When multiinstrumentalist and livelooper Rick Walker started doing the first international livelooping festivals in California 15 years ago, he probably had no idea that this thing would eventually spread like wildfire. We are doing several such festivals per year now, in many countries, and more are added to the list every year.
There is a growing scene of livelooping artists some of which travel around the world to perform on the various festivals. Unless there are sponsors, the artists usually pay for everything out of their own pockets, because this is not a commercially successful enterprise – it is just about the love for music. And the audience is fascinated every time by the wide range of styles and ideas, the musical quality, the surprising creativity they get to see.
Steve Moyes, a livelooping guitarist/cellist from Wales (who had performed on my 3rd festival in Cologne), had organized such a festival in November 2016. Eight musicians from the UK, France, and Germany met in Cardigan, a little town at the southwestern coast of Wales, for a very enjoyable afternoon/evening of livelooping music.
Most of us stayed for several days. Steve cooked for us, and we were hosted by Maggie Nicols, a singer from the UK improvised music / free jazz scene. I remembered Maggie’s voice from early 1970s Keith Tippett projects such as Centipede, and I was thrilled that I could stay in her large house, an old mill building, and get to know her.
My Wales trip started with some technical problems, including a faulty Midi controller, and an expensive laptop that suddenly refused to boot (update: after the UK trip when I came home, it was suddenly alive again as if nothing had happened – my computer technician has no explanation except that it maybe didn’t want to travel to Wales). Instead of the laptop, which is usually a central item in my livelooping setup, I used my iPad with a combination of livelooping, effect, and granular synthesis apps, all of this to create textural loops, plus an oldfashioned but still amazing Gibson Echoplex for shorter loops. Also, Steve gave me his Line6 DL-4, a workhorse for delays and looping.
One day before the concert, I put new strings on the guitar, and one of the tuning pegs broke – I could no longer tune the A string, but after some experimenting, I fixed it, sort of, by squeezing a clothes peg under the string. I could have borrowed another guitar but I felt stubborn at this point. After all, my cheap trusty Höfner Shorty is something special, with its integrated amplifier/speaker which allows for wild feedback orgies.
The evening was beautiful, even breathtaking at times. I loved Steve Moyes’s cello loops and his abstract, sculptural approach. Heather Summers played beautiful pieces with her warm violin sound in the middle of things, and David Cooper Orton delivered a number of his masterful guitar pieces. Nelly Meunier’s ‚prehistoric‘ sounds from stones, bones, leaves and other beautiful little objects were a quiet sonic meditation, and ecnegrU’s skillful reggae/dub explorations blew my mind and made me dance. Julia Kotowski’s songs (as ‚Entertainment for the Braindead‘) have become even more perfect since I saw her in California, 7 years ago, and Emmanuel Reveneau (‚Lucid Brain Integrative Project‘) was as lucid and amazing as always. What a great group of musicians! I felt thrilled that I could be one of them on this evening.
Somehow my technical problems led me to play more radically, much more in the noise department, and I quite enjoyed it (and so did a number of people in the audience – never before so many people came and told me how much they had liked my set).
On the next evening, we staged a mini festival with short sets personally for Maggie Nicols because she had performed in Austria on the festival day, and missed it. I played even more radically this time and enjoyed it even more (Emmanuel found it ’supercool‘). What has happened? I feel that while I am open to many kinds of styles, including ambient and psychedelic which would typically focus on ‚beautiful‘ sounds, I suddenly feel much more drawn to experimental sounds and structures, to noise, to uncertainty, to go beyond all borders. It was almost like a little epiphany. Playing freely like this felt so natural, so clearly like me. And I feel a little bit like a newborn, I still have to learn so much.
After our little mini-festival for Maggie, we did a collective improvisation. It was wild and ecstatic at times, and hearing Maggie’s voice soaring above it just like it did 45 years ago (with Centipede on their immortal ‚Septober Energy‘ album) really gave me the goosebumps big time! I played like never before, sometimes including granular synthesis. I discovered that I could put my unconnected iPad on top of the guitar, feeding its speaker output through the guitar picks and the guitar signal chain with its effects and loops. Wow!
Looking forward now to how my music wants to develop. I let it do that by itself, as always. It will take care of itself.
