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RE: Terry Rileys' mysterious French engineer tape loop innovator


As I said elsewhere, there is a fair chance he was part of French tape culture, which had been exploring the boundaries of what magnetic tape could do since the late 40s. The anecdotes don't say "he looked at me and said WTF" or similar. Hence the surmise. But the idea of tape jazz which is what looping is, that's TR's

Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 08:33:35 -0700
Subject: Re: Terry Rileys' mysterious French engineer tape loop innovator
From: billowhead@gmail.com
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com



On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 12:58 AM, Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com> wrote:
*Am I the only one who things it's perhaps a bit dodgy that Terry Riley hasn't researched who this **
**mystery technician was to help him do his tape loops? He was there. He'd certainly know how
to research the guy's name.
****
**It seems to me that he needs almost equal credit for inventing the technique and I can't help but wonder **
**if Riley doesn't ever want his identity known for ego because he wants sole credit for the creation
of this method of making music.
****
**Am I just being too cynical and judgemental about this bit of history mystery?**
**I'm honestly not sure if I am or not.**
**
**I'd love your opinions.**
**


Hi Rick,

I do think you're being a little bit over cynical here.  The person was an engineer who took Terry's idea and made it a reality.  As such we'll never really know how much that person understood about what they had just done and what was possible with it musically.  This doesn't mean that I'm putting the engineer down as much as I'm saying he may merely have been the technician that built the device TR had envisioned if that makes sense.

So in this case, while he may have invented the technology, he may have been completely clueless as to the technique ("what on earth are you going do with this now that I've made it?")

Could go either way really but I wouldn't necessarily consider it an ego thing at all.

Kevin

--
Till now you seriously considered yourself to be the body and to have a
form. That is the primal ignorance which is the root cause of all trouble.

- Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)