专辑简介

My own personal Screed about this project and the looping that inform it.

A few years ago, I took on the task of learning the performance approach called Live Looping, wherein the musician records himself in real time: the music that was just recorded starts over (or "loops"), and the musician then records more, thereby layering more loops on top of the first, and so on it goes... When the time came for me to create a new album, it occurred to me that this was my opportunity to document what I had been doing for a couple years. So I chose to try to stay as close as possible to the arrangements that had developed in the course of two years of live playing, but with the precision of performance and breadth of sound only possible in a recording studio. I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as--no, MORE than--I enjoyed creating it.

The impact of live looping on me--my choices about the music I perform, my view of what is possible, my career plans--can't be overestimated. As a solo artist I could no longer lean on others for any aspect of the music I produced. I do not stop thinking throughout most of the performance of a song, and I do not have the luxury of relaxing and letting someone else "take the musical ball" as I do when I play in any kind of ensemble, whether a duo all the way up to an orchestra. As a looping artist, any note I produce has the potential to be repeated endlessly all the way til the song ends, and so that note had better be right. The flip side to that is, I don't have to worry if a member of the band is having a bad day: I don't have to worry if the guitarist is getting "enough" solo time, or if the singer is getting enough water and sunlight (but not too much), or how I'm going to pay the drummer if not enough people show up, or if the bass player will quit when he finds out how much I have to pay the drummer... I don't have to worry. That is huge. Of course, live looping limits my musical choices: the form of a song (verse to chorus to bridge, etc.) can only be as complex as the loop I am able to create. But sometimes a limit on a person's musical choices can be good, and knowing what those limits are can be empowering. I have had alot of fun working within the fences that live looping forces on my musical landscape, and figuring creative ways to overcome the natural limitations of the loop is an on going process for me.

Lastly, my view of looping and traditional music, at least in my evolution thus far. From the beginning of my journey as a looper my approach to songs and tunes that are in the tradition has been to try to make the looper serve the music, not the other way around. I am not endeavoring here to do something new with the essence of the music. Rather, I try to do to the music what a small group of musicians sitting in a pub might do. So, if you close your eyes and are able to imagine that what you hear are a guitar player and a couple of fiddlers in a busy pub jamming in a corner on the jigs and reels--then someone bursts into a drinking song and a couple folks join in on the singalong refrain until the fiddlers pull the lot of them back on the track of a few more reels--well now, if you can imagine that while I perform then I have done what I came to do. So, looping is all fine and dandy, but I'm just doing what musicians have always tried to do; to entertain and delight and send the punters home content. Slainte