LIVE LOOPING my own personal history

["loop.pool" <looppool@cruzio.com>]

Since I have been one very strong advocate for the whole "Live Looping"
concept ,  I wanted to weigh in on this fascinating discussion
with an explanation of why I have personally fought for that particular
semantic concept and tried, really hard to promote it.

In order to explain this I just wanted to go on record about how I got
involved and why I started becoming enamored of this term, Live Looping
to describe what I and a few others were doing, only in our home town  (not
even knowing that there were others, like Miko B, just across our own  town
who were doing similar things until much later).

In our  beginnings with using looping gear live in front of a paying
audience, when my brother Bill, Gary Regina and I were first enamored of
using our brand new, 1993 circa Lexicon Jammans,  I was fascinated by the
concept of layering lots of (what were then very static) loops on top of
each other.

As a percussionist drummer and fledgling bassist/keyboardist/found sound
enthusiast)  I could make really interesting ambient or
rhythmic loops and build a rather sophisticated piece of music that grew do
to it's layered sophistication as opposed to the dominant
paradigm of the day:   sophistication through technical brilliance, mastery
of one's 'axe' or adherance to particular styles of music.  Personally, 
this
allowed me to give myself permission to start learning very modest motifs
and riffs on instruments that I had no business playing on stage in a
older paradigm live performance.     Just needing to know enough to record 
a
single loop, this radically widened my timbral and melodic and harmonic
palette.  This was very, very exciting for me (and scary to, I might add,
because I always ran the risk of the judgement of more accomplished
musicians).   For me,  this began a whole new phase of thinking about music
and was tremendously liberating for me.

It was all I wanted to do (much to the chagrin of a lot of more typical
local musicians who thought it was a shame that I was eschewing
my former great love of the drumset and ethnic multi-percussion) but I was
faced with a dilemma in my desire to play more gigs:

How could I publicize them?

The people coming to see what we were doing didn't know what they were
seeing or hearing.   They were enjoying the music a lot because we were 
able
to create pretty cool psychedelic ambiances and layered
percussion/bass/guitar/wind instrument loops to then play over the top of
but  I would find myself constantly explaining to people who would come up
and enquire about the gear we were using.

I've been a gear head all of my life and I have played hundreds of exotic
percussion instruments and electronic drums, but I had never had the kind 
of
response to my gear, specifically,  as I was having after these initial
shows...........I had already played professional for over 20  years in
public and I was bowled over by the audience response to what we were
attempting.

I also discovered that when we approached venues about doing such shows 
that
, despite the fact that we had been the leaders of some of the most
successful bands in the past 15 years in Santa Cruz, that we still had to
describe to bookers and publicistst and journalists and radio DJs what we
were doing and justify it's difference from what we had played before.  If
we didn't explain what we were doing and why it differentiated from what we
had done before, they just weren't interested and wouldn't publicize our
gigs.

I was faced with a dilemma, because I was completely enamored with the 
whole
concept of minimalistic repitition and loops but I also realized that the
rap and pop and film score world were full of "loop/sample" conciousness.

What distinquished what we were doing from other music in our area was that
we were doing it live in a way that was much more maleable
in real time that just triggering pre-sampled or recorded loops.

What we were doing was a bit more dangerous because we ran the danger of
fucking up in front of an audience in a way that triggering pre sampled
loops didn't represent.  Consequently I didn't want to call it LOOP MUSIC.
I wanted to draw a distinction.

Anyway,  I also discovered, from having done a ton of music business
publicity for all of my own bands I led over the years, that it would not
work
to have to use two or three sentences to describe what we were doing.   We
had to come up with a publicity hook.

What I discovered (by trying different approaches that all failed 
miserably)
was that I needed a two word description that would at least
provoke another question or two from the audience member, journalist or DJ
who was enquiring.

I'm not sure when Loopers Delight was started, but I was not a member at 
the
time so I was considering these things in the vacuum of my own
home town.    There were only three of us doing it (to my provincial and
limited knowledge).

Anyway,  I started using the term Live Looping.   I don't claim to have
invented it before anyone else (I'm sure I didn't, in fact) but I invented
it for
us in our insular musical situation.

When I first discovered the CT Collective and started coming to Loopers
Delight I discovered this amazing  community of people who were just as
turned on to this looping concept that I was.  I was in heaven and felt 
like
a religious convert (obnoxious whenever it happens but highly effective for
prosletyzing.........lol)    I actually subsribed  earlier to L.D. but was
brand new to the internet and had no
concept of setting up a daily digest or e-mail filters.    I think I got 40
or 50 individual e-mails from the list the first day or two I was 
subscribed
and I
hastily unsubscribed and didn't come back for another couple of years.

Anyway,  Steve Lawson and I started corresponding because of the list and 
he
said he was coming to the West Coast and could I get him a gig.
Steve had absolutely no draw in this area at all and I knew that I had to
come up with some good publicity hook  to interest people in his
performance.
We publicized the fact that he was doing bass looping to the press and to
the list and got an incredible response, including a slew of bass players
in the area who were intrigued about what we were doing and asked if they
could participate.    I had booked a little venue that held 45 people and
the response was so great that I quickly scratched that idea and went to 
the
Rio Theatre to ask if they would host a festival............contacted a
bunch
of the bassists and the first Live Looping Festival in Santa Cruz was born.

LIVE LOOPING described what we were doing, but, more importantly, it
provided a very strong publicity hook that really seemed to intrigue
the journalists and DJs of our area.   We began to get covers of 
newspapers,
lengthy interviews on the radio  (hell, Steve, Max Valentino and I
performed on the largest internet radio station on the planet using that
term........which just happened to be in neighboring Watsonville---KPIG).
It was a hook that caught on quicker than any musical publicity campaign
that I've ever been involved with it  (and I was really into publicizing 
the
early Santa Cruz New Wave movement and the early Santa Cruz World Beat
movement in years past, which also got a lot of press in our area).

It seems to work here and in the Bay Area, so I kept using it.    It 
doesn't
define me, musically ( I do lots of avante garde gigs, acoustic gigs, found
sound gigs,  all vocal gigs, funk gigs, jazz gigs, pop gigs, singer
songwriter gigs, world fusion gigs)...........It's just a term I use when I
want to try and sell an audience (or print journalists and radio DJs) on a
gig where I am primarily working with live looping gear.

The funny thing is that throughout all of our endless debates on the 
subject
(some people think it's bullshit to describe this as a style of music or an
accurate description of a living community..............some people feel
really at home with it)   Luis Angulo writes the list yesterday
and titles his subject    LIVE LOOPING IN ITALY,  and, guess, what:   we 
all
either tune into it or we tune out of it.     Think about it though,
using that term is descriptive enough to get one to either read his post
with interest or delete it with disgust (lol,  not me Luis).

Andre LaFosse doesn't feel represented by the term,  nor does Mark
Sottilaro..................that's really okay:      Guitar Turntablism or
Cycletronica
are equally suspect titles and require lots of explanation to even
understand by an uncomprehending public, but that's not the
point..........................they either work for these artists as a way
of getting people interested in hearing
their music or they don't.

Live Looping isnt' the end all or be all term for what we do.    How could
we use any term that represents the total commonality of this
community...............we are too diverse.   It's just a term that enough
artists have agreed to that if someday what we do here
in the totality of our experience at Loopers Delight and LiveLooping.com 
and
the Cycletronica tribe at tribe.net has an effect on the greater musical
world we can say , with some pride, that we were part of it.   Even if we
have very small numbers................even a small percentage of all who
participate at Loopers Delight,  it is what it is merely because we say it
is and feel an allegiance to it.

There were a lot of well known painters lumped in with the Impressionists 
in
the late nineteenth century who hated the term and felt like they were not 
a
part of any movement.  A lot of artists don't like the idea of being 
joiners
in ANY movement.  That's totally normal in any population of artists.   We
tend to be iconoclasts.............hopefully, that's once reason why we can
be innovative as artists.  History and critics and fans lumped them in
anyway , though, and their painting are in the Impressionist exhibits in
Paris to this day.   They also sold a lot of
CDs......................errrrrr,  paintings because of it.

Andre, as an example of an artist that I really like and whose work I think
is important,  could not do what he does without the particular
sophistication
of the Echoplex with Loop IV software, which is a looping instrument
primarily designed for live playing.   I"m not saying that he wouldn't be
brilliant and innovative in any thing he attempted musically...........I
know he can be.   I'm also not saying that he should only use that
particularly paradigm for
creating music in the future:   I could care less (except to hear, with
eagerness, what he comes up with), but he has used a looping device in a
live setting to create much of what he has put out to the world.    He 
might
be really pissed off that someone would refer to him as a live looper but 
it
wouldn't be far off the mark for someone to do so.   If some people 
consider
him a 'live looping' artist (to his chagrin) and like his work,  he will
still
make some of the money he truly deserves for his art.   If some people
consider him a 'guitar turntablist',  the same thing will occur, hopefully.


Okay,  enough wind from me.................I'm still going to produce 'live
looping festivals' to try and entice more artists to participate and share
with each other.   I am a joiner.  I like to belong.  It's not for
everybody.  If the Andre LaFosses and Mark Sottilaro's of Loopers Delight
(who may outweigh
the Matthias Grobs and Rick Walkers) don't want to be a part of it,  I'm
really fine with that.   I just hope we can stay friends and have mutual
respect for each other.  It's not a perfect world so it might not happen,
but that's my hope.

I"m going to keep producing the occasionally so called Live Looping
Festivals.   I hope everyone gets to experience one because they are a
joyous and creative and stimulating celebration of a lot of what we
represent in this ragtag community at Loopers Delight.  If it's not your
thing,  I respect that too.

yours,  Rick Walker