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June 25
We've had a wonderful week in Wales and London.
The gig with Gareth Whittock (who uses the moniker Mantra) was really fun. Gareth was an extremely generous host and he put both us and (surprise!!!) Matthias Grob up in his really quaint 400-year old cottage on the outskirts of Swansea. It is just beautiful with a back yard that looks out over a huge field that goes up into the small hills outside of Swansea. He took us on a walk with his two dogs into territory that made me think I might see gnomes or fairies.............just beautiful and so verdant!
It was really great to see Matthias and a real surprise: he had wavered about whether to come to Swansea or not but he and I have this nice habit of cheerleading and cheering each other up when we are down. He would later return the favor a day later when I had a particularly bad pre-gig day for my first London date...........but more on that in a second.
We all three played at a club called the Monkey in Swansea. We played to a rather small but fascinated group of six people. Four of the women who were there had met Gareth at a Mongolian overtone singing workshop and one woman in particular kept singing a capella during some of our performances. It was cool but the woman misread my gesturing to invite her up to the microphone (or she was just shy).
I really enjoyed playing with Gareth for the brief time that I did. He uses a really unusual guitar that is a lap steel kluged onto an inexpensive Woolworth's 6-string electric. He has beautiful tone and uses a lot of e-bow and distortion. The e-bow can be overused and cliched, but Gareth sounded incredibly fresh and unique. He doesn't have a CD out yet but I'll buy it the second he does.............hint, hint, Gareth.
His music incorporates beats and chant samples that he triggers from a laptop. Also, interestingly, he is the first person I have met who uses Audio Mulch as his looping device. After all this dragging of gear around I'm praying someone invents some laptop software for real-time looping. Audio Mulch uses delays but are not dedicated realtime loops. Since Gareth knows the bpm of his precorded rhythm tracks he can set his delay times ahead of time, giving the illusion of real time looping. Very cool. He has an excellent grasp of sound and matching timbres (being a producer and studio owner for some time). Thoroughly enjoyable and our only regret was that we only had one day to see Swansea before we were off to London.
London: Had the first of two gigs at an incredible avante garde/free music/spoken word venue in the Angel/Islington area of London, The KLINKER at the Sussex. The proprietor of this club (which is held in the backroom of a cool bar), Hugh, has been supporting unusual music for the last 21 years and we had the pleasure of playing on the last night before he takes his first vacation in 7 years (!).
Matthias and I both played, solo and together. Before we started, however, I had a mini meltdown because 1) my reverse pedal broke on my Line 6, and 2) the AC pins on my extremely irritating Electrix Repeater got bent and I couldn't turn it on and 3) My wind synth quit working. Fortunately, the world's greatest Swiss watchmaker/loop hardware designer, Matthias, fixed both of my first two problems and I figured out the wind synth situation. I'd had a really bad day and just decided that this is what I would perform at my concert. Consequently, I had one of my most angular and outside improvs and...............lo and behold...........the audience loved it!! LOL.
Next day we went to the amazing British Museum and spent several hours there with Matthias, having dinner with a friend of his , Renu, who is a fascinating young Indian percussionist (tabla, Cuban percussion), before putting Matthias on the train to go back to Switzerland. Thursday evening, I played my last gig with Steve Lawson at the Klinker and I had a very enjoyable gig (with another bent AC pin scare which my wife Chris helped me fix------I need to buy a pair of reading glasses badly----I can't do any detailed electronic work because I can't see that close). I love my Repeater but I'm so pissed at whomever designed the AC for this unit..........it is just destined to break and a lot of my performance leaves if it does.........cross your fingers for me.
Well, today we leave for the 1st Cambridge Looping Festival. I will be the headlining act tonight. I'm really excited to here Os and all the other Cambridge loopers play. I'm also excited about meeting Andy Butler at the gig. He is not going to perform, but I have always appreciated his spirit and intelligence in all his e-mail communiques.
June 14
We arrived in Belfast after an exhausting day of travel from Stockholm.
We sadly said goodbye to Per Boysen and his sons after a wonderful few days of R&R in Stockholm. What an amazing city!!!! After the traumas of the last two weeks (having to leave the tour suddenly to return home for my mom's memorial), it was what the doctor ordered. Per is not only an amazing musician and a wonderful promoter of Live Looping, he is also a very intelligent, kind and generous man. He made Chris and me feel so welcome. We felt like family.
.........ahhhh, the odysseyan journey-- I figured it out:
We
WALKED to the
SUBWAY which took us to a
BUS to the
PLANE, then ended up taking a
FERRY to a
CAB ride to Paul Marshall's house outside of Belfast, Northern Ireland.
It took 16 hours and we were zonked when we got there.
We were blown away to discover that the excess baggage (two heavy 6- space rack cases and our large traveling suitcases) cost £400 extra ($600 USD) just to fly from Stockholm to Glasgow, and then were aghast when we discovered that our connecting flight to Belfast was 50 miles away on the other side of Glasgow. We gave up on that idea and took the ferry which ended up costing us £13 each-- saving another £400 of excess baggage fees. We're learning how to travel here but it is much more costly than we had anticipated.
Paul's place is like an analogue of our home in Santa Cruz. He is a wonderful percussionist and found sound artist and feels like a brother to me in a really short amount of time. He talks a mile a minute and it's taken a little time to be able to understand his Irish dialect, which has been fun and challenging. I told him last night, however, that I finally was able to understand him all the time..........ha ha ha!
Having missed our flight, I was forced to do an interview with BBC radio from the ferry dock (the single weirdest place I've ever done an interview), and the ferry staff were really kind and accommodating. Paul was in the studio and played a lovely piece for balaphone and looper to start off the short interview. Wow, I was on BBC radio.......what an exciting trip!!
The concert was amazing.........truly amazing. Paul started off and played his very first looping live performance after only owning his DL4 for two months. It took me 9 years of live looping shows before I had the courage to do a solo show so I was duly impressed. He had some trouble with feedback during his show but I found the whole thing wonderful. He has such a delight in sound. It really feels like finding a brother in the way that he has such love for the world of sound. His house is a wonderful jumble of incredible invented and percussive instruments.
The crowd was not large but was incredibly engaged and I had a wonderful time, playing perhaps one of my best solo sets of the tour so far. I started off, as I have been, with my piece for toy bells and was just in the zone.
We then did duets together, including an attempt to get a couple of really short live track additions to the upcoming Frame Drummers CD (whose Yahoo group is where we first met). Then we were joined by a delightful musician, Mark Buckingham, who played Contra Alto Clarinet which is an enormous bass instrument deeper than a Bass Clarinet.............what a timbre and an incredible player. I love the pieces we did, including one piece where I only looped and manipulated his performance, replaying it as a duet with him while Paul played Bodhran beautifully............God, what a great night of music.
I finally feel like I'm getting back to myself after my mom's death and this night was salve for the psyche.
Well, we are now going to see a sound sculpture that Paul invented for a local school playground. We travel to Swansea tomorrow after having participated in the very first Northern Irish Live Looping Festival............on to the 1st Welsh Live Looping festival on Monday night and then on to London and Cambridge. I'm so turned on and excited I can't tell you!
May 27
It is now Wednesday, May 27th after possibly the hardest week of my life. Mom was cremated today and we are going to have a memorial celebration of her life at the Cayuga Vault (the site of the Y2K2 Live Looping Festival). Linda and Pete, who run the Cayuga, have been incredibly generous and many, many good friends have been making dinner for us every night. We are still in the process of trying to tie up my mother's home and belongings, a process which has been very exhausting and sad. Tomorrow, I will start to try and find a flight back to Europe. I"m hoping and praying that I can return in time for the Belfast Looping gig with Paul Marshall on June 13th. Everything's booked so we are crossing our fingers.
May 26
On Tuesday morning, May 20th I woke up and got an e-mail from my brother in Santa Cruz telling me that my mother had died suddenly and unexpectedly following triple bypass surgery.
It was devastating to be so far away from my family and hear this news, and I fell apart. Chris and I decided to return to California immediately, and it was wrenching to have to tell Per and Matthias that we would have to be leaving the tour........... especially knowing that the prestigious Stockholm Electronica gig was pending. They were both wonderful and completely supportive however and concealed their disappointment in an effort to support me. I feel so grateful for how close we've become. Per just kicked into high gear to help us try and find a flight home. Matthias also stayed up all night long with me (because I couldn't sleep) and listened to me tell stories about my mom and cry. It really helped me to process all of this before getting to the airport the next day for an exhausting return to California. I feel such a debt of gratitude to Per and Matthias who have become like brothers to Chris and me. We've had so much fun...............so many interesting conversations that have given me great hope about the Live Looping movement...................we've also laughed our asses off..................These guys are just gems................truly wonderful musicians and great human beings. What a privilege it has been to play with them.
All the plane flights home cost between $2,000 and $5,000 apiece for booking without advance warning, so we decided to go to the Lufthansa desk at the airport and throw ourselves on the mercy of the airlines. We encountered an amazingly wonderful man there who arranged for us to take an $800 round-trip ticket back home. We now have one month to return if we want to.
We got back to Santa Cruz at 12 noon on Thursday, exhausted out of our brains, and spent the next 10 hours grieving with my brother, sister, their spouses and my beloved first cousin Linda. It was really great to be there all together.
The day before her last surgery I had a wonderful conversation with my mom on the telephone from Stockholm. In the call she told me not to come home for the operation but to stay and finish my tour. She said that she was okay and that she didn't have any fears about the outcome of the surgery. She told me that she loved me and my siblings dearly and that she knew that we could take care of ourselves. The strength in her voice was palpable and she sounded better than she had for the last two years, and I went away with a feeling of her strength, love and unconditional support of my siblings and me.
The surgeons were forced to do a triple bypass heart operation and she died soon after the surgery of complications. The surgery was just too much for her body. She was 75 years old and a light in my life. I wrote this about her to send to the Loopers Delight list, which has become a home away from home for me in the past few years:
My mother was always a firebrand. From as young as I can remember she always had an idealistic cause that she fought for. She had a razor sharp intellect and was highly educated. She didn't suffer fools gladly, but she always had a strong sense of morality and the fact that it is a relative thing in this world.
She taught my brother and sister and me to care about people and to guard and nurture a strong sense of optimism about the world, even as crazy and hopeless as it sometimes seems. She taught us to try to love and at least understand and have compassion (when that wasn't possible) for all people, no matter what their circumstances.
She championed education and was, at various times, a teacher, a chemist and a homemaker. She urged us not to let institutions of learning hold us back from the true passion of learning and was a voracious reader and a great lover of art and music (having played drums and violin as a kid)...............especially her beloved opera (a form of music that I ironically never shared a passion for). She frequently read a book a day when I was growing up.
If you have ever appreciated the work that Bill and I have done or the dedication we have had to our community (both in Santa Cruz and here at Loopers Delight) you have to thank my mother.................really!
Bill had a constant looping gig (yeah, they DO exist, believe it or not) at a local classy restaurant. Our mom went to every gig he played there and could always be seen nibbling on a dessert and taking pictures of the performance.
She constantly chronicled and championed our music careers and always encouraged us to follow our hearts and to stay supportive of one another. We owe so much to her.
My beloved mother, Mary Lee Jensen Walker, passed away this last week.
She was sharp as a tack up until the surgery and she felt no pain afterwards. She was at peace with herself; dearly loved and supported by her children and family and had no fear of death, which is an unbelievable blessing. I only hope that we will all be so lucky when our time comes.
Bill, Allee, and I and all our loving partners (Nancy, Ken and Chris) will miss her more than we can possibly say.
She was one of the good ones.
May 19
Yesterday was a good day. We played at a club in the countryside around Urshult called 'The Barn' in mid-southern Sweden (our third gig of the tour). We did a wonderful clinic for students of a small music school there. The students were being turned on to the concept of live looping for the first time and they were rapt with attention and obviously fascinated and enthralled with each part of the presentation.
Per, Matthias and I each have really different and unique approaches to live looping and improvisation that makes for a very varied and interesting clinic. After deciding on some topic questions ("what made you attracted to looping in the first place?", "What are some of your favorite looping techniques?", etc.), Per had us each speak a few sentences and then stopped to translate for the small minority of students who weren't comfortable with English.
I have to say that I am so impressed with the large number of Swedes who speak very good English. There is not as much incentive for me, personally, to learn Swedish phrases because practically everyone speaks at least rudimentary if not perfectly fluent English. I think I will have to smile a lot and use simple gestures by the time I finally get to Greece, where I won't have it so easy...lol.
For the sake of brevity (and because many of the students had a 50 kilometer drive after the concert) we decided to each play only one short ten minute solo piece and then finish the hour and a half performance with our trio set. I went first for the first time . Every night we are experimenting with different ways of scheduling the individual performances and seem to have settled on three short solo sets with a longer improvisational trio set to end the performance.
I was in the zone from the moment I started and began with my favorite piece of late, with a set of toy diatonic bells (like the kind you would find on the desk of a hotel). The owner of the barn, who turned out to be the most generous man (and who we later had a fascinating discussion about Buddhism with at the wonderful dinner he provided for us), said later that he wondered what weird music I was playing when he first heard me start. I was gratified that he bought one of my CDs at the end of the performance.
I then played my dayglo green piece (which can now be expanded to a full 45 minute performance if I care to and am in the zone). The crowd was really with me and were laughing at some of the sounds that I was making so I started clowning and making funny faces and it was a magical moment.
Matthias then came on and played an exquisite piece that began with just simple overtone manipulation, playing and looping single guitar notes. In his part of the clinic, Matthias had earlier talked about how he had developed the original prototype of the Echoplex as a way of manipulating overtones that had a strong hand in healing a back injury that he had.
At the break between the clinic and the concert a middle-aged man came up and introduced himself as a physiotherapist. He was fascinated by Matthias' story and asked us all many questions about looping and our equipment. As it turns out, he had never played music before but was a big fan of music. He said he was excited about the possibility of learning how to loop as an entry point into expressing himself musically. It was very exciting to hear his enthusiasm and we all felt like we had accomplished another success as live looping evangelists...lol...we joked earlier today about the fact that we are the Evangelistic Knights of Live Looping on our crusade to convert the rest of the musical world.
Now it was Per's turn to play and he did a beautiful piece of music that used the Sus Insert functions of the EDP with his white Stratocaster. He uses this technique which I have heard Andre LaFosse do in a clinic, but the musical results are very different from the way Andre expresses himself with it. I marvel at how three musicians can use the exact same technological 'trick' on a machine and have the music come out completely differently, even when they are playing the same kind of instrument.
Per then started a second piece and said that he would like it if Matthias or I would come up and join him as we got into the piece. This evolved into a really long beautiful set where we never stopped playing but morphed from one distinctive musical space to another, stopping by , as we went, to play in ambient, hard groove, avante garde and other styles. The small crowd gave us a really big ovation at the end and we ended up playing two well-received encores before we stopped in deference to the venue. The audience would have settled for another couple of encores if they had their way. It was exhilarating to me.
We finished packing up and then the owner (who we dubbed 'Buddha Boy') made a beautiful meal and then showed us to our quarters for the night: a beautiful bed and breakfast that sits on a lovely small lake. We each had our own room and all felt like kings. In the morning there was an incredibly well-stocked kitchen full of delicious food...we ate a leisurely breakfast, signed Buddha Boy's CDs and started the long drive back to Stockholm and Per's flat, which is where I type from now, thanks to the fact that Matthias' Mac laptop can run off of the car battery.
What an amazing world we live in that an American, a Brazilian and a Swede can drive around Sweden, playing and recording live concerts, digitally, onto a laptop while documenting the whole experience with words and digital photography... and it will all go onto a website within a few days...
May 17
I'm in Sweden. I can hardly believe it and have this urge to pinch myself every few hours. It is beautiful and cool. (I came a little under-prepared for cold nights and Per has told us that this is unusually cold weather for May.)
We are in the southwest of Sweden, inland at a place called Hultsfred, where we just played at an amazing venue called Metropol which is the music business annex of a larger institution called Rock City. There are roughly 100 students who attend classes on everything from internet music business to learning how to rig lights and run sound. Consequently, the venue we played in was a full working simulation of a high tech bar replete with a large sound and lighting system. They even had a huge industrial black light that I got to position over all of my blacklight instruments. The whole thing was made slightly surreal for the fact that the promoters booked us onto a festival of mostly classical music artists and there was hardly anyone at the gig.
This was the second gig on the tour and I have to say that I am loving traveling and performing with Per and Matthias. They are not only wonderful, inventive and sensitive musicians, but we have already started to develop a tour sense of group humor which is something that frequently doesn't necessarily develop on a tour. They have also both really opened up to Chris, who as I have mentioned previously, is the world's most intelligent, creative, beautiful and overqualified roadie. Two days ago I found a large pair of dayglo green 'alien' hands which, when I put them on, make me look like a frog. After terrorizing unsuspecting Swedish girls on the streets of Gothenburg, I have been dubbed "froggy boy".
Per, having had a hard time connecting with us when we arrived, took a short walk in the woods by the airport where he thought we were arriving. He got attacked by a huge dog and then managed to extricate himself from the situation and then befriend the dog...it seems like some kind of bizarre and weirdly auspicious omen...the tour mythology begins.
Both gigs (including the tour opener in the beautiful city of Gothenburg on the west side of Sweden) have been really good musically. We are finding our way as an improvisational trio and trying to sort out brother sync issues with the EDP's. Per and Matthias have just released new CDs which are both really beautiful. Matthias is also recording the gigs to his Mac via the Motu breakout box. We have a few days coming up in Stockholm for not only a needed rest, but also for listening to some of these recordings and seeing if any of them are worth saving. Since I just released a live CD last summer I have been aware that a small percentage of gigs that you record live actually end up being good enough to release commercially. I, as an example, culled 22 tracks from over 50 solo shows in three years.
I've now tried to document both Bass Looping festivals, the Y2K2 festival and the recent LaFosse/Lawson/Walker and have discovered that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to listen, collate, master and mix tracks from a live concert. From my experience it takes almost as long as making an original home studio cd. Trying to do it while you are touring is even more difficult but some of our improvisations have been really good, so I'm hoping that we will at least be able to upload some MP3s to either the LiveLooping.com site or to Per's or my sites.
The Rock City people graciously put us up in a student apartment last night and we each had the luxury of having a private room for the first time of the tour. Finding time alone is difficult on a multiple-person tour that needs to be done on as tight a budget as possible. Per is producing a tour like this for the very first time and I have to say that I'm incredibly impressed with his level of organizational acumen and also with his constant awareness of trying to save us all tour expenses. I myself (as has Per) have been involved with dozens of tours in my life as a side man, but I have never launched such an ambitious thing and I have to be really, really careful about staying on as tight a budget as possible.
The tour, so far, is how I imagined it would be: We are attempting a first here and what we are doing as self-professed looping artists is not well known yet in most places. Consequently, we are concentrating on trying to be educators as well as musical artists and I have to remind myself how hard I've worked where I live to try and turn people on to this exciting new paradigm for the making of interactive music when we encounter small audiences (which we have so far in the first two gigs).
Well, time is limited on the computer here and we still are not internet connected, so I will stop typing now. Off into the beautiful Swedish countryside to enjoy a breakfast/picnic on our way to our next gig. Life is hard but someone has to step up to the plate and do it...LOL.
click here to read more recent diary entries for July
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