The session this week was very engaging, related to histories of “world music” which is a term I have always found quite funny, but played various musics from various different parts of the world that I found very enjoyable, especially an english piece that I couldn’t get the name of featuring a small pipe instrument that created a constant gorgeous drone throughout the track. The reoccuring of this idea in folk musics to have a constant running drone throughout the track is something I found very interesting how it spanned across cultures, something to research myself possibly and styles of music I should indulge more in.
Anyway, outside of class I have been writing down any kind of thoughts related to the loop topic and assembling that into a longform essay, I haven’t had the time to record any of it yet and every time I read over it I end up making revisions, but its surpassing 2 thousand words so far which I think should be enough to fill the 10 minute slot.
I went over this Youtube video to see if there was any obvious history I was missing and it doesn’t seem like it, I am already aware of tape loops in musique concrete and minimalism, I guess it is important to write about though as if I am presenting this essay to someone who presumably knows nothing about the history. Something in particular though that I have found when researching this topic is that I can’t seem to avoid William Basinski, it’s quite annoying, I remember finding The Disintegration Loops novel the first time I heard it but nothing more, I hate this kind of endless appraisal it gets and when the narrator of this video says something along the lines of “my favourite example of its use is The Disintegration Loops” I couldn’t help but laugh, maybe it’s the cynic in me I don’t know. Anyway, I haven’t mentioned it in my writing so far and I want it to stay that way.
I also read up on the broader utilisation of repetition to see what effects it has in popular music here; with the study showing that repeated listening increases the liking for music regardless of its complexity, “For example, popular music has become less complex and more homogeneous in terms of more restricted pitch transitions and less varied timber since the 1960s (Serra et al., 2012). If there is an inverse association between complexity and familiarity, less complex music will attract more listeners initially.” This study kind of reveals a parasitic nature to popular music, as the music has been distilled to what is more initially inviting and repeating more than what is more complex and obsessively worked over, and I guess that means the loop ambient frame work is an even further distillation of this to the absolute most basic for it could take, and subsuquently the most likable.
As well as more interviews with Will Long, I listened back to some more kinds of loop based musics that I could recall while writing up what I have now, and have tried to draw a connection between the loop ambient framework and the noise loop idea, with GX Jupitter Larsen being the main focus as just like Celer, I have spent an ungodly amount of time with his work already, so it is quite exciting to be able to write about his practice. GX’s interviews are purposefully nonsensically really so I don’t feel like they are necessary, I already have ideas I want to present about his work and the fixed state of erosion his work presents, I could contact him about this but I’m not sure if I’m that kind of person to do that. I’m already in contact with Ivan Senkevich who has a similar kind of practice but I don’t think there’s so much more to write about than GX.