By WALLACE BAINE
Sentinel entertainment writer
According to its organizer and key fomenter, the event to be held at the Cayuga Vault in Santa Cruz will be the largest and most comprehensive festival of its kind.
Ever.
In the history of the world.
There is no reason to doubt Rick Walker, the voraciously creative and experimentally minded Santa Cruz musician who will serve as host of the Y2K2 Loopfest. Walker’s passion is looping, a relatively new musical arena from which he has built the Loopfest, a gathering of like-minded musicians and tech-heads from places near and far (though mostly near). Walker will welcome 48 musicians and performers, plus recording engineers, video artists and anyone else interested in the musical high-tech avant garde at the two-day festival of loopers, who as a group aren’t yet able to command mass audiences. "I’m going to have 15 people sleeping in sleeping bags in my house," said Walker. "It’s going to be great."
What is looping?
What Walker is talking about has nothing to do with airplane stunts, calligraphy or rides at the Boardwalk. Looping is a technology that allows a musician to build layer upon layer of rhythm, melody or texture, to create a dynamic new experiment in sound.
It is, in essence, a collaboration with oneself. Looping machines allow you to lay down, say, a drum track, to which you add a bass line, then a secondary percussion instrument, then a kazoo if you like — all in real time. It’s like building a musical sandwich.
The idea of looping is a cornerstones of hip-hop and electronica. The term comes from the notion of tape looping, the practice of making recording tape into a loop so that a piece of music plays over and over again. Hip-hop music developed in the 1970s and ’80s when pioneering DJs like Grandmaster Flash and Kool DJ Herc in the Bronx began isolating component parts of soul, R&B and disco records, drum parts called break beats or pieces of melody called samples. These pieces of songs were played on a loop, an innovative shortcut in creating rhythm tracks.
"The drum set is the most expensive thing to record," said Walker, a life-long percussionist who led the group Worlds Collide (and others) in the ’80s and ’90s. "You have to have space. You have to have isolation. It has to be miked properly. It’s just a giant ordeal to record drums right. "So what these guys were doing was finding those parts of songs in which you’d hear nothing but the drums, the break beat, and taking those out for their own use as percussion."
The process of looping was first done on turntables. A DJ would have two turntables, each playing the same album. On the first turntable, he might play a five-second piece of percussion, at the end of which he would play the same sample from the second turntable while backtracking on the first to the same point and so on: a loop. These days, technology is infinitely more sophisticated. About 10 years ago, a machine called a Jam Man allowed individuals to create digital loops on the fly, which accounts for the flowering of the artform on display at this weekend’s event.
Scheduled to show at the event will be musicians and engineers but also key players in the development of the technology. MIT-educated theorist, composer and designer Richard Zvonar will present a lecture on the history of looping. Walker will lead a panel discussion on the future of looping with Zvonar and looper Kim Flint, who maintains the go-to Web site for looping fans called loopers-delight.com. Walker, his brother and long-time collaborator Bill Walker and Southern California guitarist Andre LaFosse will demonstrate new and useful gadgets in the field. Then there are the performances by a conga line of various musicians, most from the West Coast and more than a few from Santa Cruz (a fact that leads Walker to declare Santa Cruz the "Looping Capital of the World"). Among those slated to perform are John Whooley, the UCSC-trained front man of Estradasphere; Pete Coates, who runs the venue at which the event takes place, the Cayuga Vault; the edgy Bay Area electronica cabaret diva Amy X. Neuberg; local improv actor Matthew Schreiber and Ms. Pinky, the nom de guerre of a performer and the software he’s developed that allows DJs to burn digital samples into a vinyl record.
Walker, under the pseudonym "Loop-pooL," is preparing to release his second looping CD, titled "Translucent Dayglo Lime Green Plastic," which is a good description of Walker’s whimsical artistic sensibilities. The album is a document of Walker’s love for "found-object" music, creating sound from everyday items and manipulating them with looping technology to create something altogether different. "Brass bowls are great," says Walker of one of his favorite percussion instruments. "You would not believe the great sounds you get out of a brass candy dish." The green plastic of the new disc’s title is a reference to the translucent green PVC pipes Walker taps, raps and blows into to create both a sound and a compelling dayglo-and-black-light stage show. "To take something that people know and see all the time and re-contextualize it, making it into an instrument for art — for me, that’s just magic." Walker spends a lot of time shopping for any little thing that might make an interesting sound that he can digitally sample. He habitually visits flea markets and retail stores such as K-mart, Spencer’s Gifts and Everything for a Dollar, each time keeping an open mind, looking for nothing specific. "I probably have the biggest collection of vibrators not used for sex in the world," he said, recreating the sound the sex toys make when put into an empty glass jar.
Walker also has big plans for looping, including a tour of the Bay Area and participating in a European looping festival. Walker wants to spread the word about looping in places a lot less experienced with avant-garde musical forms. He’s hoping he can coordinate or support looping performances in Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield and Las Vegas.
He’s quick to point out that the artists from Loopfest are all coming to town on their own dime and all proceeds from the event will go directly to the Cayuga Vault, a venue that has suffered with financial resources in recent months.
Walker hopes that the performances, presented on two stages, will blend together in a loop of live music. The instant a musician finishes on one stage, the second musician will pick up the vibe on the second stage. If there’s a glitch in the system, Walker will be there with a portable looping system on a battery pack, built on a marching-band drum harness, to jump in and fill in the gaps — bridging the loop.
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