Now and Forever: Towards a Theory and History of the Loop
by Tilman Baumgartel (Music 780.07 Bau)
It’s hard to imagine modern music
without the concept of “looping.” The concept got its name from the original
physical method of its execution, which consisted of taking a piece of magnetic
audio tape with something recorded on it, cutting a length of the tape holding
a segment of sound one wants to use, and then splicing the end of the tape back
to its beginning, creating a physical “loop” of tape. Some tape loops were very
long before coming back around to repeat again at the beginning, while others
were fairly short, creating repetition that was obvious to listeners. As
technology evolved, the name for such repeating parts has changed, but the
underlying concepts of a “sample,” “beat,” or “sequence” are used for similar
musical means as a “loop.” And they are everywhere in modern music, from pop to
hip-hop to electronic music to contemporary classical ideas. While there have
been books that touch on the significance of these repetitive practices in
music, Tilman Baumgartel, a German media theory professor, has written what
might be the first full-length book to focus on the loop itself. It’s called Now and Forever: Towards a Theory and History of the Loop,
and you can borrow it from the Polley Music Library.
In his introductory chapter,
Baumgartel makes an analogy between audio loops and simple computer programming
loops: on his Commodore 64 computer in the early 1980s, the first BASIC script
he learned to code was a simple program that would cause “Hello” to repeat on
the screen. He extends the analogy to the various bits of looped material that
we all encounter in our daily lives now, from looped hold messages when making
calls, to repeated commercials in public spaces. Various combinations of audio,
video, and text are provided to us on repeat from every form of media. From a
philosophical standpoint, the connection between loops and technology is
foundational—our machines have often been made to take the pressure of mentally
or physically exhausting repetitive tasks off of human beings, after all. It
would be possible to write a book tracing the philosophical implications of
evolving technology and the effects of looping/repetition on the thinking of
the general populace, kind of an extension of the avenues explored by authors
like Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman. But this is not that book. Instead,
Baumgartel states that, “It is about music and art forms that are shaped
and characterized by repetition because they are produced using the machines of
modern media, the computers.”
This is a delicate distinction to
make, but I can understand the necessity of it for the sake of a book-length
argument. Baumgartel acknowledges that repetition is of course a common
component of all kinds of art and music throughout history, but the focus here
will be on more modern forms of technology that make repetition a kind of
automatic process, where a machine such as a computer is used for easy
repetitions. And there has to be an “artistic” use of the repetition, so more
novel forms of repetition like the Zoetrope of the 1800s aren’t included, while
others like cinematic film and audio tape are. Broadly speaking, the author
discusses major 20th Century movements in music and art through a lens of how
they were impacted by concepts of looping/repetition.
What do we find here, then? There
are some fascinating connections made among looping-related artists in several
disciplines that I had not considered before. Baumgartel looks at artists in
the fields of film, music, and visual art, and in particular, I think he does a
great job addressing the cinematic use of looping. One of the earliest examples
of a looped piece of art was the Edison film “The Kiss,” a mere 20 seconds of
footage that was played repeatedly for laughs starting in 1896. The repetition
of the moment seemed comical to audiences because of its short, mechanical
nature. This concept was leveraged again much later in the 20th century by pop
artists like Peter Roehr and Andy Warhol, who used various forms of short,
repeated gestures on film, both made by themselves and from commercial sources,
to comment on consumer culture and human nature. Roehr was also known as a
minimalist artist, whose simple, repetitive blocks of colors and shapes have a
certain looping quality that resonated with his video and audio montage
techniques.
Where music is concerned, the book
is broadly divided into two chronological parts. In the first part,
manipulation of tape loops isn’t for the sake of emphasizing repetition:
instead, it was a way to create new kinds of sounds through speeding up or
slowing down tape, playing it backwards, or splicing different sections
together outside of the chronological timeline in which they were created. The
nature of sounds could be altered as well: for example, cutting off the initial
articulation of piano notes makes them sound like something more akin to the
synthesizers that were developed decades after composers like Pierre Schaeffer
laid the foundations for musique concrete, electroacoustic, and acousmatic
music through careful tape manipulation. Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen took
these ideas even further than Schaeffer, cutting bits of sound into tiny
fragments of tape and reassembling them in a search for new sounds, or the
essence of sound itself, perhaps hidden from us ordinarily by the strict
progression of time in ordinary sound production. But in these musical
examples, I start to find weaknesses with the author’s arguments as presented
here. For example, I think there could be an interesting look at the difference
between “looping” and “splicing” of tape in these early days, and following the
evolution of the “splice” further toward the present day. The splice is easily
as influential on contemporary arts as the loop, but in very different ways. In
it, we find much of the chaotic mashups of musical styles that came later, some
through manipulating recordings in the work of artists like John Oswald, and
others literally playing live montages like John Zorn. The splice, with its
inherent anti-chronological, ahistorical nature, is the perfect antecedent for
the hyperlinked functionality of the internet, the defining technology of our
time. Slapback tape echo, generated using playback and recording heads of
varying distances, is also brought up as a form of repetition, popularized on
many recordings starting in the 1950s, such as Elvis Presley’s early hits.
While it was an influential sound at the time, and led to various forms of
studio experimentation, I don’t think I would count it as tape manipulation or
repetition in the spirit presented in the rest of the book.
The second part of the book tackles
musical repetition, starting with the American Minimalism movement. Baumgartel
focuses especially on the work of Terry Riley, whose early 1960s experiments
with tape are among the first to harness the power of repetition through tape
loops. But I’m not sure that I agree with the author’s analysis that Riley’s
work with tape was fundamentally inspired by the technology itself: he asserts
that “Terry Riley derived this compositional technique directly from the
potentials of the tape loop.” Strictly speaking, his techniques with tape
obviously came from working with tape and seeing what it could do, but the
historical record shows that his deeper inspirations came from the technical
tape-based work of his predecessors like John Cage and Richard Maxfield, the
cut-up (splice) techniques of Brion Gysin, and repetition-based music from
African and East Indian cultures. The author also asserts that, “Of all of the
avant-garde composers, (Riley’s) work probably had the greatest influence on
the pop music of his time,” a claim I’ve never seen elsewhere. One could find
evidence to the contrary in most books about the post-WWII avant-garde, where
Riley is mostly remembered for his non-tape pieces “In C” and “A Rainbow in
Curved Air,” and Baumgartel somewhat contradicts the idea himself when he
points out that much of Riley’s tape music was lost over time, and hardly any
of it was ever released publicly until decades later. Even if Riley was first,
and I don’t see evidence that he was except in a very narrow technical sense,
he still wasn’t influential for this period of his work, and the folks who
started hip-hop and techno music movements discovered ways to manipulate
samples on their own, quite apart from whatever was happening in the
avant-garde of the 60s. I wouldn’t call Riley the grandparent of the minimalism
movement, anyway: he and his contemporaries were more influenced by various
forms of world music and by the work of Erik Satie than the technology of their
day.
Looped manipulation of spoken texts
is addressed in several spots in the book, too, which is an area that hasn’t
been discussed much before. The topic appears in somewhat oblique form, though.
In the section on Peter Roehr, the “cut-up” techniques of Brion Gysin and
William Burroughs are mentioned, though somewhat dismissively: “Text or tape
snippets were randomly assembled, often with dismal results.” In fact,
Burroughs was creating some of the earliest collage-based tape works by simply
recording various sounds and readings, randomly moving the tape around via
fast-forward and rewind, and recording over pre-existing parts. Random, yes,
but it was an interesting technique for producing the audio equivalent of his
paper cut-up processes. Burroughs also employed very slow movements of tape
across playback heads to find unique, ghostly sounds, a process he called
“inching,” which produced unusual sounds like those Stockhausen was after. I
would assert that Burroughs’ techniques and philosophies in general exerted
more influence on 60s culture than Riley, though they were approaching the
issue from the different perspectives of the “splice” versus the “loop.” Then
there is a chapter on the use of tape delays by novelist Ken Kesey during his
tenure as the defacto leader of the Merry Pranksters, the pioneers of cultural
psychedelia. A well-regarded novelist of the time, Kesey’s group were the first
to “drop out,” to use Dr. Timothy Leary’s phrase from a few years later,
traveling in a proto-psychedelically painted bus, and throwing “Acid Trip”
parties around the West Coast. In the parlance of the time, Kesey and his
cohorts used tape delays and microphone relay systems to blend the world around
them with their own “rapping,” or extemporaneous poetry and speeches, which
Kesey thought would lead to new multimedia forms of the novel in the future,
and also aurally approximated the kinds of headspaces the group reached in
their Acid Tests. Baumgartel makes an important connection between looping and
early synthesizer technology in this section as well: Don Buchla, creator of
the Buchla synthesizers on the West Coast roughly contemporaneous with the work
of Bob Moog on the East Coast, developed the first sequencer for use with his
synths, and a sequencer is very much a form of electronic looping, causing a
synthesizer to repeat a pattern of sounds or actions.
Chapters toward the end focus on
early iterations of looping/repetition in pop music, particularly the Beatles’
“Tomorrow Never Knows,” and early days of disco music using sequencers, using
Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” from 1977 as an example. While
these are great examples, I am baffled by the lack of coverage of hip-hop or
techno, which are contemporary musical styles that have exerted massive
cultural impact that continues to the present. Hip-hop started around 1973, and
was well under way using record loops, samples and sequences by the time disco
got serious about it. Detroit techno, which laid the groundwork for 80s and 90s
electronic dance music, started shortly after disco, with the first Cybotron
and ANUMBEROFNAMES singles in 1981. If this book were to attempt to connect the
history of looping more closely to the present, these are the genres that have
had the most staying power, keeping these principles at the forefront of public
consciousness for the last 50 years. And then there isn’t any mention of how
guitarists have used loop pedal devices in a variety of genres since the 1980s,
a tradition founded upon the long tape loops produced by Robert Fripp in the
70s for his “Frippertronics.” On the “theory” side of the book’s research, I
was also surprised that there wasn’t any mention of the latest AI experiments
with music, film and text: machine learning forms of AI, after all, are
essentially treating large datasets as a master tape, from which smaller
“loops” of information are curated.
In the end, I think this is an
important book, and the topics it addresses are crucial for understanding how
modern music has evolved. But I’m glad that it features the “towards” part of
“towards a theory and history of the loop” in its subtitle, because I found it
to be far from comprehensive in both theoretical and historical contexts.
Hopefully simply raising these issues in a book-length discussion will lead to
more in-depth writing about the subject, though. I can see another book’s worth
of deeply relevant information that could be worked into this one.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try Sampling Media by David Alderman and Laurel Westrup (eds.),
Playing with Something that Runs by Mark J. Butler, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural
Practice by Robert Fink.)
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
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