After living with thwarted technolust since last June, I finally got myself an iPhone on Monday. Verdict: amazing, beautiful, world-historical. I quickly got tired of the generic wallpaper, so I poked around in my files and found a scan of a gorgeous music score by the avant garde American composer George Crumb, whom I posted about two years ago. I spent a few minutes turning the score into a 320x480 graphic, and now it greets me each time I pick up my phone. Even though it’s too small for the details to be visible, it still looks super-cool on the high-res iPhone screen. (I’ve uploaded a much bigger copy of this score so you can see it in all its glory; you can view it here.)

You can download this and use it on your own phone:

Ever since I started this site, a year and a half ago, I’ve been wanting to post about the young British musician Stuart Wyatt, a classically trained electric violinist who plays solo live shows using foot-controlled loop samplers, a technique known as live looping. Wyatt used to have a robust website with plenty of free mp3s, but health problems and financial difficulties forced him to abandon the site in 2004 or 2005, and it eventually disappeared. I was happy a few weeks ago to discover that he now has a new site up with lots and lots of his music.

I do live looping with guitars and electronics, and I first became aware of Wyatt’s music in 2000 or 2001 through his participation in the Looper’s Delight mailing list. At the time, Wyatt was living in Paris and making money by bringing a rechargeable amp out to the Place des Vosges and creating elaborately layered instrumentals with the help of a battery-powered 14-second loop sampler (the classic Line 6 DL4):

Wyatt typically starts a piece by sampling himself playing a four-, eight- or sixteen-bar melody or rhythm. As the initial phrase repeats itself over and over again, he plays melodies and harmonies over the top of the loop, occasionally tapping the record button with his foot to add new phrases to the existing loop. In the right hands (and feet), such as Wyatt’s, live looping is mesmerizing to watch: Over many minutes, you watch and listen as a single musician slowly builds a simple musical phrase or section into a fully formed piece of music, often with harmonies, rhythms, drones, and counterpoint. A lot of the time, looping is simultaneously a composition and a performance, where a musician is reacting to what he or she has just played.

Here’s an excellent track called “Thursday Piece,” which Wyatt improvised live at home in 2002 with an Electrix Repeater—one of the best music gadgets ever. I own one and am obsessed with it.

“Thursday Piece” is about 12 minutes long, and it builds and develops slowly but beautifully. A lot more mp3s are on Wyatt’s main music page. If you like what you hear, you might drop him a little money through PayPal—he’s apparently having a rough time these days.

Live looping dates back to the early 1960s, when the minimalist composer Terry Riley developed the Time Lag Accumulator, a dual reel-to-reel system that let him record and loop a simple musical idea and then overdub dozens of improvised parts. The result was a massive, hypnotic, and ever-growing wall of sound. In the early 1970s, with help from Brian Eno, Robert Fripp began experimenting with a Riley-style reel-to-reel system that he later named Frippertronics. (“There it was,” Fripp later said, describing his discovery of this technique, “a way for one person to make an awful lot of noise. Wonderful!”) After years of experimenting with looping in the studio—on albums by Peter Gabriel and Hall & Oates (!) as well as his own—Fripp took the setup on the road in the late 1970s and early 1980s for a series of solo guitar-and-tape-delay concerts. Here’s some more looping history. These days, inexpensive digital technologies—both software and hardware—give both amateurs and pros a remarkable amount of looping power: There are now tons of great cheap looping devices on the market, almost all of them much more powerful and versatile than Fripp’s 1970s reel-to-reel system.

Because looping is a technique, not a genre, it is used in a wide range of music styles. The singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur plays solo live shows using two loop samplers and a stageful of effects devices, which allow him to create the sound of an entire band: He’ll start a song by tapping and slapping a beat on the neck and body of his acoustic guitar, and then he’ll layer arpeggios, strums, and backing vocals to accompany his own voice. It’s pretty incredible to watch. (The singer-songwriter Howie Day has apparently used looping in a similar way, though I’ve never seen or heard him do it.) This guy does tight, intricate beatboxing with the help of a great software program called Ableton Live. And this fairly technical Guitar Player article explores how various prominent guitarists incorporate looping into their playing.

On my own music page, you can hear a few tracks where I use looping extensively, though not in a live, real-time way. For those tracks, I built up a bunch of loops and then remixed them in my studio.

Greetings from my new apartment on East First Street, where I moved ten days ago after having lived on the Upper West Side since the Harding administration. The move, combined with a couple of busy periods at work, is the reason for the relative silence here so far this year. But I’ll be putting up a fair amount of stuff over the next few weeks—I have a big backlog of things I’ve been meaning to post about.

I have a lot more wall space in my new place than I did in my old one, so I’ve been happily accumulating things to hang on the walls. For a couple of years I’ve been meaning to find books of original scores by the American avant-garde composer George Crumb (b. 1929), who often uses highly unconventional, and graphically gorgeous, techniques to represent his music on the page. I haven’t heard much of Crumb’s music, but the scores themselves are simply sublime works of art. The staves on Crumb’s manuscript pages often dip, curl, and twist back into themselves, forming crucifixes, peace signs, closed loops, and various other symbolic shapes.

I bought two Crumb collections from sheetmusicplus.com: Makrokosmos Volume I (1972) and Makrokosmos Volume II (1973), both of which are for amplified piano. The design of my site can’t accommodate large, detailed graphics, but these images should give you a sense of the beauty of Crumb’s manuscript pages. The first image is a composition called “Twin Suns,” which is part of Makrokosmos Volume II. I rotated the image about 100 degrees clockwise so it would fit in this column:

Here’s a detail from “A Prophecy of Nostradamus,” also from Makrokosmos Volume II:

I’m going to frame four or six or eight of these and put them up in my apartment. As unplayable as they look, Crumb’s scores are all quite playable by experienced musicians. Don’t ask me how.

Here are video excerpts from an interview with Crumb in which he talks about some of his techniques. And on this page you can listen to sound samples and download cropped PDFs of some Crumb scores.

Okay, more soon…

One evening in 1994, my friend Nina sat me down and played me “Water From a Vine Leaf,” an ecstatic seven-minute epic by the British producer and synth wizard William Orbit, whose redesigned website went online yesterday. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that hearing “Water From a Vine Leaf” changed my life. I had been playing guitar for ten years at that point, and under Orbit’s spell I slowly moved away from rock guitar riffing and became an electronics-obsessed knob twirler (though I never stopped playing guitar). By the late ’90s, when it had become possible to cram an entire recording studio inside an off-the-shelf computer, I was spending endless hours at my Mac creating Orbit-influenced electronic tracks and then layering guitars over the top of them. Orbit is also responsible for my discovery of the glories of the resonant analog filter, for which I will be eternally grateful to him.

A couple of years after I discovered Orbit, Madonna enlisted him to be her main collaborator for the album that would become Ray of Light. He is now a very rich man. These days he has a very comfortable and lucrative career producing tracks for artists ranging from U2 and Blur to Pink and All Saints. He’s also known for having more or less discovered Beth Orton, who does a spoken-word thing toward the end of “Water From a Vine Leaf.” In 1993, the same year “Water From a Vine Leaf” was released, Orbit and Orton recorded an album together called SuperPinkyMandy. It was only released in Japan, and it’s now a collector’s item. I have a bootleg of it; it’s very hit or miss.

Orbit’s redesigned site has a lot of rare stuff on it, including dozens of snippets of the music he’s been working on for his next solo record. He hasn’t recorded an album of his own material since the mid-’90s, so the sound samples are especially cool to hear. (Pieces in a Modern Style, his collection of electronic versions of classic works by Bach, Satie, and other composers, was recorded in the mid-’90s but wasn’t given wide release until 2000.) The site’s video section includes the original “Water From a Vine Leaf” video, which I had never seen before. It’s a misguided New Age mess. Beth Orton appears in it, whirling like a dervish.

[Continue reading "William Orbit, King of the Knob Twirlers"...]