On The Road: Loop 2016

This was my second time at Loop, a summit for music makers put on by Ableton in Berlin, Germany. It reminds me of a DIY art/music event that ran for years in Newcastle, Australia called TINA – a combination of the cold war architecture of Funkhaus and the eclectic curation led me to that association.

This year, Loop had doubled in size from 500 attendees to over 1000, so the venue needed to be much larger than the previous year. And it was - the venue, Funkhaus, was a Soviet-era recording facility for communist propaganda and the place from which GDR radio programs were broadcast. It’s still the biggest recording facility in the world - a place where it’s easy to get lost wandering the back corridors.

The nature of Loop programming is such that it’s not possible to see everything. In fact, there are several things happening at any one time. This means you get to curate your own unique Loop experience and that it’s unlikely two people will have the same experience, unless they were to follow Each other. This has its pros and cons; I noticed that some people were constantly slipping in and out of talks, performances, and presentations trying to capture moments of two things at once. It was disruptive at times. So I'll report on where I went.

The first Loop event I visited for the day (Friday) was a discussion The View From Here: Localized scenes in a globalized World – I had this earmarked already after a chance breakfast with Demian Litch, a techno artist out of Mexico City. She’s leading the charge in a revolution for young female producers out of Mexico and she’s nailing it. Her work has a strong feminist nature with a lot of concern about the value of women (or lack thereof) in Latin culture. (At present, six women are murdered daily in Mexico with no one convicted of those crimes.)

The discussion was great, Demian highlighted that Latin America is vibrant and passionate about electronic media at the moment, largely due to technology becoming more affordable and networking across borders made easier with social media. Demian has really built some vast networks both in the USA and through Europe and she is playing globally now.

Next, I checked out a presentation Versum: A journey through sight & sound with Tarik Barri. Tarik produces an incredibly well-synchronized 3D environment that takes into account the space, size, and speed of the imagery and the levels of the synchronized sound to each of the generated images - they correspond sonically, depending on their position within that environment. He uses Max, Max for Live, Open GL/GLSL and Java to pull all of this together. Hard to imagine, and incredible to see in person. Many jaws were on the ground by the end of his presentation.

I slipped upstairs to the sound chamber/freezer (at least that’s how it felt) to see Robert Henke’s installation Fragile Territories.

I haven’t felt like this about an installation for a while. The blue/purple glow reminded me a little of Ugo Rondinone’s ‘Our Magic Hour’ installation at the MCA in Sydney, 2003 - it certainly gave me the same chills and the feeling of the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. The sound and vision were excellent and the chill of the freezer-like sound chamber only added to the evocative feelings. I very much enjoyed the sound, but personally would have liked it a little louder, something where the sound immersed the viewer at the same level as the exquisite but fragile visuals. The lasers emit light with a clarity that I feel is still hard to reproduce with video projectors and it certainly makes it possible to break out of that 16:9 paradigms. Robert’s work organically combines with the space and activates it in a way that you could be forgiven for thinking it’s always there. I amused myself by imagining what would have happened if someone had walked into the same sound chamber and seen this in the 1950s - they would they have thought they'd entered a black hole and been ejected into another dimension or that they were in the presence of some serious witchcraft!

Next, I headed over to the green room, where I got to sit down and chat with Mari Kimura, a long-time Max user (since 1991). Mari has creative insights and an academic/research background like no one else I know and I’ll be sharing those with you in a future newsletter article. Another great thing about spending some time with Mari in the green room was that eventually Morton Subotnick showed up - and joined us in conversation. Upon learning that I was from Los Angeles, Morton regaled me with an hour-long story about growing up in Boyle Heights in the thirties and forties, going to school, and battling local gangs just to keep your head above ground. It made me laugh when he mentioned it took an hour to get to Santa Monica back then because there were no freeways - I had to let him know that it’s still the case now even with freeways.

Later, I see Morton play live in surround sound (4 channel), accompanied by Lillevan who produced live visuals. An exquisite 50 minute-long performance that saw the two combine and divide at times throughout the performance. I was captivated by many these moments of synesthesia, and the main hall was alight with a attentive audience. I don’t think I’ve ever seen 1000+ people so quiet and still.

The following day, I caught Open Audio Communities: Sharing the knowledge - a panel that included Johannes Taelman (Axoloti – like the Nord Micro Modular or the Mexican lizard, depending on your point of view), Astrid Bin (Bela), Olivier Gillet (owner of Mutable Instruments), and Tom Whitwell (Music Thing Modular and huge open source enthusiast). Each of them presented fantastic overviews of their work, where they came from, and the path that got them to where they are now.

Olivier Gillet was a lot of fun. His talk explained how he went from coding for super corporate top secret stuff to wanting to work in the open source world. Olivier’s process for me is interesting; Due to the popularity of his modules, a number of people spread throughout the world have taken to producing copies of his boards and building them. For some of those people, it’s their main Livelihood. Gillet doesn’t seem to care, as long as he covers costs on the first run (after which time he releases the source code, build schematics etc.) then he is happy. He even went as far to say he doesn’t care if cheap knock-offs start coming out of China (I’m kind of surprised we’ve not seen this yet in the eurorack world, actually).

Performance-wise, I sneak in to see Matthew David and Diva perform live. They're both regulars of Los Angeles’ tape/new wave community, and nice people to boot. They completed a near 2-hour-long set of live improvised music. I think it’s mostly live looping-oriented based work with very few samples playing back. They work hard and the performance is phenomenal, both Matthew and Diva bring much needed warmth to the room through their durational set.

The Robotics presentation by Gil Weinbern and Mason Bretan of Geortia Tech brought an interesting change to my day. They have a robot they present called Shimi whose software can listen to music, patterns, translate those and reinterpret them back within a meaningful manner to the musician. This can also happen in a collaborative call-and-response scenario or a live situation where it is as if you’re improvising with another bandmate (i.e. the robot in this case). The robots even give this process a kind of physical presence, with mannerisms emulating the musician playing along with it.

The last Loop day is the one I had a chance to present a Max for Live workshop. I love sharing Max knowledge with users and this workshop was full of enthusiastic attendees. In just an hour and a half we worked through making a generative synth, a midi controllable/playable FM synth and a morphing trigger sequencer for the control of out board hardware. Attendees seem quite happy with what they achieved in the workshop and that's a wrap.

After wrapping up the workshop, I headed up to Hall 1 to experience The Kopenhagen Laptop Orchestra, who lit up Hall 1 in a way I had not seen all weekend. I think it might have been the “in the pit” format in which they played - people crowded around them while they moved through an incredibly organic set with a synchronicity I’ve not seen before. There are several machines running Max, all of them synced using Live as master sync and distributing that across each computer. I’m not entirely sure on the finer technical details, but after connecting with Andreas Wetterberg at Loop, I will be diving into an interview with him in the near future - so I will find out more.

I take a short break to grab a coffee, Loop had organized a vast array of food stalls for the summit but my favorite place for a snack was an old antique café that was built as part of Funkhaus from the beginning, their apple sponge cake was to die for and I revisited it many times throughout the weekend.

After my break, I headed back to Hall 1 to see Suzanne Ciani. I had the pleasure of meeting Suzanne earlier in the week, sharing some great conversation with her about music, synthesis, and how she was led back to the modular after years of playing the piano.

Suzanne’s presentation, Life in the Waves, started with a 20-minute performance and it was brilliant! Her performance was a lot more active than I was expecting - a Buchla 200e, an iPad running the Moog Aninmoog app and another iPad controlling to Eventide H9 external effects units. Suzanne was moving around a lot and really playing her setup moving, shaping, and sculpting the sound. This stands as one of the best live improvised modular performances I’ve ever seen - arpeggios and sequences with a side of random and chance made for a dynamic sound that gave you enough predictability to latch onto for the journey with no chance of repetitious boredom. Clearly, Suzanne is a virtuoso of the Buchla and an exceptional artist separate from the machine.

Her conversation that followed her performance was charismatic and she showed no signs of recordings from the 70s, some decayed too far to ever be resurrected. Despite this loss, Suzanne had great positive outlook for the future, and she mentioned that she's currently in discussion with engineers to make hardware in similar style to Buchla, but beyond. An interesting point that came up is with her recent return to modular synthesis and the alienation of her early fan base resulted from her playing the acoustic piano for the past three decades. She said that she intends to engage with that perceived split further by hosting a concert or concerts where she plays the piano one night and the Buchla 200e the other. If I’m anywhere close when these happen I’ll be there.

To close out Loop, we got to hear a sermon from the one and only Lee Scratch Perry. This was meant to be a panel discussion with Lee, Subatomic Sound System, and Volker Schaner (who’s been making a documentary about Lee), moderated by Frances Morgan of Wire Magazine. The thing about this panel discussion was that nothing really progressed too far in the way of discussion. Lee Scratch Perry had something he wanted to say. Frances would interject in an attempt to keep the panel going along a trajectory she had planned prior. When Lee would get a chance to talk again, he almost would have to start at beginning again with what it was he was trying to tell us all, so he never got the chance (I felt) to get really deep into his thoughts and process.

Lee took great delight in letting everyone in the room know that we were just ‘babies’ still and that ‘shit’ is good, sometimes you just need a little ‘shit’ to make it good! I like to think he was referring to his days of dirty dub delays and mixer feedback in the studio. It was great to see someone (his grandson?) rolling joints for him side of stage, coming on stage on two occasions to give them to Lee so he could light up and huff & puff during the discussion, the audience of course delighted with this expression of freedom.

In any case, some people thought that Frances did a great job in steering the panel in a particular direction - but I couldn’t help but wonder.... What if Lee Scratch Perry was just handed the mic? What more did he have to say? I would bet money that we would have been in for one hell of a ride. We'll never know.

In summarising Loop, it is a phenomenal opportunity to meet with a large amount of creatives. The energy is fantastic and if you have the slightest creative urge it's going to come out the other side a raging driven giant. While I was in attendance as a Cycling '74 employee and presenter, I received a huge amount of creative inspiration from attending. If you have the cycles, I recommend applying and getting to Loop next year. You'll be a better artist, musician, creative for it!