By Wendy Marinaccio

Mountain View

Local electronic musicians performed a new kind of music at the first Mountain View Loopers Festival April 14.

Looping is a technique where a musician plays a measure or phrase of music and records it, then continues looping it back while adding to it and soloing on top of it. The repeating “sample” of music gains depth with each additional layer. It’s all live, nothing prerecorded and highly improvisational.

“One technique is to play a rhythm and use that as a base for everything else, playing along with it,” said Jon Wagner, one of the performers at the Loopers Festival. “I control when it’s sampling, then play it back, repeating. Then I can listen to it and play along with it. You see one thing but you hear something very different coming out.”

Robert Edgar opened the Loopers Festival playing MIDI guitar, Rick Walker followed with looping percussion and Wagner closed with hand drums. The three got acquainted through an online collective of loopers called Loopers-Delight, but met face-to-face for the first time at the Festival.

For a musician, part of the appeal of looping is the ability to keep one’s musical vision intact. If a musician has a precise idea for a piece and wants it to sound exactly perfect, looping allows him to play each part himself, without having to hand anything over to another musician’s interpretation.

Walker explained that in a recording studio, a musician can record each track himself, but couldn’t recreate that in a live setting until now. “I summoned up the courage once to do a solo gig, and since then I’ve gotten addicted to it,” Walker said.

“I enjoy looping because it’s something I can do as a solo,” Edgar said. “I can get a pretty good range with a guitar synth and a looping sampler. I can do the most with the least.”

You’ve heard looping before, although you may not have known it: think echo. It’s a recorded segment that plays back and repeats. Wagner played a piece at the Festival called “Echo Echo,” in which he sampled three beats and then had to play “in phase” with the echo, or play the same tempo he had recorded.

“A couple times tonight, sonic events happened that I had no control over,” Walker said. When sirens or motorcycle noises got inadvertently included in the loop, they just became part of the music. But, can a musician make a mistake in this electronic art form? “Double beats,” he said. This happens if the musician gets even the slightest bit out of phase with the looping.

During Walker’s performance, he used everyday objects as percussion instruments, including a frisbee, battery-powered fan, cup, kid’s whiffleball bat and a spring. Walker said he once spent four hours in a Home Depot finding the perfect-sized clay pots to create the musical scale he was looking for. “Now they go running when they see me coming,” he said. He insists even beginning musicians can try looping.

“It doesn’t matter what your level is. You can use voice, pots and pans … basic equipment just costs $250.”