Enjoyable night at Left Bank. Stuart Clark did a nice set; his music tends to remind me of looping, in that it has short repetitive chord sequences (beautifully crunchy last night on new strings) with percussive repeating lyrics. I did a short set in which I won two numbers and the looping technology won two. Actually I thought it wasn’t bad, apart from a couple of false starts, but I may be corrected. Then on to a nice jamming set with the G, who seemed to be in guitar hero mode. That was fun.
I’ve been lurking for a while in Loopers Delight, a mailing list for people into looping technology. I’ve heard some nice and innovative uses of it as a result. Most of the time it’s arcance discussions of equipment I can’t afford. Every now and again, however, you find something like this:
>I like leaving my tape delays, pedals, delay and looping plugins running
>for a long time, for instance while I’m having dinner and whatnot. When I
>return, there’s often distorted loveliness waiting for me in the cans.
>
> Do you do that as well? Any tips?
When I feel like just having a sound texture for the room I work in, I put
something down in the DigiTech 7.6, usually a guitar wash, sometimes with
percussive instrumentation, but mostly it’s no hard rhythm if I’m after a
"truly ambient" (i.e. "as ignorable as it is listenable") loop.
However I don’t just let them run over dinner. Sometimes I leave it going
for as much as two weeks, depending on how hectic things get here
(renovating old house, going crazy all over workmen, taking care of
96-yr-old mum-in-law). I think of this as utilitarian music, it provides
a
space you can think in, wallpaper for the mind, unbound by notions of what
a
"song" is. Much of the time I find myself internally composing
instrumentations/variations I didn’t plan on at all, which is more than
fun
for me.
Side effect of tracking through computer, though: I did an early
experiment
with NetMeeting voice-over-ip stuff, and when it began my partner in Reno
noted a warbling, watery kind of sound that he couldn’t filter out, but
didn’t obscure our voices over the connection (56K for me, ISDN for him,
after all it was 1998!). Turns out it was a week-old loop of this very
kind, and I’d gotten so used to its running that I forgot to mute my Line
In
on the sound card.