1952 Live looping recording Re: 50th anniversary of realtime looping? (BBC Radiophonic Workshop)

[Art Simon <simart@gmail.com>]

I think it's little more than a footnote, but I found a recording of a live performance at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1952 that clearly uses live looping techniques.
It's the first live looping recording that I'm aware of.  The title is "Sonic
Contours" by Vladimir Ussachevsky. It was performed and broadcast live
and is basically piano played through a tape delay. Otto Luening also
participated in the concert, but "Sonic Contours" is only credited to
Ussachevsky. The length of the delay and amount of feedback varies
over the performance (maybe at the hand of Luening?). At times the
delay is very short producing a slap back echo effect, but at the 5
minute mark, the delay is lengthened and the there is sufficient
feedback that several layers of piano are heard on top of each other.

Amazon has it as an 99 cent mp3 download:
http://www.amazon.com/Sonic-Contours/dp/B000S4B8YK

Not my favorite piece of music by any means, but an interesting footnote in the history of live looping.

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Revfever <revfever@ubergadget.com> wrote:

As far as being widely heard and recognized by the public, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Daphne Oram, et al...) pioneered the use of tape loops back in the 1950's
and they may(?) have even preceded Les Paul. (and....?) Not sure how much they ever did that was "live" looping, a la 2 tape machines, if any at all, but it would
not be a surprise if this group of early geniuses had done at least some of that as well.

Also, Riley's 'Rainbow in Curved Air' utilized a lot of overdubbing, along with looping.

Cheers-
Rev.Fever
Portlandia
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On Aug 19, 2012, at 9:39 AM, Tyler wrote:

So July 9, we celebrate the 50th anniversary. And it's mostly about Terry Riley, right?
I think I'm going to order a copy of Rainbow in Curved Air then.
Tyler Z
On Sun, 19 Aug 2012 18:22:42 +0200, Michael Peters wrote:

Mati wrote,

certainly they glued tape to loops in the 50ies, so studio looping is older as
far as I understood, Les Paul brought ready tapes to stage and lovelooping
started with the two tape machine idea

"lovelooping" yes :)  it started with the two tape machines in 1963.  And yes,
as I wrote in that essay, of course loops (static) are much older but they are
something completely different - more like a pre-digital way to sample. Les
Paul was probably faking his "live" multitracking, there was a discussion about
this on LD:

http://www.loopers-delight.com/LDarchive/200211/msg00922.html

-Michael

--
Art Simon
simart@gmail.com