More Loop Highlights

Loop, is a band that seems to have vanished from the radar screens of the cool kids. Too bad, because this record is pure pleasure. Very trance inducing music like the track , “Be Here Now”. These albums deserve a reissue, as do the Main and Hair and Skin Trading company albums. This band and its offshoots way beyond their time. Worth every penny.

My 1990 cassette copy of “A Gilded Eternity” has long since been atomized and levitated away in a fine shower of particulate. It felt like I wore that copy out within a year of its purchase. It was the perfect music for entering headspace through all sorts of avenues, and attentive listening consistently revealed new depths to Loop’s final release. This CD is a bonus release, but I’d rather concentrate on the original material, which was trailblazing enough.

Loop’s sound shares some surface similarities with Spacemen 3, in that it was heavily-amplified, guitar-driven, effects-laden, and highly repetitive in form. But Loop’s sound had a more visceral quality to it; it was massive, monolithic, propulsive, and in its standout tracks carried not only a psychedelic edge, but one that truly embraced and explored the more sinister aspect of that sound.

Nowhere was that more present than on “Blood”, the fourth track. A sinuous, heavily processed guitar tuned to a minor key weaves its way through repetitive, tribal percussion and bass-line. The surreal, hallucinogenic quality of the track is amplified even further by Robert Hampson’s phased, echo-laden vocals, described at the time by critic Michael Yockel as having been “…phoned in from Jupiter.”

Most heavily layered of all of their tracks, “Be Here Now” represents the apotheosis of Loop’s sound, and “A Gilded Eternity” the natural conclusion of the direction they chose to take as a band. This is the most conventionally structured song on this release, and yet it still manages to sound as if it’s emerging from the deepest recesses of a universe where everything is opiated and the number of fixed, recognizable dimensional points are truly infintesimal at best.

“Shot With A Diamond”, which closed the original release, signaled the direction that Hampson would take with Main, an ambient, drumless piece, minimalist in composition, yet rising to a climax of chilling pulsation that has the listener envisioning the slow rupture of larvae from a tarantula wasp through the hapless body of its host.

After splitting from Loop, John Wills and Neil McKay (the band’s rhythm section) formed the Hair and Skin Trading Company, which took the creeping sense of menace on “A Gilded Eternity” into a slightly more structured direction on their final release “Over Valence”. However, this CD can be regarded as the inspiration from which those compositions sprang, if not the final blueprint. “A Gilded Eternity” was truly one of the genre-bending releases of the ’90’s, and definitely recommended.

The Loop mouse works very well except for some minor quirks the most aggravating of which is the fact that you eventually mimic a contortionist when you are using it. Every time
the pointer encounters a screen edge, it re-centers, and if you carry on past the screen edge, eventually you find your self pointing the mouse back over your shoulder and around
your ear in order to move it around the screen. For a person who talks with his hands a little practice and thought must be put in to manipulating the mouse or you are going to wind up more entertaining to your audience than you wished and for reasons other than you intended. Too bad it does not have a centering button. Without a centering button, it is not worth 105 dollars. It is not as usefull as a Wii remote which requires you to point at the sensor bar, or the multifunction PS-3 controller.