_ _ _ | |_ __ _ _ __ ___ ___ _ _| | |_ _ _ _ __ ___ | __/ _` | '_ \ / _ \ / __| | | | | __| | | | '__/ _ \ | || (_| | |_) | __/ | (__| |_| | | |_| |_| | | | __/ \__\__,_| .__/ \___| \___|\__,_|_|\__|\__,_|_| \___| |_| ______ ______ | .~ ~. .~ ~. |`````````, ..'''' | | | | | |''''''''' .'' | | | | | | ..' |_______ `.______.' `.______.' | ....'' This is an excerpt of a workshop on TAPE CULTURE that was given at Common Ground in Berlin by dj shluchT *** LOOPS - Postmodern & THe Infinite *** Hey-Hei, today I want to write down a few thoughts on Loops -> digital and analog loops. To get started, one should look up the following picture of which Frieder Butzmann makes a point of in his 'Musik im Grossen und Ganzen' - book, Page 13) The picture one can see is called: "the birth of a virgin" by Albrecht Altdorfer, 1525. Butzmann points out two very interesting aspects of the Loop as a practice for musicians/ within music: 1. the loop is a cycle - but not like the cycles one knows from nature or economy. the loop in music is a repetitition where an event repeats and beginning and end are seemingly the same point -just like the infinite. - in the picture linked above one can see that in the way the angels hold each others hands, so whereever your eyes start to follow the cicrle of angels, they will always end up at the same point- there is no beginning, no end. The angels just keep on singing and turning around in a circle just like the water that runs down the mountain in a river, it doesn't run away and seems to be always the same - and here is a little difference to the loop in music: the loop in music can be counted - its repetitions can be measured - as a profane measurement of rhythm & metric. But the beautiful sound itself that angels create can't be measured, they are angels, they are supernatural. Therefore their sound is not sizeable for rational systems - its an emotional quality thru repetition. 2. Butzmann also points out a second aspect of the musical quality of a loop - imagine you are in that building with the angels flying around you and chanting - the architecture, the space - their chanting will fill the whole room & the room will add its characteristics to the sound - for our picture, the old cathedral - the room will add a lot of hall and echo to it. Angels are not directly visible to us - but the space filled by the chanting is easy to imagine for everyone and shows an important quality of repetition and sound in general - the hypnotic and mesmerizing aspect of the loop as well as its artificialness. MORE HISTORY... - the moon cycle -as already mentioned above, there are different loops/ cycles one can take for comparison or to get into the nature of the rep- etition - one thing I like to point out right away - is that the loop in music is artificial - the art of the loop is to make the beginning and the end invisible - the one shot sample for example can be looped but its nature is a different one - beginning and end are clearly different points and will create a very different texture of loop. The Moon cycle is always the same just like the water in the river but there is something about the way they are occuring on a timeline that is linear and therefore in opposition to the loop as a phenomena in music. - in 1928 André Cœuroy wrote a book called:"Panorama of Contemporary Music" - in that book and by the influence of the futurists and the first gramo- phones he started to deconstruct the way music is received and created by integrating the new technology (recording music & records) as a practice for composers. He wrote: "perhaps the time is not far off when a composer will be able to represent through recording music specifically composed for the gramophone" In a way he suggests to compose music for records and perform the recordings afterwards as the actual music/ composition. (That is very fascinating for me - that already so early theory people were thinking about that - and only after the second world war that became a more popular practice amongst musicians and composers - by the way researching more about theory people from the late 19th century/ early 20th century one can find that a lot of postmodern ideas were already formulated back than but apperently it took another 40years to actually take off - think partwise its a result of ex- pensive equipment that became over the years cheaper and easier to produce so that a wider range of humans could afford it.) - Affording stuff - seems a thing- therefore most of the early loop and tape music experiments had to happen within the institutes of the estab- lishment - such as radio stations or science laboratories - they were the only ones till the late 50's who could afford the equipment. Here a list of institutions that caught my attention: - Studio d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion nationale early 1940s - Radiophonic Workshop BBC late 1950s - ELMUS / Canadian Electronic Music Laboratory 1950s - San Fransico Tape Music Center early 1960s - mentioning gear and equipment -from the late 50th eary 60th on tapeloops and loop based music became more and more popular within mainstream music. Frank Zappa is one of the artists who helped a lot making it accesible for the mainstream by influencing bands such as the beatles. Yellow magic orchestra made a whole record based on tapeloops and one shot samples around '81 its called "Technodelic"and symbolizes an interesting paradigm shift from academic & psychedelic music with loops to generic or computer music loops and starts to eliminate the human nature of the loop to make it nearly algorithmic music composition. Grandmaster Flash and the breakbeat movement as well as some disco dj's also started to pick up on using tape loops to add breaks and beats to their mixes. - The digital loop, the digital loop is part of music but also of computer science - and is more or less a fundamental part of our daily modern life - digital loops are very different than tape loops / analog loops. The material they are made with is digits. Its no longer the material of the tape that adds a human element to the loop - its the loop of a machine, a calculated loop and with the possibility of post optimizing it- a function within a grid of functions to make the system smooth. ADDITIONAL NOTES: -First records of tape based loop music can be traced back to Halim El-Dabh in around 1944 he borrowed wire recorders from the Middle East Radio in Cairo/ Egypt He also recieved a Fullbright scholarship in 1950 and went to the USA where he studied composition and became an influence for Musicians in the US - such as Frank Zappa. -I'm very surprised when listening back to early tape music / music concrete how much it is about destruction and deconstructing and violence/ war seem to become a part of its nature. Wondering how much the two world wars influenced that phenomena. _______ _______ __ | .---.-.-----.-----. | _ .---.-.-----|__.----.-----. |.| | | _ | _ | -__| |. 1 | _ |__ --| | __|__ --| `-|. |-|___._| __|_____| |. _ |___._|_____|__|____|_____| |: | |__| |: 1 \ |::.| |::.. . / `---' `-------' TAPE PLAYER: 1 Tension Arm 2 Idle Roller Supply Reel Takeup 3 Earase Head | .-'''-. .-'''-. Reel 4 Record / Play Head | ' \ ' \ 5 Capstan | / \ / \ 6 Pinch Roller |. ' . ' 7 Guide || . ' | . '| 8 Tape Lifters |\ / \ / | | `. / `. / | | '-...-'` '-...-'` | | | | | | 3 4 | | 1 ._. ._. 1 | |o 2 | | 8 | | 5 o| '---_() |_| | |_| ()__--' `------.------------.----------'(_) 6 7 |8 7 TAPE: .-----------. ________________________________ | | | _______ | L | | ___ | | A { ------------------------------- | | [___] | | R | | | | ------------------------------- | | ___ | | R | | [___] | | B { ------------------------------- | ------- | L | | ________________________________ |___________| TAPE TRAVEL --------> Record/Play Head Above are a few simple drawings of how tape players are functioning and how tape works. Some more notes to it- usually tape players have two heads - one for erasing and the other one for playback and recording - an interesting thing to do is to tape over the erase head or even voltage control it - to start making infinite overdubs into already exsiting recordings without earasing whats already on the tape The actual cassette - is a unique object too - first of all its not a record or a CD - so flipping the tape - isn't the same like flipping the record - Side A and Side B are all recorded on the same side of the tape. They just run in different directions to each other - Each side is stereo therefore you have two mono channels which can be organised into left and right. The Four-Track uses that special characteristic of tapes - therefore: Sida A left = track 1 Side A right = track 2 Side B right = track 3 Side B left = track 4 Once you record 4 tracks they will all be in the same direction which means if you turn the tape your music will be backwards for the Bside. In other word a 60 min stereo Tape is only 30 min on a Four-Track. Another difference to vinyl is that the compact tape is one of the very first media that allows consumers to make their own recordings & distribute them like the "professionals" do. That is a very significant part of tape and its culture as tape also played a significant role for underground music and within the cold war - "Tommy buys a Leonard Cohen Tape - than goes to see a punk show of his favorite band "Abwärts" in Hamburg - he tapes over the two little holes that protect the tape from being accidentally recorded - takes his tape player and bootlegs the show - the next day he makes a copy of the tape and and mails it to his friend Piotre who lifes in Prague." Hamburg/ West Germany- 1980 Throughout the late 70s and the 80s, tapes became a very popular medium in mainstream and underground - even more popular than vinyl- It's mainly because the means of production to produce tapes became more improved and optimized - the age of home hi-fi_delity was born. Tapes also quickly became a tool for the political resitance during the cold war & the counter culture (punk, new wave, rap ...) who became tired of mainstream music industry and helped its popularity all over the globe. The Tape is not a CD - even though it was common to save data & programs on tapes as it was cheaper than floppy disks. In some countries radiostations would even transmit programs and data that one could record at home and play or use afterwards with the personal computer - the tape has one significant difference to the CD - the track listing. A tape is a linear time line where one can't just skip a track - or lets say DJ XYZ wants to play track 5 from a tape - that's way more difficult with tapes to find the right position than it is with records or CDs. By the way, it is possible to save images on looptapes - once you have encoded the image information into audio. The tape usually is made of a chrome, iron or metal oxides/ dioxides and the data/ information is written in it by organising the metal parts via electro magnetic pulses - therefore, tapespeed is an important influence on the quality of the information - the faster it runs the closer are the single points of the information on the tape and that again makes them sound better in quality. THE TAPE LOOP: - correct splice ____________________ ________/___________ bottom ____________________ _____/______/_______ top _____▂▂▂▂▂▂▂________ side TAPE LOOP TYPES: Standard Chandler* ________ _______ /O O\ /____ \ / \ //O \ O | <---- tape loop /____________\ || \_/ \o__________o/ / \________ ^ o___________o head ^ head Moebius Tape Loop: __ /O \ / ~\~ < 'moebius'twist goes here /____________\ |o__________o| ^ head (*) In 1995 David Chandler released a hand-built series of 100 cassettes with spliced loops marked 'open-source'. These tapes and their construction method became an underground secret-weapon among touring bands in the 90s, and were given the nickname, the "Chandler Loop" - Chandler him self has been making and organizing experimental dance music in Portland sice the early 90's -and there it became really easy to distribute his loop tapes all over the states and the world. -Tapeloops can come in various lengths depending on the type of loop - in general they are either around 235mm and 372mm. When make a tape loop you need to find a cassettetape with screws then open it - take out the tape & cut a piece from it - remove the rest of the the tape from the wheels - put the wheels back in now, try making your loop with the tape in the case - make sure its not too tight and not too loose. Best is once you have the loop tight move the two wheels a bit so that the loop becames again a bit loosende - then take out your loop while still holding the two points of your tape together and make a diagonal cut - now screw it a little together and try out if it runs - if so screw it back together. I can highly recommend using a Four-Track recorder with loop tapes - as you can have 4 different loops on one tape - All synced to eachother and if your four-track has 1 or two efx AUX sends you can even add outboard effects to it. More tips -> Record something on the tap you want to loop before cutting the loop - like that you can make vary clean and clear loops. Also experimenting with the erase head and loop tapes might add some depth to the sticness of the synced loops. DIGITAL LOOPS A few more things about digital loops - on of my favorite is the gid89a or commonly known as .gif - it can be used to save layers and trans- parancies and so on - its even possible to hide .exe scripts or php snippets in it to manipulate website that allow .gif image format. The .gif for whatever reason is not very widely supported anymore on the web or is converterd to a video loop /.webm (This might be for some simple statistic reason or the state of arts on the web has moved on). - Still there remains a certain cultural excitement and hype about it. Similar like the tape - even though it is long dead. Animated gifs/ image loops are in a way like audio/tape loops - they can be like one shot samples but looped or they can be tight like the angels chanting in the very beginning of this text. A lot of todays information on the internet is organised in loops and algoryhtms. Adding gifs to a feed or a timeline - often makes me think of throwing tape loops in the river - to feed the infinite flow of particular difference that enldless loop of it - the gif the little loop of the same with itself - It punches a mesmerizing hole to another dimension that stops the endless flow for as long as one allwows the moment to happen. - This is an excerpt of a workshop about tape culture and loops I came up with for Common Ground weisestr. 24 12049 Berlin. dj shlucht