I see it different now: don't bend your personality, play your real trance thing, but so well that people can understand and follow it, even if they are not in a room with you! or accept that it only works live or only with a few friends or only by yourself BUT: enjoy that it DOES work, its an amazing gift to be able to produce your own trance !! (I am using "trance" in a more open way, following http://trance.org) back to the y2k video: it probably brings back the trance to those who were in it there at the venue. it may give some little sparks to people who understand about music but I suspect that the other 99% of the listeners have no chance to get into the trance and for them it sounds bad and crazy and looks like there was no public and the musicians did not shine... ...and to some, the video may confirm that they are not interested in LiveLooping. And thats why I think its worth the effort to be self critical and se whether I am totally exaggerating here. :-) [ careful: politeness does not allow anyone to say he does not like your music. even good friends and very honest people usually lie in this situation, so create your own criteria to judge whether what you do really helps the others. ]