1998 Digital Frippertronic Experiment (MP3)

Ken Mistove has uploaded a 1998 experiment in live looping. He explains that his intent was to replicate Frippertronics — in other words, “realtime performance using looping.”

He explains in some detail:

The looping was done in Max/MSP recorded direct to disk. The only “mastering” was fades and normalizing. It was a simple patcher that I feel gave great results at the time. I wrote the patcher on a dare. An aquaintance asked if I could reproduce Robert Fripp’s live system from the mid/late 90’s (Soundscapes). I barely scratched the surface of what RF was doing. The patcher was four 60 seconds loops with an audio switcher/mixer in front of the delay lines. The four delay lines where set to unique times. I changed patches on the D-50 and routed the output to various delay inputs.

The result has the composition-through-accrual feeling of Fripp’s work, especially the way slight variations in metric sensibility get subsumed into the haze of background as subsequent layers are added on. The major distinction is less the specific material that Mistove draws from than the variety. Mistove culls from a wider array of sonic items than Fripp, who tended to work from a single guitar. Mistove, too, elected to use a single instrument, a Roland D-50 synthesizer, but the collective sounds have significantly less of a sense of common flavor. That isn’t to critique the piece. Quite the contrary, the divisible nature of the elements lets several linger in the ear far longer than they might have otherwise.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ken-mistove. More on Mistove, who’s based in Simi Valley, California, at kenzak.com.