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return to main page | hear audio clips from Rick's live looping cd | read Rick's music biography
With the release of his brand new live solo looping CD Translucent Dayglo Lime Green Plastic, Rick Walker's Loop.pooL presents a fascinating and creative one-man journey through the world of sound and rhythm. Using digital live looping technology, Rick is able to play a completely different set of instruments on every single song in this early-twenty-first-century version of a "one person band". He uses loopers to create repeating, real-time recordings of the instruments that he plays so that he can quickly change instruments and add other interesting layers to his real-time composition.
Composer Arnold Schoenberg once said, "All composition is just very slow improvisation". Rick has taken this truism and sped up the process, creating exotic sonic tapestries that conjure up distant worlds (not always our own). He will incorporate everything from primal shamanic trance elements to state-of-the-art electronic music.
He uses a huge palette of sound, drawing from "found sound" instruments, invented instruments, world percussion instruments, wind instruments, keyboard instruments, string instruments and a fascinating repertoire of unusual and exotic vocal techniques (overtone singing, warble singing, trill singing, gutteral singing, hum-whistling, mouth percussion and effects, yodelling and pygmy bottle blowing/falsetto singing). He also incorporates state-of -the-art digital processing and production techniques, using analog filters, vocoders, digital delays and modulators to add a more timeless patina to his performances.
One improvisation may only use pieces of dayglo green plastic (replete with black lights and strobes) while another will combine Vietnamese Bau (a one-string instrument), glass ghatam (pitch-bending Indian instrument) and a Native American drone flute. He performs compositions for blue glass, springs, brass candy dishes and children's plastic toys, and yet may turn around and play a beautiful middle-Eastern traditional rhythm on traditional instruments. He may also produce beautiful melodic overtones out of an ordinary kitchen stove gas pipe, or play a Martha Stewart* brass waste paper basket like a tabla.
Loop.pooL performances also have a high degree of audience participation woven into them. Rick asks his whole audience to participate in his looping madness by passing out unusual instruments and found sounds for them to play. He also teaches people how to overtone sing and gets them to add non-lyrical vocal techniques to his loops. These performances appeal to everyone from 5-year olds to septuaginarians because of their participatory nature.
Rick Walker's Loop.pooL has performed at venues from museum art galleries to 10,000-person Massiv raves. He has played for Silicon Graphics executive power dinners as well as free performances at Santa Cruz's Rio Theatre. He will play anywhere for any occasion because he thinks of live looping as the folk music of the future.
(*Martha Stewart Brand: fine products since 1998. A wholly owned subsidiary of K-Mart Corporation...)
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