Reanimating my Frippertronics setup

No, of course this is not really "Frippertronics", and I'm obviously not Fripp - I'm just using the best known name for this setup, with all due respect to RF. Livelooping with two tape recorders was actually practised for many years by Terry Riley (who called it "Time Lag Accumulator"), long before Fripp learned about it from Eno and started using the technique under the name of "Frippertronics". Maybe I should also invent my own name for this setup - "Veloopitronics" maybe?

These two Revox A77 tape machines that I use for livelooping here are 40 years old. The left one is my trusty old tape deck from 1974, I bought the other one on eBay a few years ago.

My first "frippertronics" gigs were in 1981 (inspired of course by Robert Fripp's tape delay based music) but after a few years I replaced the cumbersome tape machines with easy to use analog and digital gear, and the tape machines gathered dust.

In July 2013, I realized that the tape based livelooping method is 50 years old - it was first used by Terry Riley in 1963. On the 3rd International Livelooping Festival in Cologne that I organized in that month, I wanted to present the original method - doing old school frippertronics ... only to find that the tape machines had stopped working.

It took some effort to make them work again, and they run mostly ok now but are still not exactly behaving in a reliable way. Digital machines are so much easier and so much more flexible - but there is something about the mechanical tape method that I still find deeply attractive. I hope I can do more videos like this.

Information about the history of this setup:
http://www.livelooping.org/history_co...

More Frippertronics videos:
   • frippertronics or rather, veloopitronics  

More of my other music:
http://veloopity.bandcamp.com