I found this audio paper about something I am quite enthusiastic about, and was hoping to mostly just have certain records from my own personal canon mentioned to get excited over to be honest but I got something different. Mike Callander discussed Pierre Schaefer’s discovery of closed grooves and quite beautiful description of the action as “the phonograph needle doubles back in the groove, it causes us to hear an object that does not evolve, that congeals within time,” “A sound fragment that has neither a beginning or end, a slither of sound isolated from any temporal context, a clean edged time crystal made of time that now belongs in no time.” The treatment of a loop in such romantic terms makes me reflect on the noise loop music I enjoy, that kind of freezing a state of entropy in time that GX Jupiterr Larsen focuses his work on (as a way to measure the Polywave as he calls it, the distance between nothing and something, which is an absurdist idea but strangely applicable to his work).
“Chris Cutler likens a loop to the walking dead, captured and fixed, he describes a loop as an artefact rather than an action.” Chris Cutler is used in the essay as a kind of counter to Mike and Schafer’s excitement about the looping excitement, with Chris referring to the “deadness” of a locked groove compared to a tape loop or digital loop ect, because of the fixed amount of time set the loops are more irritating than a longer loop that can have more emotional weight. I kind of get what he means but Mike says his workaround is by having multiple turntables to create a gradually desyncronising experience extending the loop outside of the second long barrier (also mentioned is that Mike is a techno DJ and really enjoys the small loops).
Mike also talks particularly about the vinyl medium and brings up a point I’ve never heard before by using the record Ghost Hemiola by Stefan Goldman, which is a double LP of empty locked grooves (which I feel like I need to get a hold of myself for my ASMR wall noise material), and he uses it to show how the needle amplifies the sound around the turntable, tapping the edge of the table and breathing into it. He argues this translates in a live setting which makes DJing with wax superior in some way, as it creates a kind of positivity feedback loop where the vibrations from the crowd are being played back into the audience under the music. Very interesting idea.
Generally really enjoyed thinking about loops a lot more because it is a massive part of my practice and what I listen to, made me think more about what it actually is that I’m doing and what others do, particualarly thinking about The Haters as a mode of freezing a state of erosion to create a kind of forever eroding object, and maybe Celer and other loop based ambient music as a method of freezing a point in time, fixing a memory into sound. A quote was used from Brian Eno that I found quite poignant, “almost any arbitrary collision of events listened to enough times comes to seem very meaningful”, I start to think about the ideas of audio shelter brought on by Noise Wall and generally by monotonous musics, an encouraged mode of relistening to albums you own if you didn’t enjoy the first time and how things are typically not made to immediately click, or why things don’t immediately click. I don’t know, I think this might be something fun to explore for the paper.