Mass Driver Songs (1981)
category: solo electric guitar + tape loops
Mass drivers are machines which use magnetic fields and a long rail to accelerate loads up to very high speed. Large scale versions might eventually be built on the moon to send ores from lunar mines directly into lunar orbit for further processing.
When I started playing distorted guitar with tape loops in 1980/1981, the musical results - raw and unrefined, but loud and relentlessly repetitive - often seemed to me like a soundtrack for series of heavy metal loads accelerated by magnetic fields into space.
The "Mass Driver Songs" are improvisations on electric guitar and tape loops. They were recorded while I experimented with a setup very similar to Robert Fripp's " Frippertronics ", consisting basically of two tape recorders which together create a loop delay of several seconds. (On these recordings I used loops with a length of 4 seconds. They could easily have been made longer but the longer they are, the more difficult it is to create rhythmic structures - it gets quite tricky beyond 7 seconds due to limitations of the human brain, or at least my brain.)
Before Eno taught Fripp how to do what he later called Frippertronics, Terry Riley had been working with such a setup for years (see my Short History of Looping Music article). Riley called it "Time Lag Accumulator". His looping music became famous with his LP "A Rainbow in Curved Air".
Live looping is a simple and effective method to multiply oneself in real time, creating layers of sound. It is a wonderful way of making music alone, and has stayed with me since, not wearing off - only the technology has moved from tapes to digital machines.
None of this stuff was ever meant to be published.
stream all tracks:
Song 1 - [excerpt] (2:08 min, 2 MB)
Song 5 - [excerpt 1] (1:34 min, 1.4 MB)
Song 5 - [excerpt 2] (2:35 min, 2.4 MB)
Song 7 - [excerpt] (4 min, 3.7 MB)
Song 8 - [excerpt] (5:46 min, 5.4 MB)
Song 11 - [excerpt] (2:23 min, 2.2 MB)
Intro for Die Härte - live at Stollwerck, Cologne (3:59 min, 3.8 MB)
loud and raw tape loops full of minor thirds
- Michael Peters doing a guitar/livelooping set at the John Cage MusiCircus in Bonn, May 1981
- Michael Peters doing a guitar/livelooping set at the John Cage MusiCircus in Bonn, May 1981
(photograph: Guido Conen)
- Michael Peters, ca. 1980
