Looping
Glenn Poorman, September 2001
Terry Riley
|
Looping is a name given to music created with repetition of audio samples.
The music can be generated any number of ways ranging from recurring
playback of pre-recorded snippets of tape to live feed into a delay or echo
device to live performance of repetitive patterns without the aid of any
technology. The actual origins of looping are pretty hazy. Especially
considering that music dating back to the dawn of man was based on rhythmic
repetition and this type of repetitive music was engrained into so many
cultures. Beginning in the middle ages, that kind of music took a back seat
in the west to more complex pieces of music which focused more on the laws
of harmony. It wasn't until the 20th century that some revolutionary
composers began to experiment with new forms of music such as ambient music,
12-tone music, and minimalist music.
Brian Eno
|
As the experimentation in music grew during the 20th century, so did the
marriage of music and technology. Today, it's largely believed that the
first musician to employ tape echo technology in order to perform looped
music was
Terry Riley. In the early
60s, Riley setup up a delay/feedback system using two Revox reel to reel
tape recorders that he called the
Time Lag Accumulator. Basically,
the way the system worked was that the two tape recorders were setup at some
distance from each other with a single loop of tape running between them.
When an audio signal was played into the first recorder, it was recorded
onto the tape. When that part of the tape reached the second recorder, the
signal would be amplified and (at the same time) fed back into the first
recorder to be taped again. While this was going on, new audio signals
could be fed into the first recorder so as to build up very complex works
from just one performer. In 1963, Riley employed this system in public for
the first time on a piece of music called
Music for the Gift which
was written as accompaniment for a play. In the early 70s,
Brian Eno
discovered Riley's
Time Lag Accumulator and began experimenting with
the system eventually showing it to
Robert Fripp in 1972.
Both musicians used the system on a handful of recordings and Fripp began
touring delivering live performances using the system that he began
referring to as
Frippertronics. Fripp continues to perform his style
of looped music today although the Revox machines have been replaced by
digital technology and his style has been renamed
Soundscapes.
Matthias Grob
|
For years, the double reel to reel system was the only reasonable way
to perform looped music. The expense and complexity of the system, however,
kept it out of the hands of many who would have otherwise been draw to it.
Many players were experimenting with some simple looping using the echo
boxes available at the time but not even the most expensive of boxes could
generate a long enough delay to adequately do the job. As the 80s gave way
to the 90s, digital technology was becoming cheaper and new digital delay
devices were putting the idea of looping into the hands of the hobbyist with
low cost 4 second digital delays eventually becoming 10 or 20 second digital
delays. While these units made looping more of a reality for the average
musician, looping was not what they were built for specifically so they had
many shortcomings. In the early 90s,
Matthias Grob set out to build a
dedicated looping device. Being a musician with a desire to play looped music
and a musician that had tried all of the available boxes, Grob had a keen
insight into how to build it and what it should and should not have. His
original box was called the
Loop Delay and was built in 1991. When
the technology was sold to
Gibson, the
resulting unit was called the
Echoplex Digital Pro which is still
available from Gibson today and is generally the unit that all others are
measured against. As you would expect, the Echoplex is no longer the only
game in town and many manufacturers are making products that they advertise
as looping devices or
phrase samplers. This, of course, means that
the number of musicians performing looped music has really taken off over
the course of the last ten years.
Robert Fripp
|
So what is it that makes this kind of music making so appealing? The
easiest answer is that it's the only way for one musician to generate
that much music. Robert Fripp described looping as
"a way for one
person to make an awful lot of noise". There's so much more to it
than that though. Looped music has this uncanny ability to take on a
life it's own and go off in directions that are not even known to the
performer before it happens. Combinations of ideas initiated by the
performer become new ideas as they merge. Plus there's that sense of
uncontrollability that can make performing looped music a very exciting
prospect.
Looped music can be heard in so many different forms today. Aside from
the heavy and/or ambient works of Eno/Fripp, there are many other
performers who borrow heavily from those earlier works. Others may keep
the actual looping much simpler employing more common parts over top
of the loop (drums, basslines, solos, etc). Much of the electronic music
heard today, while not specifically billed as looped music, is essentially
nothing more than variation over a repeating pattern. And with the cost
and available of the technology becoming more within reach everyday, it
looks as though the popularity of this form of music has nowhere to go
but up.
More Information
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