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Re: the Infamous Guitar-Loop Paradigm



>I certainly don't intend to cast aspersions on anyone
>here, guitarist or
>otherwise.  My main purpose in posting this is to see
>if people think
>that "looping" as a technique/practiced art
form/what->have-you has
>actually changed significantly within the last four
>years, particularly
>in terms of the whole "guitar loop" thing.  What do
>you think?

Andre,

It's interesting to hear this from my perspective,
'cause I didn't get into loop music myself until about
four years ago, and it WASN'T the ambient-ebow-rubato
thing.  I picked up a David Torn album after reading
his article and lesson in Guitar Player, and so
immediately started associating loop music with these
funky rhythms and cool riffs.  In fact, the only
albums by Loop Professors that I own even now are a
buncha DT's discs and Robby Aceto's solo album.  Not
an ambient one in the bunch - not even a Fripp CD!
(Will the rioting villagers please extinguish their
torches....)

As far as whether the "genre" as such has changed in
the last four years, I'm finding it difficult to think
of it as a genre at all, in the way that you could
point to the evolution of metal from Black Sabbath to
Metallica to Korn or something like that.  Loop music,
to me, has always been defined in terms of
equipment/technique rather than sonic results - these
are the people who use loopers.  They sound like,
well, themselves: an amalgamation of influences and
original ideas in varying proportions.  Before the
advent of the Internet, when the most visible guitar
looping music was Fripp's soundscaping, it might have
been possible to say that Guitar Looping was an
Ambient Thing, as most of the folks doing it had heard
and been heavily influenced by Senor Fripp, and, well,
gee, who else was doing it?  Over the last four years,
we've had a lot of new exponents coming forth with
their music (in this forum particularly), and this has
cross-fertilized the loop community to produce Neat
New Ideas and, perhaps as a side product, taken us
further away from the Ambient Thing.  So the sound of
the individual Loop Professors has changed (the
distance between Torn's _WMS,T?_ and the Splattercell
disc, for example), but I'm not certain that we can
equate that with a shift in the Guitar-Loop Paradigm,
if there is one. (This sentence is a relation which
relates itself to itself...ack! too much
philosophizing during vacation!)

Cool interview, BTW!

Scott Martin
coirbidh_99@yahoo.com




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