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Book Reviews
Now and Forever
By: Tilman Baumgartel - Zero Books - $29.95

Description: Elvis Presley and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The Beatles and Andy Warhol. Terry Riley and Ken Kesey. What all these artists have in common is that loops have played a significant role in their work.

The short sequences of sounds or images repeated using recording media have proved to be an astonishingly flexible, versatile and momentous aesthetic method in post-World War II art and music.

Today, loops must be counted among the most important creative tools of postmodern art and music. Yet until now they have been largely overlooked as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Now, for the first time, this book tells a secret story of the 20th century: how a formerly inconspicuous basic function of all modern media technology gave rise to complete artistic oeuvres, musical styles such as minimal music, hip hop and techno, and, most recently, entire scenes and subcultures that would have been unthinkable without loops.

Verdict: Everything remains the same, only the appearance changes - Anton Webern. Repetition, they say, is the mother of skill, but it’s also the mother of music production (well, mother may be a bit of a stretch, but it’s certainly important!). From the repetitive structure of electronic music and looped samples, to repeated melodic ideas and delay effects, repetition is a key part of music production in many ways.

Here in Now and Forever: Towards a Theory and History of the Loop, author Tilman Baumgartel comprehensibly explores the many ways that repetition has been incorporated in music production over the decades.

Drawing on real examples from classic tracks, along with diving into other loop forms inherent to technical media, such as film, we quickly discover that loops have been more prevalent in postmodern art, film and, of course, music down the decades than you could have ever imagined.

With a drop tag line of A Secret Acoustic History of the 20th Century, the book explains how the loop has an absolute staple of music production, and in ways that you might truly have never envisioned.

In the ’60s and ’70s the idea of looping a bar of audio for a whole track was frowned upon by many. The popular mindset was that you should record every element in full for the entirety of the track, otherwise it’s not real music. More creatively minded artists provided to be exceptions of course, The Beatles famously experimented with tape loops on their later projects.

Since the late ’80s and early ’90s, the rise of sampling in music production made looping the norm, and nowadays platforms like Loopcloud have made the whole process easier than ever. Genres defined by this technique are hip hop, house, disco edits, and modern pop.

Indeed, if we wish to get technical, which I won’t bore you with too much now, but a Micro Loops is a technique that’s often used in electronic music and is simply the taking of tiny snippets of audio files and looping them. These snippets are referred to as grains and using them in sound design is termed granular synthesis.

Furthermore, when you get down to the granular level these tiny parts of samples just act as oscillators and so can be used in a granular synth as any waveshaped oscillator would be.

But, I digress, and so getting back on track, what Tilman Baumgartel aims to do here in this plush, lush, hefty and chock full of heartfelt passion for the prose, is showcase how we have been living with loops in all forms for as long as we, and even our parents, and their own parents, can possible recall.

Indeed, Baumgartel’s own introduction to this phenomenon was when he himself purchased his very first Commodore 64, itself embedded with its own BASIC programming code within, and of which after he was prompted on screen to type in certain commands, found that moments later the program did nothing but type the word Hello on the monitor over and over (until he physically ended it); meaning that this was his own, personally created, virgin loop.

As for aforementioned, versatile and momentous aesthetic method in post-World War II art and such, well, one has to look no further than the terms web, skein and, of course, loop, which are all terms usually associated with textiles; but are also surprisingly common referents for the formal qualities of a wide range of art created over the past 60 years.

Furthermore, these words are particularly apt for describing the linear, gestural painting of American Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose work gained critical acclaim in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Their calligraphic abstractions were meant to convey the direct process and expression of the artist, an idea borrowed from Surrealists who emigrated to the United States before and during World War II.

The Surrealists commitment to automatic writing - allowing the unconscious to guide the creative process - was extremely influential. The artist’s gestures, whether handwriting or larger movements of the body, became the vocabulary of personal self-discovery and revelation of his or her psychological states.

But then some artists eliminated the emotional and individual references in their work by reducing their compositions to basic geometric elements, such as Robert Mangold’s looped compositions of the 1960s and 1970s; of simple shapes drawn within polygons.

People have asked down the years, is it cheating to be looping so much in recordings, but I think the industry believes that as long as you’re making an effort to use the loop in a way that feels unique to your sound, there’s nothing wrong with having them in your songs.

Ergo, there are many approaches to making repetition in music fresh and interesting, but perhaps taking the best bits from each to develop hybrid techniques that better suit your very own, and unique style, is the way to go.

About the Author - Tilman Baumgartel (PhD) is a writer. He lives in Berlin and teaches media studies at Hochschule Mainz. Previously he was a professor at the University of the Philippines in Manila (2005-2009) and at the Department of Media and Communication at the Royal University of Phnom Penh (2009-2012).

He has written or edited nine books on various aspect of media culture, including internet art, computer games, the aesthetics of loops and the director Harun Farocki. Schleifen. Zur Geschichte und ästhetik des Loops is his latest publication.

Official Book Purchase Link

www.JohnHuntPublishing.com





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