August 2006
Rick will be featured at the ZeroOne Festival's Live Looping performance Wednesday, August 9th at 10 p.m. at the ANNO DOMINI GALLERY in San Jose, with a new show of found and invented sound and live looping. For the first time ever, he will also be showing his recent experiments in lo-fi video looping as he performs. He'll also be debuting a piece written for the world infamous Door-Stop-a-Phone created by his father, Art Walker, MD.
One of Rick's favorite musicians, Matt Davignon, will open the show with a wonderful performance of minimalist live looping and digital delay manipulation, utilizing only a drum machine as a source for sound. Matt has just finished his new CD featuring this material, which can be purchased at www.edgetonerecords.com.
About his new material, Rick says, "I'm just amazed at how creative and on the edge of music Matt Davignon is. It's nothing less than artistically astonishing the soundscapes that he creates with a drum machine as his only sound source. You'd never guess listening to the performances that this is his only sound source. His music is, at the same time, beautiful and langorous; edgy and challenging; soundscapey and ambient yet never uninteresting. It's like listening to a complex intelligent life distilled into a wordless language of emotion. Brilliant and inspiring to me."
for information and directions to the ZeroOne Festival and the Anno Domini Gallery, go to: www.galleryad.com/events/nightculture/index.html.
July 2006
He will be doing an experimental set of found sound and vocal/electronica.
Lx Rudis will also be doing a solo set on Synthesizer that evening.
The LUGGAGE STORE is at 1007 Market Street in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.luggagestoregallery.org and scroll down about halfway; or phone 415.255.5971 .
SUN JULY 2
GUITAR LIVE LOOPING mini fest
ALCHEMY
120 PEARL ALLEY, Santa Cruz
8 pm - 10 pm $5 donation
no one turned away for lack of funds
all ages welcome
Massimo Liverani, the producer of the 1st Firenze (Florence) Live Looping festival, is an innovative live looping guitarist who will be performing in the United States for the very first time this coming Sunday at ALCHEMY in Santa Cruz. As well as contibuting ambient textures to Officine Croma, the Florence-based Italian live looping group that he heads, Massimo has been responsible for an electronica/live looping Renaissance in Florence. He has organized countless multi-media events, incorporating dance, theater, video projection and music.
His arrival is our excuse to throw a mini Guitar Loop Festival which will also feature Bill Walker, and m.c. Rick Walker (on toy prepared guitar).
The concert is open to all ages and will end by 10 p.m. A $5 door donation is requested but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. The money will be used to help pay for the room. Alchemy is at 120 Pearl Alley, on the north end of the Pearl Alley parking lot right behind the Pacific Garden Mall in Santa Cruz.
March 2006
The First Annual Boise Experimental Music Festival will be held in Boise, Idaho, April 28-29, 2006.
I will be co-headlining with guitarist Lucio Menegon (Split Lip, Lumper/Splitter)
(www.kingtone.com).
The festival is being organized by Krispen Hartung; for more information, go to:
www.boisemusicians.com/experimental.
January 2006
Rick is performing at the NAMM show in Anaheim, California on January 20-22. (The National Association of Music Manufacturers annual show is one of the 'mecca' events of the music industry, with as many as 80,000 people attending in four days.)
He will be demoing the World Premiere of the LOOPERLATIVE live looping hardware box (along with Steve Lawson and guest Bill Walker) at the Anaheim Convention Center.
Rick is proud to announce that he has signed on a Representing Artist with LOOPERLATIVE.
He is also excited to announce that he has just signed on as a Representing Artist for the COOPERMAN FIFE AND DRUM company as well and will be demonstrating their Kanjira (South Indian), Bodhran (Celtic), Tar (North African) and Riq (Middleeastern) in his multi-instrumental solo shows, featuring percussion, found sound, bass, keyboard and voice.
Rick will also be playing a custom Darbukka made by Kobi Hagoel in the show.
For more information about Cooperman Drums and the Looperlative, check out Rick's blog.
***November 2005
Rick has just started to endorse the plugin suite called MonsterBag designed by the very creative VST effects developer, TobyBear Productions in Germany.
MonsterBag is a suite of 13 plugins designed for creative mangling of loops and audio files, including several plugins that are particularly good for creating idiosyncratic and very funky ostinato patterns for dance music. The suite includes granular synthesis plugins, morphing plugins, gated filter programs, delay programs and a few hard to explain but very hip new concepts.
Developer Tobias Fleischer from Munich has also created a fascinating VST instrument called Deconstructor which allows for creative slicing and dicing of existing sound files to create new rhythmic patterns. These are exceptionally powerful and unusual programs for sound design, and Rick has been having a field day using them to design sounds and grooves for his upcoming abstract electronica CD.
Please check out this creative company at www.tobybear.de .
October 2005
The Y2K5 International Live Looping Festival was a great success, and we'd like to thank all of the wonderful artists and contributors, some local, and some who travelled a very long way to be with us here in Northern California.
The Mayor of Santa Cruz, Mike Rotkin, made a special presentation, giving keys to the city to the headliners and proclaiming LIVE INTERNATIONAL LOOPING DAY for Sunday, October 9th.
For complete festival information, visit
www.loopfestival.com/y2k5/ (festival site courtesy of and maintained by Bernhard Wagner).
September 2005
Rick and his brother, the amazing looping guitarist Bill Walker, were recently featured performers at the largest live looping festival in European history! The huge event took place in Zürich, Switzerland, where Swiss looper Bernhard Wagner (part of the Y2K4 team last year in California) brought 40 artists from 9 countries for 3 days of excellent, eclectic performance.
Details about this exciting event are available at
http://nosuch.biz/zhlf05.
Rick's diaries of the Zürich festival and other tours can be read here: www.looppool.info/tours.html.
June 2005
Sunao Inami made a really nice recording of
my live looping concert at the OTOYA club in Kobe during my recent visit
there. I uploaded it in mp3 form for anyone who wants to listen to it.
It was a good show for me and one that was purposefully more abstract than
others.
www.looppool.info/JapanConcert/
...hope you enjoy it. (Many thanks to Sunao for being so considerate in recording me!)
Read my Japan tour diary
HERE.
All 73 Japanese tour pics are now up at the gallery, courtesy of Chris, my
website host.............wooo hoooo! See them
HERE
(link opens in new window).
Here is a link for the mp3 of "It Doesn't Matter" ( my goth/darkwave song that was included on the KUF compilation CD) and also a KUF poster image:
www.looppool.info/UltraViolette/.
The KUF CD is available for sale at:
http://www.cavestudio.org/cue/shop/merchandise/distro/index_e.html.
January 2005
I just got back from the fabulous and wacky NAMM show in Anaheim, California. It was a fun road trip with my brother Bill Walker and road technician/keyboardist extraordinaire Chris Boland (Diana Ross, INXS, et. al.).
There were over 80,000 musicians and vendors at peak hours on Saturday, the largest ever NAMM turnout, and the whole show was really fun, informative and overwhelming.
Highlights for me included the annual Loopers' Luncheon on Saturday.......and sitting in for an entire set with
drumming legend Jerry Marotta (Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, et. al.) and looping Chapman Stick phenom Tom Griesgraber. As a matter of fact, Bill, my brother, and I have been invited to come sit in with Tom and Jerry (yes,
those're their names........lol) at their Brookdale Lodge date Tuesday Feb. 1st in Brookdale, California
(between Ben Lomond and Boulder Creek on Highway 9 right outside of Santa Cruz;
831-338-6433; www.brookdalelodge.com)
so we are very excited about that.
I also had really nice experiences at the Cycling 74 booth, the Univeral Audio booth, the Ableton's LIVE booth, the Melodyne booth and the Steinberg booth (where my good friend who used to be my main contact at Antares, Michael Logue, now works).
The NAMM show is always stimulating and frequently overwhelming and exhausting (though I've learned to mitigate its sound-saturation tendencies by spending 15 minutes every 3 hours in the middle of the Sonex anechoic foam booth...........ahhhhhhhhh). I also find that the long drive back to Santa Cruz always produces tons of creative ideas about where to go musically in the next several months.
****
(Where is 2004? Misplaced somehow...)
****
2003
I did a collaborative piece with the amazing live video animator David Tristram at the Woodstockhausen Festival of Esoteric Music. It's the first time that I attempted an all vocal piece and it was a little scary and exhilarating to attempt it. Check out the results here:
watch video of Woodstockhausen 6 performance
If that link doesn't work you can try watching the lo-fi mini-version.
April 11th:
Join Rick and friends for an Evening of Live Digital Looping
presented by the Santa Cruz Digital Arts Festival on
Friday, April 11th at the Union (formerly the Jahva House,
120 Union St.)
in downtown Santa Cruz.The show begins at 9 p.m.
Tickets are $10 at the door with
no one turned away for lack of funds!
The show features: Bill Walker (guitar, guitar synth, synth, loops), Rick Walker's Loop.pooL, and Walkers (a new all-electronica looping project in its first appearance since composing the music for the Digital Animation Festival at the San Jose Museum of Art last fall).
Call the Union at 459-9876 for more info, or check out the Santa Cruz Digital Arts Festival website.
April 5th:
Come to Loopstock 2003, the
second annual looping festival in San Luis Obispo, California,
from 11:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m.on Saturday, April 5th.
Loopstock will feature performances by: Rick Walker's Loop.pooL, Andre LaFosse, Max Valentino, Whoolilicious, Dr. Richard Zvonar , Jon Wagner, Dennis Leas , Bill Walker, Stanitarium, Steven Rice, Mark Hamburg and Armatronix; and looping technical clinics by: Andre LaFosse, Dennis Leas, Max Valentino, Rick Walker and Bill Walker.
Loopstock will be held at the Chumash Auditorium on the campus of California Polytechnic State University. Admission is free, and all ages are welcome. For more info go to www.armatronix.com .
February 2003
Well...the LOOP TRIO TOUR is over. It was really fantastic and we got wonderful feedback from our audiences.
Here are some great photos from the Loop Trio (actually the Manring/Lawson/LaFosse/Walker Quartet!) show at Rocco's in Hollywood: http://photo.phui.com/html/BassShow_main.shtml
Here are some more photos of the Loop Trio tour.
I'm very proud to announce that the Mayor of Santa Cruz, California, Emily Reilly, proclaimed January 25th, 2003 as "International Live Looping Day" to acknowledge the contribution of the live looping artists of Santa Cruz for their contribution to this budding new international movement, not the least of which was the production of 22 live looping festivals, including the largest gathering of Live Looping artists in history: the Y2K2 Loopfest.
The mayor then presented four framed proclamations to the musicians involved in January's Loop Trio Tour: Andre LaFosse (from Los Angeles), Steve Lawson (from London), Rick Walker (one of Santa Cruz's own) and Bill Walker (also of Santa Cruz).
She wrote me this letter immediately after the show:
Dear Rick,
Thanks so much for allowing me to participate in your concert last night. The music was wonderful and the spirit of the crowd was such an example of the spirit of Santa Cruz.
I realized as I was driving home that what you are doing is what will change the world. We all need to follow suit, one note at a time, one conversation at a time: be IN the moment, IN the present, with joy and love..........
.........Thank you...and keep it up! You're holding the planet together!
Love,In January 2003, join us for the Loop Trio Tour , a live looping tour featuring Steve Lawson , England's leading solo bassist; Los Angeles guitar turntablist Andre LaFosse ; and Rick on percussion and found sound.
Rick has just become an official endorsee of the Gibson/Oberheim Echoplex Digital Pro (with innovative Loop IV software by Aurisis). He will be doing a clinic at Bananas at Large in San Rafael on Sunday, January 26th at 3 p.m. with fellow clinicians, Andre LaFosse and Steve Lawson.
All the shows start at 8 p.m. (unless otherwise noted) and are $10 at the door with no one turned away for lack of funds.