Preface

The alarm goes off at four o’clock on Sunday morning, but I’ve already been awake for half an hour. It’s due to the excitement. We’ve been away from Berlin for a long time. And for a long time, we haven’t been able to do what we are about to do – visit our favourite club.

The club has become so popular that on a Sunday night between one and six o’clock, you sometimes have to wait for 2 hours to get in. Yesterday, we went to bed at ten – probably just as the lights were being turned on over there for another non-stop night. We set the alarm so that when we get there, the queues at the entrance to the huge building have subsided. There’s no such thing as being late. A cup of tea, a sandwich and we’re on our bikes, riding through quiet side streets, then through Görlitzer Park. As we cycle across Oberbaum Bridge, S. comments on how beautiful it is to be out and about this early. Only if you don’t have to go to work the next day, of course, she adds. Well, we won’t be going to work. And we’re going dancing.

Berlin is bathed in a grey-blue twilight, the River Spree sparkles metallically. Past the Ostbahnhof, up the street of the Paris Commune, take a right into an unassuming cul-de-sac and ride through an industrial area, then past a long line of waiting taxis. And there it is in front of us, a dark mountainous shape – the former power station on Stalin Avenue.

We lock up our bikes and walk towards the building through a narrow passage between two fences. Here and there, an empty champagne bottle is lying on the ground. A torn T-shirt hangs on a pole and on another there’s a headdress that someone fashioned from a coat hanger and some tinsel. The closer we get to the building, the louder the rhythmic thunder gets; it seems to make the entire building shake.

At the entrance, there are a few people who look like they’ve had a long night. Quick, get inside, before it gets light outside. The steel door swings open and a bouncer waves us through with a quick nod. Behind the cash register there’s a huge staircase that looks like a backdrop to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, left behind after shooting. Up a steel staircase that reverberates in time to the music and we find ourselves on a dance floor in a high-ceilinged hall; about 500 people are moving to the monotonous electronic beats as if it wasn’t already early morning; as if the city weren’t slowly waking up to go to church or Sunday morning shift, or to get fresh bread rolls and a newspaper from the kiosk.

No, time has stopped here; it has dissolved into endless loops. Loops that never stop moving, never arrive anywhere, loops that just go on and on. My thoughts get entangled in them; my body, cocooned in them, begins to move to their beat. At some point, my shirt is drenched in sweat. I am dancing on a platform at the edge of the dance floor. Below me, all around me, others are heaving to the same rhythm. Screams. Red flickering lights. Arms shoot up in the air, dovetailing with the hands of the clock, and time stands still. Things begin to rotate. All things.

I’m standing in front of the main entrance to Shibuya Station in Tokyo, at an intersection thought to be the busiest in the world. It’s six o’clock on an evening in November; it is almost dark and the city’s offices are emptying onto the streets. From all directions, thousands of commuters are surging towards the intersection. Behind me is the train station from which passengers emerge in short successive bouts, as if pumped into the open by a great muscle. They stop by the side of the road; the traffic is flowing past them. As soon as the traffic lights turn green, the crowd starts to march hectically. Hundreds of people hurry across the street in less than a minute. Only I remain standing. I let the crowd wash around me and as if in a trance, wait for the traffic lights to change their signal again. Once. Twice. Ten times. A hundred times. Neon advertisements flicker above the crossing. The commercials run simultaneously on three giant screens. Below, the traffic lights set the beat. If I wait long enough, the commercials on the screens repeat, just like the phases of the traffic lights are doing. If I wait longer still, it will get dark, then turn into day again, night again, and eventually, autumn will turn into winter. Everything repeats, faster and faster. Day after day, night after night. It’s light, then dark, light, dark, faster, faster, until there’s just a flickering around me.

The stroboscope transforms the movements of the people on the dance floor into a series of snapshots. The music turns out loop after loop, repeating itself and vibrating, and now the hall is full of huge machines. They are working – gigantic steel wheels, cranks and connecting rods moving with the same staccato rhythm as the forging hammers that come down on the workpieces. Gears interlock, pistons move in and out. Everything rotates, turns, booms. Now and forever. A man is shovelling coal into a blazing furnace. It’s Georg, No. 11811, the stoker from Metropolis. I can see around the globe now, where everywhere, slave-like, bent figures are working in semi-darkness, moving to the rhythm imposed on them by the machines. On a conveyor belt, thousands of hands assemble components to the beat. Once the devices are completed, they will be producing their own rhythm. In another corner, dark figures surround a large drum (or is it an oil barrel?), which they belabour, following the rhythm.

Everything is part of these infinite loops. Steam engines, centrifuges, drills, rotors, propellers, fans, crankshafts, two-stroke and four-stroke engines. Relays jangle, computer hard drives hum in time. All rotary machines, rhythm machines. They loop, tap, roll, oscillate and join loop to loop to loop to loop. Each a doppelganger of the previous one. Déjà vu after déjà vu.

The globe rotates, cells replicate, huge celestial bodies turn around each other, electrons rotate around the nucleus, matter vibrates. Endless vistas of space full of mirrors open up, one reflection reflecting the next, echoes reverberating through them, only to fade away and resound again, without end because every end is another beginning. Everything moves, all the time. Nothing begins, nothing ceases.

The big drum. Sometimes manic and demonic, sometimes infinite and exalted, sometimes merely annoying. I let the rhythms dance inside me and keep moving, my breath accelerating, my heart beating in time. The DJ’s records on the turntables continue to turn when we leave the dance floor and go back down the reverberating steel staircase to the exit. While time had stopped inside that machine room, it has been continuing outside. When we step outside, it’s already dark again. A gentle wind blows from the Spree; the street lights are on in Holzmarkt Street. In 8 hours’ time it will get light again.

Chapter 1

Now and Forever: Introduction

Everything remains the same, only the appearance changes.

Anton Webern

In 1983, I bought a Commodore 64 from my neighbour. The Commodore 64 remains the most-sold computer in history. My neighbour wanted a newer model, so I bought my first computer for 100 German Marks pocket money. It came with a manual for the BASIC programming language. At the time, computers had very rudimentary graphical user interfaces, and if you wanted to use them, you had to know a programming language. So, after playing a few rounds of Donkey Kong and Scramble, I set about entering my first BASIC commands into the computer.

According to the handbook, the first program to be tried was as follows:

100 PRINT HELLO

200 GOTO 100

RUN

BASIC, unlike other programming languages, has the advantage that its commands bear some resemblance to spoken English. The commands are arranged as a numbered list, which the computer processes one after the other. The PRINT HELLO command tells the computer to write the word HELLO on the display. The second command, GOTO 100, tells the program to jump back to the first command in the list, i.e. to PRINT HELLO. The RUN command tells the computer to start executing the program. This little program did nothing but write the word HELLO on the monitor, over and over – in capital letters, one letter at a time.

Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello

Although I was unaware of the term loop at the time, I had created a small loop on my computer – a program loop, which repeated the same thing over and over. The computer continued to write the same word on the monitor and did not stop until I turned it off.

I do not recall that this program, the first one I ever wrote, made a big impression on me in any technical sense. But I still remember its effect – it had mesmerized me. As though hypnotized, I had watched as the word Hello rolled over the screen, line after line in the clumsy BASIC font, white on a blue background. The slow, consecutive appearance of the words had been both soothing and stimulating.

Just like after the consumption of certain drugs, I felt completely focused and relaxed at the same time. I had lost any sense of time. I stared at the words, the blurred letters that appeared on the screen one after the other. I do not remember how long I continued watching the lines crawl across the screen. It might have been minutes, or as long as half an hour before I turned the machine off.

I never repeated this strange experiment. And I might as well admit that my BASIC programming skills progressed very little after that. But the computer’s unceasing repetition, which would have continued to this day had I not turned it off, did leave a lasting impression on me.

Almost 30 years have passed since then. Along with the computer, loops have acquired a place in our daily life that is as far-reaching as it is largely unnoticed. It’s not only in the computer programs we use daily that loops are continuously running. In the last decade, they have emerged from the background of life, and are now a part of our lives that cannot be ignored.

Repetitive animations tell us to put the debit card in the ATM, musical loops keep us hanging on while we wait for the call centre to answer. The ringing of mobile phones and the endlessly repeated commercials on the screens of large train stations are loops. On CNN, the news tape at the bottom of the screen shows stock market prices and newsflashes in a continuous loop. Spectacular news images are run as non-stop loops during special broadcasts while experts debate.

The data, the video images, seem to have taken on a life of their own. It is as though these recordings of life do not wish to exist only as inanimate information on hard disks, tapes or diskettes; it is as though they want to find a way back to the world of the living. And what repeats itself is not dead.

This book will attempt a reading of the state of the human soul from the sundial of human technology (Theodor W. Adorno) by telling the story of the loop. In doing so, it will try to elucidate the effect and the significance of the loop. However, the focus will not be on loops like the ones previously referred to, those that surround us in daily life. Instead, I will focus on the visual arts and music, fields in which loops have become an important design element in the second half of the twentieth century. Loops, for me, are part of a culture of repetition. They reflect the creative possibilities of repetition in digital media.

What, exactly, is a loop? The word has established itself as a technical term for short sound and image sequences that can be repeated indefinitely, both in the world of music and in the world of audio-visual media, whether analogue or digitally recorded. Anyone who can conjure up an image in connection with the term loop will probably be thinking of a strip of tape or film that is glued together to form a loop. Today, loops – both audio and visual – are usually generated on a computer.

Let us imagine such a loop. Imagine how a piece of recording tape, ends glued together, proceeds laboriously through the tape deck, again and again. Or imagine how a short sound file is repeated by a music program. Let us imagine how it reproduces a sound fragment, over and over. A few seconds of laughter, for example. Ha, ha!, Hahahaha. Hahahahahahahaha. The longer the laughter loop lasts, the more superhuman it comes across. Depending on the listener’s state of mind, it may become funnier and funnier the longer it plays, and may even have a contagious effect. Or it can create an increasingly demonic and terrifying effect – as in the techno track Do Not Laugh by Josh Wink, which is based on looped laughter.

When a sound is looped, the loop can make time stand still. The immobilized sound embalms the moment. As the world-weary Faust closes his deal with the Devil, he imposes one condition – he will allow the Devil to take his soul if, at that moment, the Devil can get Faust to say, please stay! You are so beautiful! The tape loop fulfils such a wish, a wish that is blasphemous and deeply romantic at the same time. Loops promise that the beautiful (but also terrible) moment does not have to pass, but may linger, now and forever. That it can be repeated until desire is transformed into weariness. Or until ennui becomes transcendence.

Repetition per se has, of course, always been an important means of aesthetic expression in the arts. The charm of music is to be found precisely in the interplay between repetition and variation. Barely varied forms of repetition play an important role in such different styles of music as the Brazilian samba and the Javanese gamelan, in the Moroccan ganawi music and the Eastern European polka. Repetition is found in the percussion music of West Africa and in Indian tabla music, in the funk music of James Brown, in Ravel’s Bolero, in the canon Brother Jacob and in Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd. And these minimalist forms of expression are not only normal in music, but also in the visual arts. The ancient Greek and Roman mosaics and the Moorish alicatado tile images on the walls of the Alhambra, Arabic calligraphy or Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square are all based on repetitive structures. But this book is not about these forms of repetition.

It is about music and art forms that are shaped and characterized by repetition because they are produced using the machines of modern media, the computers. The optical toys of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the wheel of life, the zoetrope or Ottomar Anschütz’s Schnellseher [speed viewer] were all loops, albeit without making any decidedly artistic use of the special possibilities that their technological forms suggested. That is why this book is not about them either. Rather, it is about artists who have utilized the possibilities of repetition the technology offers to create an aesthetic concept.

Machines have been making sounds and images into loops for more than half a century. In the fields of music, film and the visual arts, this method has been used to achieve very different aesthetic objectives. In my story of the loop, the first artist who worked systematically with loops and their aesthetic possibilities was French composer Pierre Schaeffer, who created his first musique concrète compositions shortly after the Second World War, using skipping records.

The arrival of the new medium of magnetic tape made it easier to produce such sound loops. Schaeffer and, following him, an entire generation of composers started a thorough investigation of these new musical possibilities. Soon, in centres for experimental and electronic music, as well as in many recording studios where pop music was produced, long tape loops were coiled around tape reels, guide rollers, microphone stands – and even around ball point pens, beer bottles and wine glasses.

Loops became one of the most important new tools for producing electronic music. But those composers who were among the first to work with loops, for instance, Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen or Pierre Henry, generally tried to avoid drawing attention to the loop’s repetitive qualities. It was the succeeding generation of post-war composers that focused on just that: the music of the American minimalists consisted of nothing other than uninterrupted, minimally varied repetitions, of patterns. This technique was developed by minimalists Terry Riley and Steve Reich in the mid-1960s and arose directly from their experiments with tape loops. Many other music genres were to adopt this approach and turn the repetitive possibilities of recorded media into a foundation for compositions.

From the 1970s onwards, popular music was increasingly shaped by loops and by the extremes of repetition made possible by technology. Entire genres like hip-hop, electro, house, techno or one Giorgio Moroder’s electronic disco are based explicitly on repetition by means of media technology and they have developed original forms of expression based on loops. These, in turn, have become the basis of complex sub- and youth cultures, influencing whole generations with their own manners, fashions and codes of behaviour. And not infrequently, these loop-based art forms have also been the foundation of flourishing business endeavours.

In the visual arts and experimental cinema, artists and filmmakers like Bruce Connor, Nam June Paik, Peter Roehr and Lutz Mommartz began working with film strips that were continuously fed into the projector as loops. The same time frame saw the development of the Minimalist Music genre. Such works fit perfectly into an arts scene that had begun to develop an unexpected taste for repetition. Amazing enthusiasm for repetitions and series, for lists and arrays, is a characteristic of minimalist art, pop art, conceptual art and the performance arts of the 60s and 70s.

In 1965, video cameras and recorders appeared in the consumer marketplace and were discovered as a new medium by a number of artists. Soon after, artists like Nam June Paik, Klaus vom Bruch or Dara Birnbaum began to repeat themselves, over and over, in their video works, installations and performances. In video art, the loop became an important formal tool that has continued to shape the works of artists like Rodney Graham, Daniel Pflumm, Francis Alÿs, Paul Pfeiffer, Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Safy Etiel and Matthias Müller to the present day.

In view of this, it is difficult not to wonder why loops have not been seen as one of the significant aesthetic elements of the last decades.¹ From a historical perspective, loops would seem to be one of the most important forces in the culture of the second half of the twentieth century. Today, they have become such an influential form of expression in so many fields that I think it is appropriate to refer to them as a cultural form.

How did the loop become so popular in music and the visual arts? How could a style of music such as techno, which is based on continuous repetition, become a youth movement? And what was so dangerous about this music, which reminds many people of Chinese water torture, that the UK Parliament even passed a law in 1994 in the Criminal Justice Act to prohibit the playing of music "that totally or mainly consists of series of repetitive beats" outdoors?²

Especially in Western culture, repetition has traditionally been regarded as boring and soul-destroying. You’re repeating yourself! is intended as a criticism. Or, it’s always the same story with you! Or, as if someone had been able to see the triumph of loops coming, can’t you change the record? In the intellectual history of the twentieth century, repetition has had a bad name, something that will be discussed in detail later. For the moment, it will suffice to recall Freud’s idea of the pathological compulsion to repeat. The Frankfurt School, and especially Theodor W. Adorno, were harsh critics of repetition in mass media and popular music, which they saw as regressive and soporific. Adorno declares,

what repeats itself is healthy, like the natural or industrial cycle. The same babies grin eternally out of the magazines, the Jazz machine will pound away forever. In spite of all the progress in reproduction techniques, in controls and the specialities, and in spite of all the restless industry, the bread which the culture industry offers man is the stone of the stereotype.³

Contemporary Westerners have grown accustomed to looking at life as if it were moving forward in a linear progression. Repetitions were primarily regarded as an element of delay on a forward path. The idea of circular time (Jorge Luis Borges) seems strange and suspicious in Western culture. Peter Handke writes in his novel Across that it is striking "how the repetitions in current phrases usually impress me as something evil, pathological, or even criminal. Could one not, on the other hand, speak of refreshing repetition as opposed to wearisome repetition; voluntary repetition as opposed to forced repetition? The possibility of repetition as opposed to the danger of repetition?⁴

The loop contradicts the teleological directionality of the Western Christian world towards a better life after death as much as it contradicts the Modernist belief in progress. Those who work hard will achieve their objective. – Whoever is good in this life will go to heaven when he dies. – Whoever pays his social security taxes will get a pension later. – The course of history is a history of class struggle that naturally leads to revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat and, finally, to a classless society. The Westerner’s present has always moved towards such a future.

The loop, as a cultural form, contradicts such ideas. Art works and compositions based on loops often create a feeling of an endless present or cyclical time in their audience. These concepts are in direct opposition to the modern understanding of time and history as constant progress. Time’s arrow was the phrase used by Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould in his influential book to describe the Western notion of history: time as an arrow shooting toward a target. In contrast to the concept of time as an arrow moving forward, Time’s Cycle, for Gould, represents the cyclical, periodic concept of time, as it is perceived in many non-Western cultures. Insofar as loop-based art and culture contradict a linear understanding of time and history, they also represent a critique of, or alternative to, that understanding.⁵

The teleological-linear orientation of Western culture is also reflected in Western art. The traditional music of the West, whether folk songs, pop songs or Beethoven symphonies, as a rule has a narrative, teleological orientation. It is organized to follow a functional harmonic schematic of tension building towards a climax – in the process of movement, the music develops towards a goal, a resolution, a climax. Music based on loops, on the other hand, is non-narrative and non-teleological. The music just goes on and on, an evolution without direction, in which the listener no longer has to follow a strict musical development, but rather, is confronted with the cyclical, repetitive movement of short musical patterns.

Whether Minimalist Music or techno – this type of loop-based music refuses to fit in with the compositional development of motifs and the like. As in the famous dream of Friedrich August Kekulés, in which the molecular structure of benzene appeared to him as a snake biting its own tail, in techno, loop-based music is a monkey’s dance of rhythmic sound events, one following the next, long rows, often joined together densely…winding and rotating like a snake, as Kekulé described the molecular loop-structure of benzene that appeared to him in a dream vision after some glasses of punch.

Significantly, the triumph of repetition in the world of culture coincided with the very moment when the first cracks appeared in the euphoric belief in progress and the exaggerated optimism of the modern age – in the second half of the twentieth century. One of the maxims of the Enlightenment and the modern era was that humanity would follow a path of progressive (and progressing) development in which the rapid advances of science and technology would lead to more justice, humanity and self-determination.

However, the Second World War, the Holocaust and detonation of the first atomic bomb showed that the scientific and technical progress of the modern era had by no means led to a more just and enlightened global society, on the contrary, it had been a prerequisite for the most terrible barbarism in the history of mankind. That the fully enlightened earth… would come to radiate disaster triumphant,⁶ as expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno, triggered increasing doubts in the post-war generation about the maxims of progress that had defined the modern era. This is the context in which the emergence of repetition-orientated artistic and musical schools, such as minimalist art and Minimalist Music, played out like an unexpected retarding moment in the modern era, a kind of pause or rejection of the Western mobilization civilization (Peter Sloterdijk).

This process culminated in a period marked by two symbolically charged dates – the simultaneous end of the second millennium and twentieth century. In this double fin de siècle mood, contemporary, postmodern philosophy proclaimed the end of the grand narrative (Jean-Francois Lyotard) while journalism proclaimed the end of history (Francis Fukuyama) after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Warsaw Pact. The German historian Achim Landwehr has shown in his book Geburt der Gegenwart [The Birth of the Present] that our perception of time is a cultural construction.⁷ The assumption borrowed from Newtonian physics of a homogeneous time flowing inexorably forward is a specifically modern concept that has dominated modern times. This concept of time was not, of course, suddenly overturned in the last years of the previous millennium, but the sudden success of loop-based music may be a sign that time might have appeared to some as arrested, jammed, compressed or even transformed into a closed loop. Loop-based culture was an appropriate reflection of the timeless time of the era. Because one of its most important characteristics was not to develop further, not to demonstrate progress. It seems fitting that the 1990s saw the coming together of techno-as-music and the youth culture phenomenon.

But this book is not a book about electronic dance music either. Numerous excellent studies have been published in recent years about its history and aesthetics, and it is not necessary for me to rework it.⁸ Rather, I am concerned with the prehistory and early history of a development that ultimately led to styles based entirely on media repetition, such as techno and hip-hop.

Why did artists and composers from such widely varying backgrounds suddenly start working with loops in the second part of the twentieth century? How did music based on minimally varied repetitions catch on? Upon what aesthetic assumptions was the phenomenon based? I find it amazing that a musical style such as techno, which has so little to do with what we in the West are taught about music in school or instrumental lessons, was able to grow into a kind of mass movement at the end of the twentieth century. I was amazed when this music first appeared, and I am still amazed. My amazement is the reason for me to write this book – to answer these questions for myself.

The answer suggested in this book, in broad strokes, is this: the form of loop-based music and art is a direct result of the fact that these art forms are created with electronic devices, with machines. The artists have made the characteristic properties of these media machines into an art form. They were created with turntables, tape recorders and video equipment, with synthesizers, sequencers and computers. And these devices are – like all machines – repetitive creations. They reproduce and repeat.

The visual arts and music that make use of these devices used the technical imperative of reproduction and repetition in the loop as their subject matter and developed their specific forms from this. The development from the initial, tentative experiments with loops into musical styles that emerge out of loops took place in a constant interplay between the media technology that made such repetitions possible and a culture that was increasingly prepared to accept such repetition as an artistic method. The presentation of this interaction is the most important concern of this book. The artistic work with loops seems like an attempt to develop an element of difference from the mechanical repetitions of technological media (tape recorders, sequencers or computers), that is, from the immaculate and faultless expiration of machine time. What Gilles Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition about the role of the imagination in repetition also applies to the artistic work with loops – the role of the imagination, or the mind which contemplates in its multiple and fragmented states, is to draw something new from repetition, to draw difference from it.⁹

As I will show, the best artistic works with loops are always concerned with bringing their complicated inner repetitions (Gilles Deleuze) into view. Artistic work with loops is therefore also an attempt to curb or tame the seemingly overpowering technology by lending slightly irregular, organic traits to its precise, periodic pounding. Artists have either manipulated the technology they used to create loops, or they have prompted their audience’s perception to produce such differences by playing with the mechanically perfect repetitions of the recording media. Loop-based art and music must therefore always have a phenomenological component. It is no longer primarily about what the artist or composer is trying to say or express. Instead, this type of music and art deals with the body of the listener or viewer and the conditions of their perception. This shift in the roles of the art-producer on the one hand, and the art-consumer on the other is the most radical aesthetic innovation that loops have introduced into the art and music of the postmodern era. Art and music using loops, therefore, are not anti-progressive per se, that is, they do not celebrate stasis and stagnation. They are neither a negation of progress, nor an aestheticization, nor even a celebration of compulsive repetition (Sigmund Freud), an eternal recurrence of the same (Friedrich Nietzsche) or a negative infinity (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), for which a Hauntology in Mark Fisher’s sense would be responsible.¹⁰ As a surprisingly flexible artistic tool, loops are used by artists for widely differing purposes. If their repetitive features were at the centre of the artist’s cognitive interest, then it was not on account of the paralyzing, but of the productive moment of repetition. Diedrich Diederichsen writes:

anyone who has experienced something new in the sameness of the loop is dealing with a much harder new than those who experience it in a structure where the occurrence of the new is intended, as in conventional narration…If something that is the same becomes different, and something that is different becomes the same, then we know better where we stand. We are making progress. Well, you get ahead in the loop.¹¹

Seen from a present-day perspective, working in loop-based art seems like a kind of grassroots movement in which artists, composers and musicians from very different backgrounds participated for very different reasons. Some of them did know of others who worked in the same way. But many came up with the idea of making art using technology-based repetitions without any knowledge of predecessors or contemporary practitioners; they did it because the media itself suggested these methods to them. In the following story of the loop, we will meet some very well-known, recognized artists, e.g. Andy Warhol, Ken Kesey and Karlheinz Stockhausen. But there will also be outsiders – like jazz composer and instrument maker Raymond Scott – who are probably known only to specialists.

This is therefore not a history book in the strict sense of the word. Although the chapters are arranged in roughly chronological order, it is not my intention to write a definitive narrative, and this book does not claim to be an exhaustive treatment of the subject. It can’t be about recounting all the artistic or musical experiments that have been done with loops; otherwise, its scope would have expanded into the infinite and it would be unreadable. Rather, I have tried to trace the aesthetics of the loop by concentrating on episodes and works that I regard as key events in the development of the loop as an artistic form of expression. Some of these key events involve artists like the minimalist composers Terry Riley and Steve Reich, whom one would expect to find in a history of the loop. Others, like Elvis, The Beatles or Ken Kesey, probably wouldn’t be associated with loops in the minds of most people.

From the key events I will develop the historical and discursive framework in which they happened. The focus will be on music, because no other art form can handle repetition with more virtuosity than music. I will consider loops in the visual arts mainly in terms of their points of contact with music.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part is about loop-based works from the immediate post-war period until the end of the 1950s. In this period, loops in music were almost exclusively used to create sound effects (film and other visual loops played practically no role at that time). The repetitive