The LoopRoom should not be mistaken for a record label. My intention is rather to present and bring some order to all my scattered music projects. Recordings as well as concert series, collaborations with others and crazy project plans that maybe won’t ever be fulfilled.
Thanks to the Bandcamp engine my Music section can offer free listening streams and free downloads as well as shopping options for albums and songs in any format you chose. The 24 bit FLAC download may for example sound better than CD audio. Some work is offered on physical CD as well.
Releases from before the millenium are not up here, because back then I was signed up under artist deals with record labels that own the rights to the particular recordings. Here’s a listing of that back catalog.
The word “LoopRoom” was first used in November 2002 at the Scandinavian Music Festival. The man in charge, Christer Lennartsson, offered me a performance room inside the music trade show area for the entire week, a 20 x 20 meter box inside which I should play a thirty minute live looping show twice a day. Christer called me a couple of weeks before the festival and said I had to come up with “a name for my booth”. Since I was going to loop inside a room I simply suggested “loop room”. The night before the opening day we trade show workers were let in to rig our stuff and I just couldn’t believe such a cute little white box they had built me! Outside the entrence was a tidy office-style sign spelling that funny name “Looproom” and inside it was dark as an underworld cave. I was sponsored by Luthman Scandinavia with a good sound system and stage light, but I kept it very dark in there at showtime. Just a couple of candles and some blue, green or purple lights at odd places. People rambled in from the chaotic trade show inferno outside, sat down and chilled out to the music. I had an Electrixpro Repeater and a Gibson Echolex Deluxe Pro connected to the mixer and lots of extra microphones for the guest musicians I had invited. The atmosphere inside that huge box was so refreshing that a lot of people wanted to stay after the show just to enjoy some easy time and talk about “what the heck that was that I was doing with those instruments and electronics”.
Three continuous streams were meeting up to merge in that room: The stream of music that I played twice a day, the stream of listeners passing by and as number three the stream of guest musicians sitting in to play with me.
Well, ok… that was the short version LoopRoom history. I realized that what made the week so inspiring was that the looproom box had this crossroad and melting pot character. After the Scandinavian Music Festival week I registered the domain Looproom.com to continue the experiment online.
The long version goes back about half a century, but I won’t bore you with all that. Let me just say that I found a piano in a house with no adults to “correct me”. What excited me was that the sounds I could make with that piano opened windows for me to look into other places, sometimes with other people living there. Being four years old I could not understand how that worked, but I accepted it as a fact. Today, half a century later, I still do not have a clue although I witness the same phenomenon almost daily.
