DG1: LOOP 3

Q. What are Frippertronics? Did Brian Eno invent tape-looping techniques?

Eno is perhaps most known with regard to tape loops for introducing Robert Fripp to a system of looping two reel-to-reel decks which became known as Frippertronics. It's not clear if Eno devised this particular system or found it after someone else did. Eno almost certainly wasn't the first to explore the technique and probably picked it up from Steve Reich or Terry Riley. I've heard that Pauline Oliveras was using a system like this in the 60's. Eno was at least very familiar with Reich's tape pieces and cited It's Gonna Rain as an influence at his talk on Generative Music at the Imagination Conference in 1996.

Frippertronics isn't so much a tape "loop" as it is a tape delay and looped signal. Conventional tape loops are cut and spliced together at the ends to form a loop. Frippertronics uses a reel of tape on one reel-to-reel and records on that machine - the tape runs out to a take-up reel on a second reel-to-reel instead of on the first deck, and the signal is played back on the second deck and also can be looped back and mixed into the electronic inputs on the first unit. This creates a degenerative delay, which with level control on the "feedback" signal can be used to sustain a repeating "loop" or to let it decay into the tape hiss and infinity. This system was used for the Fripp & Eno releasesEvening Star and (No Pussyfooting), using guitar and some synth, recorded in Eno's living room. Fripp later started using it for solo guitar, occasionally using pre-recorded frippertronics tapes to solo over. Fripp and Eno first recorded with this system in September 1972.

More recently, Robert Fripp's experiments have evolved into Soundscapes and Radiophonics. The guitar is still the input device, but digital delay techniques are used. The guitar can sound like any instument, and sounds can go into his large boxes of tricks and not come out for ages. The Soundscapes records are highly recommended, particularly A Blessing Of Tears, whilst the Radiophonics ones are scary.

Brian Duguid notes:
I don't believe Eno's tape-delay system was original; the description of it matches the description of the system used by Pauline Oliveros to compose her piece "I of IV" in the mid-sixties, although that used oscillator tones as its source material. (I haven't heard "I of IV"; does anyone know if it's available on any recording?)

Martian Bachelor answers:
Pauline Oliveros's "I of IV" is on a vinyl LP called "New Sounds In Electronic Music" (Odyssey/Columbia/CBS #32-16-0160). The piece takes up all of Side 2 (20:03). The back cover notes say it was made in July, 1966, at the Univ of Toronto Electronic Music Studio, that it's a real time studio performance composition, and uses a combination-tone technique developed in 1965 at the San Francisco Tape Music Center (where P.O. was from 1961-67). The equipment is described, and it definitely involves two decks and a tape delay (8 seconds) feedback loop. It's an absolutely gripping and memorable piece of music, and parts will raise the hair on the back of your neck. Other parts are more "ambient". It's hard to conceive of this music having been created in the same universe and at the same time as The Monkeys, Lawrence Welk, and Green Acres... I have no idea if this LP is still available -- would suppose not, except that Steve Reich's "Come Out" is more than half of Side 1, so the LP may still have interest out there because of him and Oliveros. It may have been re-released on CD for all I know...

Eno has also used loops in other ways - for his video installations he has used "8 simultaneous tape loops of slightly different durations running out of synch with each other."

The San Francisco Exploratorium installation had a soundtrack that consisted of loops of varying lengths, on auto-repeat cassette decks playing non synchronously. So he had four cassette decks playing different length loops in 8 different channels (as far as I could tell they were not "stereo" mixes on the tapes but actually two different non-synchronous tracks), and then he localized the channels through speakers scattered through the installations so standing at any one spot you would hear a blend of loops through different speakers. These "loops" were actually fairly long, and the "soundtrack" itself was essentially one huge loop - Eno guestimated that it would take some 127 weeks for the loop to precisely repeat itself. But from a listener perspective repetetive elements were pretty recognizable. It sounds like Eno may have used the same source material at various locations, but each random configuration of the starting of the cassettes would create a fairly unique juxtaposition of the source loops.

Eno talks more about these sorts of looping systems in his liner notes on his use of Koan Pro software that he used for his Generative Music 1 software based music release and in some of the archive interviews.

Some further history of tape loops via Christopher K. Koenigsberg and with amendments by Brian Duguid:

The first ever magnetic sound recorder was patented in 1898 by Valdemar Poulsen, using steel wire rather than tape. Steel tape was substituted soon after, and in 1935, a German company invented the tape recorder using oxide-coated plastic tape that we know and love.

Pierre Schaefer, the guy who started "musique concrete" in France, used gramophone records at first; his studio in Paris got a reel to reel tape recorder in 1950. Karlheinz Stockhausen visited and met Pierre Boulez there in the early 50's, perhaps 1952? I forget. Stockhausen got to hang out and make a very short tape piece in the Musique Concrete studio. Then Herbert Eimert opened an electronic music studio in Cologne West Germany in 1953 and Stockhausen went there to work on stuff.

Stockhausen used tape loops in working on "Gesang der Junglinge" in 1956. He would record one second's worth of a sound on a loop, play it over and over onto a second machine; recording at low speed to speed up the result. Then he would bounce that back onto the first machine again, and so on, working all day, doubling the speed of the sound with each pass, until he had increased it 1,000 times. He would end up with one minute's worth of sound after a whole day's work in the studio.

Of course this is work on the micro-structure of the sound, rather than the macro-structure of the composition as Steve Reich and Terry Riley did. But tape loops were used by Stockhausen at least as early as 1956 on "Gesang der Junglinge". ( - Christopher K. Koenigsberg)

In the 1980's the advent of sampling technology (the digital equivalent of tape recording) allowed for quick and easy looping of samples, which has had a strong impact on the use of repetetive loops in music, leading to the now popluar craze of re-mixing, which deconstructs and reconstructs the elements of one piece of music into a new interpretation based on rearranging fragments of the original. In some ways this is quite similar to Burroughs and Brion Gysin's technique of tape and literary cut-ups.

John Aitken writes: "A person by the name of Joe meak or meek was using a technique with two real to real taps either at the same time or before Eno. Why was this person not included in this list. Joe meak was a froe runner for brit pop and is note rated for his talent in the world of pop. Even Jonathan King recorded with him with a song by the name of looped'ta love by shag Love from Edinburgh Scotland."

http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/enofaqm.html