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DELAYS
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This is the name I use for delayed feedback-assisted improvisations, which
I've been doing since about "1980". Robert Fripp is known as the pioneer of this tool, and I became aware of it through Art Scholtz with whom I played stringband music back then. In those days it was tape delay, where you string 1/4" magnetic tape between two tape decks, recording the signal using the first deck and playing it back from the second deck to the first, mixing that with the live signal. The periodicity of the repeat and the length of the tape were the only constraints. Nowadays, with Lexicon's Jam Man and similar "echo boxes" both those constraints have been removed, and I've done delays approaching four hours with on-the-fly change of the delay length. The new constraint is the recording medium's time limit. I hope with the new mp3 craze that I'll be able to make the longer delays available to the public on something other than multiple CDs or cassettes, since there should be no break in sound; but for now I can offer the best of the old ones and the one new delay I've done that was under eighty minutes. You can order CDs of any of the delays for which there are excerpts on this site, or if you're sure you'll like them sound unheard there are many others.
Delays often are put in the category of "experimental music". I don't think that's correct for these delays. We know exactly what we're doing; we just don't know what's coming next, which is the hallmark of all improvisatory endeavors. But we know that we don't know that.
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This is a really cool opera that I toured after we made this recording at Mills College. It's "opera for television" although it hasn't been broadcast. It's not your usual caterwauling and blustering but a very scary and subtle probe into the human psyche. And more even than in Wagner or Strauss, the Music is in the Words. Give a listen.
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Al Margolis records people like me improvising over soundscapes he's created, so the effort is very collaborative, and the virtual band is If, Bwana. He has lots of stuff in the can, but so far this is the only piece to come out with me in it. But it's all great music to either listen to or work, say, in a woodshop to.
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