A Newly Looped Horzion Every Time

After read­ing Kyle Glann’s blog called A Truly Loopy Idea and talk­ing with exper­i­men­tal music guru Adam Forkner on a recent trip to Olympia, I’ve been think­ing a lot about the idea of dif­fer­ent length loops run­ning out of sync with each other and then return­ing later on with dif­fer­ent har­monies and unin­ten­tional col­ors. As I’m sure many of you know, Terry Riley has been a huge influ­ence on my recent musi­cal endeav­ours and he’s dealt with some abstract loops as well. This par­tic­u­lar loop of his isn’t char­ac­ter­is­tic of dif­fer­ent lengths, but is def­i­nitely a trip.

So the other day I com­posed a sim­ple three layer loop: 7, 8, and 9 bars run­ning sim­il­tan­iously against each other.

This is what the foun­da­tion looks like,

and this what it sounds like. The top-heavy melody shapes the core of the idea at first but, because of the lay­ered chords under­neath, it drones out after a while. While study­ing the unin­ten­tion­ally “cre­ated” har­mony, I dis­cerned that it locks up again — after the intro­duc­tion at bar 1 — at the 169th bar. This is an odd num­ber and I can’t fig­ure out it’s sig­nif­i­cance but it’s an inter­est­ing the­ory to study and can also be found in the incon­sis­tent plan­e­tary orbits found in our solar sys­tem. Sort of like an unex­pected newly-planned hori­zon every time, if you will.