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Thomas Dolby: LIVE LOOPING



Wow,  I just got from a very stimulating show,  watching Thomas Dolby hit 
the
stage for the first time in 15 years (except for a short tune up gig two 
weeks ago in SF).

Not only was it a wonderful show in a wonderful venue (The Independent is 
now hands down,
my favorite music venue in San Francisco after having seen Elbow and now 
Mr. 
Dolby there).

What was very exciting is that every act on the bill used live looping 
techniques extensively.

Genie (who had such a wonderfully creative show at Y2K5)  opened up and 
was 
really well
recieved with his mixture of psychedelic delay drenched guitar,  human 
beatboxing and
amazing manipulation of 2 DL4 Line 6s...................sometimes while 
multitasking with
playing slide guitar........while beatboxing................while using 
his 
fingers on one DL4
in his lap and his toes with a 2nd one on the floor.

The the excellent group LoopStation performed with, again, Line 6 DL4s and 
what looked
from my vantage point to be a Boss gigadelay.

The group is a cellist and a singer and they were really wonderful and 
amazingly full spectrum
in their passionate pop songs.    They were very, very well recieved by 
the 
crowd and I was lucky enough
that their cellist gave me one of their CDs to listen to , which I can't 
wait to put on my hard drive right away.

I asked them to come play Y2K6 and he seemed interested so cross your 
fingers.  This was one of the more
interesting live looping acts that I've seen and both the cellist and the 
vocalist used liberal usage of looping
in the set.

Dolby's set was just sublime replete with wonderful visuals.     He had 
several cameras on his person and there were
frequent images from one of them in black and white on the large screen. 
The cameras were fish eye lens and it
was really cool to see him manipulate his gear on the big screen.   He 
also 
had beautiful looped images
accompanying his songs...........including some very powerful emotional 
imagery of submaries, torpedoes and the ocean
during his song,  "One of our Submarines".

I'm not entirely sure of his setup except to say that I know it's well 
documented as of yesterday on his website and that
he was basically looping inside of LOGIC on a Mac.

He seemed to have a nice blend of actually playing parts on keyboards; 
singing;  looping occasional keyboard parts (which I realize could have 
been 
real time midi looping or an internally run VST live looping pluging) and 
then some obviously sequenced
parts.

The canned-ness of it didn't bother me in the slightest because he really 
was multi-tasking and playing a lot.
He was in fine voice and my only complaint was that I wish his show had 
been 
longer than the slightly less than an hour that it was.

His equipment failed him twice during the show but he was very 
entertaining 
and called attention to the fact.............Every time it screwed up he 
promised the crowd that he would throw t-shirts to the audience and he did.

At one point he dedicated a song to his wife (the reason he moved to L.A. 
apparently) and she just coincidentally happened to be standing right next 
to us.    I was graciously taken to the show by Glenn Javaheri and his 
girlfriend who also gave me some video that he shot at the 1st Bass 
Looping 
Festival at the San Jose Museum of Art, years ago with Steve Lawson and 
Michael Manring.

It was a wonderful concert and I felt so proud to be in this community and 
see how high profile some of what we do is getting.
This is the first 'normal' show I"ve seen where everyone on the bill was 
live looping extensively.