When it came to creating this looped song, I thought it would have been much simpler than it actually turned out to be. When faced with learning how to use this loop pedal (something I’ve never used before), it was a daunting task, made even more daunting with the knowledge of a live audience. But over the last couple of days I’ve turned to my most influential solo performer for some guidance, Adam Page. During the beginning of this process a lot of my work was influenced by Laurie Anderson, which subsequently allowed me to form the basis of my show. However, as my ideas and concepts have developed, I have found my work steering away from the constant avant-garde musical underscoring of Laurie Anderson and more onto narrative and musical storytelling artists such as Adam Page.

I watched numerous of his performances, and gathered performance acting techniques, as well as musical techniques.

What I’ve learn from Adam

He is a great storyteller. He structures many of his shows around a single event or story, tells that story, then improvises a song about it. I would like to use this structure within my performance. To use the song as a commentary on my situation and story, rather than the song as the main focus like in much of Laurie Anderson’s work.

All of his musical work is completely improvised. This therefore makes the performance seem raw and slightly rugged. I really like this and think this honesty could be quite endearing in my performance. As the performances are all improvised, the objects he chooses to make music from are randomly picked from the objects around him. I like this a lot, and although my objects will be pre-chosen, I will perform it as though they are spontaneous decisions. I think doing this will be more in keeping with the relaxed, chilled out atmosphere, rather than being structured and pre-planned (which is completely contrasting to my cocoon).

My attempt at looping 

Below is an example of one of many first attempts at looping. It was not as complex as I wanted the final song to be, but it was one of many stepping-stones towards the final piece.

After many days of experimenting with sounds and rhythms, below is a recording of the final song. Also, if the worst happens and it all goes wrong in the performance (as is often with live music), this is proof of what it should have sounded like!