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Hey! I'm loopin' on TV!



We had a thread a while back about shoegazing vs. eye
contact with the audience. Well, at a recent
performance I was completely oblivious to a couple of
guys with a camcorder taping my set until afterwards
when one of them approached me during that 'making
sure to get all of my instruments, accessories and
cables into the cases and get the hell off stage so
the next act can get on' phase of a gig when you
really can't chat all that much. He told me that he
was a television producer and stuck a sheet of paper
in front of me on which my signature would give him
the rights to the footage in perpetuity. As it was for
a local program (two stations in Boston and
Cambridge), I signed it. THEN he went on to describe
the program's slant: it was to be about how electronic
music might be the death knell for players of
traditional musical instruments, blah blah blah, the
same tired old argument that greeted the invention of
the fortepiano, the mellotron, the synthesizer, the
sampler, etc....

This afternoon, a CD-R arrived in the mail containing
an mpeg file of the program. With it was enclosed a
note reading "This show is currently being shown on
CCTV and BNN. [Channels 10 and 23 in the Boston area;
the show is called "Our Town"] Enjoyed your work! You
have to get it out of the 'church basement' and into
the mainstream."

About 18 minutes into the program, the commentator,
Art Foley, seated in front of a well-stocked bar,
delivers the following speech:

"Let's get into something really controversial, and
that's music. I had an opportunity recently to go over
to the Zeitgeist Gallery and they had an exposition of
'electronic music' and they had all these boxes with
electronic gear and they would 'loop' and 'resample'
and do all kinds of tricks with a note that they would
either strum on a guitar or play on a saxophone or
whatever... We did a Big Band about six months ago, an
interview with a Big Band and the opinion was
expressed at the time that we may be seeing the end of
traditional instruments... [Wistful, concerned
expression...] So take a look at this, and don't close
your mind to it and think in terms of if you could see
something like this in, say, a cocktail lounge. This
type of music does not have, you might say, an
association with it, it's almost like people who juice
their vegetables and fruit, turning it into juice,
they eliminate the digestive process. As a result, the
stuff dumps right into their bloodstream, and they say
this is, of course, very beneficial. Again, this music
does not have the normal association with it; as a
result, it DUMPS RIGHT INTO YOUR MIND! [Big hand
gestures] So it is... it's POWERFUL! And again, don't
turn it off; give it a listen and see what you think.
Is this gonna be THE FUTURE OF MUSIC?"

(That's followed by ten minutes of me looping. The
first few minutes is a bit embarrassing, but it gets
better when the loopage kicks in, and plays right to
the end through the show's credits.) 

Dumping pureed music right into your mind,

-t-

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