Stacking Static Parts and 100% Feedback in live looping

[Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>]

    In the books that have influenced your music thread,  I talked about 
really enjoying
Ashley Kahn's wonderful book on the making of 'Kind of Blue' by Miles 
Davis.

 Davis embraced modalism because it finally gave the soloist control 
over determining harmony as opposed to the comping instruments or the 
'tune'.
He felt that with Bop and Post Bop that the role of soloist had been 
relegated to commenting on chordal changes that were laid down
by either the composition or by the chordal compers aesthetic

Later,  he was the first person (to my knowledge) who used percussion 
tape loops when he recorded 'In A Silent Way'.

He did this for the same reason:     By not having to groove,  the 
percussionist was freed to comment more
and to be able to play more freely and creatively.

I realize that , for me, this is one of the most compelling reasons why 
I love to do live looping:

As a minimalistic/pocket grooving drummer/percussionist...........one 
who really loved the drumbeat much more than
the fills that people used to augment it (or to just get away from it's 
tyranny),   I felt liberated to
lay down a groove that gave me the freedom to do something else.

It liberated me to be far more creative and eventually led me to picking 
up dozens of different melodic instruments to
see what I could get,  naively,  from them.

Looping can allow us to morph arrangements........to shift from very 
conventional things to very unconventional approaches
or vice versa in the middle of a realtime composition.   
Because I use a lot of feedback set to 100%,    the stasis of parts is 
able to morph precisely because of you put on top
of them subsequently.

I don't think my approach is better than anyone else's, however.

I see a lot of wonderful artists use variable feedback to create all 
kinds of interesting morphings in their live looping work
(my brother,  Matthias Grob,  Andy Butler, Per Boysen, et. al.)  but I 
keep finding more and more things to do
just by using starkly naked loops that don't morph over time but that 
are,  through arrangement,  recontextualized because of the
parts that end up on top of them.

The desire to escape boring oneself is a great motivator.
With the stasis of stacked parts coming from 100% feedback approaches
the emphasis necessarily falls on choosing new timbres,  exploiting new 
timbres from traditional sources and various forms
of analogue and digital processing before or after the loop.

It's funny, but I've actually thought about not taking expression pedals 
for the LP-1 on my tour to specifically force myself
into more of a box that needs to be climbed  out of.    

I don't know.........perhaps I'll break down and bring them

Also,  perhaps, I'll start learning some of those very cool approaches 
that my brother has been using with variable
feedback replaces in his music after the tour.