Ableton this week opened registration for Loop 2018, which will be held this fall for the first time in the United States.

Loop, Ableton’s annual summit for music makers, is scheduled for November 9 – 11, 2018 in Los Angeles. The three previous events have been held in Berlin.

Loop offers three days of talks, performances, hands-on workshops and studio sessions aimed at sharing ideas on music, technology and creative practice.

We talked with Craig Schuftan, the program lead for Loop 2018, who gave us a preview of what to expect at the first Loop in the Western Hemisphere.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin, Synthtopia: For its first three years of existence, the Loop summit was in Berlin. This year, you’re moving the conference to Los Angeles. What was the reason for the shift?

Craig Schuftan: Ableton is a Berlin-based company and in a way, Loop was in Berlin by default. It’s our home, and so it made sense for Loop to be here.

But it’s also true that we have a lot of people in the US who use Ableton products. And there are other people who are interested in what we do who are a long, long way from Berlin. It’s impossible for a lot of people to come to Loop when we have it in Berlin.

Another reason for having a fresh Loop location in 2018 is for the people we might want to invite, you know – artists, inventors, makers, thinkers. For practical reasons, it was just impossible to bring them here [to Berlin].

For all those reasons, we decided this year to try hosting Loop in LA.

Synthtopia: The Funkhaus, where Loop has been for the previous two years, is a really unique location, with multiple performing venues, sound studios, recording rooms and lots of interesting connecting spaces. How do you find a place that rivals the Funkhaus?

Craig Schuftan: I think the answer is, you don’t.

The Funkhaus is a really special place. Being an old East German broadcasting center, the Funkhaus had concert halls and recording studios and production rooms and things like that that we could use. The place is extraordinary. It’s almost like we could never run out of room.

I was involved in programing Loop last year, and if we wanted to add some other kind of experience, or some additional installation, there was always space for adding one more thing. It was almost like that place went on forever. We knew it would be quite hard to find another place anywhere in the world like that.

So, when we started thinking about doing Loop in LA this year, we had to consciously try to put that out of our minds, knowing that this is a different city, with a different type of experience, in different kinds of spaces.

LA is an entertainment city. There’s no shortage of recording studios and performance venues there, and we’ve found some really, really good ones. What Los Angeles doesn’t have is a giant building like the Funkhaus that contains all of those things together.

So in planning Loop this year, we’ve split up that experience among several locations. For many of the sessions at Loop LA, we’re using a recording facility called EastWest Studios in Hollywood, which is a pretty iconic place.

It’s been renamed a few times in its history, but since the 1960s, EastWest Studios has been a place where some of the most extraordinary, memorable and groundbreaking popular music in the world has been created. The list of artists and producers and engineers who have worked there is quite amazing. This is where we’re going to be holding our workshop and studio sessions program for Loop this year. All of that activity will be housed in this one place.

About ten minutes up the road from there on Vine Street is the Montalban Theater. That will be the main stage for Loop this year. It’s a classic old-fashioned Hollywood theater that seats about 900 people. That’s where our talks and big presentations and performances and concerts will happen.

The building also has a lovely rooftop area with a cinema, which we’ll be using in different kinds of ways over the course of the weekend.

Because we’re using two main venues, we’ve started to think about Loop this year not as happening in one location, but as something that happens in what we call a campus. We’re imagining not just these two buildings, but also the streetscape in between as part of Loop, with a couple of other, smaller locations and venues around the area as well.

Synthtopia: What kind venues and activities will there be in between the studio location and the performance venue?

Craig Schuftan: There’s one smaller theater, which we’ll be using for Loop’s “Open Zone” this year.

Open Zone is all the things that happen in between the structured, scheduled Loop program. There are spaces for people to meet up, collaborate and jam and make things together, spaces for installations and meetups and interactive experiences.

Also,cthere is also the streetscape itself. We’re thinking about ways to create interactive listening experiences that happen while people walk down the street or wander about Hollywood in between the official spaces that we’re using for Loop.

Synthtopia: Are there some themes for the Loop program that attendees can expect?

Craig Schuftan: This is a lot of what the Loop program team has been doing this year – thinking about what the themes for Loop ought to be this year. Quite a few of those themes have been inspired by Los Angeles itself and by the studios we’re using.

EastWest Studios has a rich history. Among other things, it’s a place where The Wrecking Crew, the band behind all those incredible hits of the 1960s, most famously The Beach Boys, did a lot of their famous recordings.

Synthtopia: Wrecking Crew did a lot of Motown recording, too.

Craig Schuftan: They did!

So, at EastWest, we’ll be working in a space where those people played instruments. It’s kind of amazing, and it’s still happening there today – a couple of months ago, Lady Gaga was recording an album in there with, I guess you’d say, today’s equivalent of the Wrecking Crew. They’re making beats and putting together top line and orchestrating things and working behind the scenes to make her album everything that it could be.

While [the Loop program team] were thinking about all the people who’ve worked there and recorded sound, as we toured these studios, we came up with this idea of what we’re calling Hidden Heroes.

In the past at Loop, we’ve talked quite a lot about music makers, and we’ve definitely talked a lot about producers, and sometimes about engineers. This year, we’d like to focus a little more on everybody else. So many people go into the making of a pop recording, from engineers, singers, producers, but also songwriters, ghost writers, people who design the sounds that you hear when you use a synthesizer.

We want to broaden the focus to encompass all the kinds of other people who work to create the sound of modern pop music, who are hidden somewhat, as the “hidden heroes” name suggests, and bring their stories to life a little bit more. We want to give attendees a greater understanding of all the work that goes on behind the scenes in music today.

Synthtopia: What are some of the other themes that run through the Loop 2018 program?

Craig Schuftan: As far as other themes go, we’re also thinking a lot about How to Perform. I think this an important thing to talk about, especially in an age where technology has enabled all kinds of people to make music pretty much by themselves.

Look at the amazing story of the studio itself becoming an instrument, emerging in the days of The Beach Boys and The Beatles, through the early days of electronic dance music and up to today. It is this story of it becoming more and more possible for someone to make an entire record in their bedroom. That was kind of like a thing that people talked about in the 80s and early 90s. Nowadays that is just every day. You have the world of sound at your disposal.

Synthtopia: When so much of music making is sort of a solitary process, it sort of begs the question of why go to the studio? And how do you translate that solitary work to the stage?

Craig Schuftan: In a way, it might be hard for a lot of Live users to wonder why they would ever set foot in a place like EastWest Studios. Every sound you could want, every type of effect, is right there at your fingertips, on your laptop.

I think one of the interesting side effects of that, if it’s possible to produce an entire record in your bedroom or in your living room, the challenge of what to do when someone asks you to stand on the stage and perform it, that’s quite real. I think it causes a lot of confusion and heartbreak in the world of electronic music.

Synthtopia: When a lot or people make music, they’re deeply focused on orchestrating and producing and putting the sound together, not really thinking about performance at all.

Craig Schuftan: We wonder: if someone asks me to perform my music, what do they really want to see, you know?

Given that it’s not like making music using a guitar or a percussion, where there is a performance that could later be reproduced on stage. A lot of electronic music stays made kind of piecemeal. There is no “original act” that could be reproduced on stage.

So what do we do?

I think this question is preoccupying people at all different levels of music-making, and preoccupying them in different ways too. We’re aware that there are all kinds of different solutions to the question of “how to perform.” On the one hand, some people might want to recreate every sound they made using live players and have the entire experience be live.

Other people who, might seem to “not be doing very much” behind the console or behind the gear they have onstage, they might want to make it theatrical and interesting. In that case, the solution might involve more choreography or more video or more lights, or just an attitude of some kind.

All of this by way of saying: I think we’re interested in exploring those two different extremes of performance, and everything in between.

Synthtopia: We have the opportunity to set the definition of performance for ourselves, now, too.

Craig Schuftan: That’s right. That’s the good news.

But it’s also true that the audiences bring expectations. We never know exactly what those are. We might have some assumptions, but I think there’s a lot of people who when they go to see a show, they expect to see something happening, but they’re not exactly sure why. That’s interesting to explore in itself.

We’ll be asking ourselves that question as music makers and as audiences, as parts of an audience.

Synthtopia: If you can do it all on your [smart phone or laptop], then why do people still go to EastWest? That, to me, seems like a fascinating question to explore.

Also, the issue of live performance, that’s something that we talk about a lot, trying to understand how artists approach that.

Some artists seem approach performance from a standpoint of “let’s be theatrical and make it a spectacle.” Seeing Kraftwerk in concert was definitely like that. Other artists seem to explore the idea of let’s perform it live, make it in real time, and have an element of risk and almost like an element of danger. Like, if something could go wrong at the show, it’s exciting to people.

But we don’t mean to get you off track! What are the other themes you want to explore at Loop 2018?

Craig Schuftan: In the past, we’ve talked a lot at Loop about how to get through creative blocks. How, as a producer or a songwriter, or a music maker, you can kind of push through those barriers that you encounter in your practice, and not just get inspired, but keep inspiration going when it’s flagging.

This year, we’re looking at that idea again, because we know it’s very important to people. But at Loop 2018, we’ll approach it from a slightly different angle, which is more about Community and Collaboration.

That is – when you’re working with others, how do you communicate?

What is the best way to work with other people?

How do you let people know what you want to do?

How do you listen to what they want to do?

How do you make your music making a real exchange, rather than just kind of waiting for your turn?

We’re really interested in the cultural and social and indeed, the political side of working on music with other people, and wanting to explore that in more depth than we have in the past.

Synthtopia: How do you anticipate holding this year’s Loop summit in LA might affect the ‘flavor’ of the event and influence the experience for people who attend? What is your intention with that?

Craig Schuftan: Apart from the things we talked about before, the environment itself is quite different from the Funkhaus in Berlin. It will be set in a more lively neighborhood, one that’s already quite different from where we’ve been before. I expect that will affect the flavor, as you say, quite a lot.

Also, one of the reasons we want to do Loop in LA is that we want to reflect the diversity of music making, not just in Los Angeles, not just in California, not just in the US. We hope to see attendees from the whole of, North America, and Central and South America, extending to the whole Pacific region.

Locating Loop in LA this year gives us the opportunity to work with people whom we simply couldn’t work with in the past because, for practical reasons, it was too difficult.

We are as curious as you are to see how all of that changes the flavor of Loop this year. It’s very much not us bringing “Loop Berlin” to LA. It’s not a matter of us showcasing or showing the same kind of music making or music practice that we’ve had the last couple of years, just moved, transposed, to a new place.

A big part of the reason we’re doing this in a different location is to reflect what is going on in this city and this country and in this hemisphere.

Synthtopia: Tell us about where you’re at now [in the process of planning the Loop program].

Craig Schuftan: Most of the work that the Loop program team have done up to this point has really been soliciting and gathering and hearing and talking about ideas. We purposely canvass quite a wide variety of people for their ideas, because basically, we’re interested in all their ideas and wishes – things that we would never think of.

We’re also aware that we work at a company which is full of super curious people. They know all kinds of things about music that we [on the Loop program team] don’t. They are involved in all kinds of, not just genres, but different aspects or approaches to music that myself and the other members of the core program team don’t necessarily know about. That is to say, technology is as big a topic at Loop this year as it ever has been.

Synthtopia: We’ve also noticed you also actively solicit feedback from people who have attended and participated in Loop.

Craig Schuftan: That’s very true. I will come back to that in a minute.

We also rely a lot on our friends in the US and our colleagues there, like the people who work for Ableton in our Pasadena office, and the people whom they’ve met in the course of their work there. We want to understand and to reflect the local culture of this city where we’re all gathering. We’re gathering a lot of ideas locally, because we want to understand what’s going on in music in the city itself.

And yes, as you said, we also gathered a lot of feedback from attendees in the past. That is super useful, because one important thing we’ve learned is that a lot of the reason why people come to Loop is to meet other music makers.

I think that’s something that is easy to forget when you’re putting together the program for a festival – leaving time for things outside the programmed events. It’s a rookie mistake to look at an event schedule, you know, a grid with a spread of time and spaces on it, and try to fill up every last space on the grid. You feel like you’ve done your job, because all the empty white areas are pink now, that’s good.

You know, “it’s full! We did it!”

That can be counterproductive, in a way. There should be a lot of stuff to see and do at Loop, and there definitely will be, but you also need to leave space for people to meet and interact and, hopefully, collaborate, because that’s a huge part of what this event is about.

Synthtopia: Do you anticipate that the performers that you invite to this year’s Loop, and the production sessions that you have planned, will have a different vibe this time around? Is that part of your intent for being in LA?

Craig Schuftan: I think it really depends on the artists. We try to design those experiences around what the particular artist does best, what they have to offer participants.

You know, some people are very technical, and they like to show what they do in detail. Other times, an artist’s session is more about ideas or about exchange or about enthusiasm.

We’ll be tailoring those experiences to the individual practice of the individual artists, and what they’re interested in, and what we think is interesting about them.

We are definitely keen to try some experiments this year, too! When we talk about what a workshop could be this year, we might be looking at expanding that definition a little bit. One of the big topics for Loop this year, another one of these “themes” that we’ve been talking about, is simply the idea of what we mean when we talk about the future of music.

We’re interested in this idea of speculative music conversation. That is, when we talk about music tomorrow, music in 10 years, music in 20 years, do we have a goal in mind? What do we expect it to be like? How does that fit into a bigger picture of what we expect or hope or fear that the future will be like?

That, to me, seems to be a huge preoccupation and concern for music makers at all levels at the moment. I think we should be having a workshop about that. A workshop that’s not people sitting around the mixing desk or with a bunch of laptops. Maybe that’s a group of people in a room with a whiteboard and some pens and paper, and some books and articles, and maybe a slideshow. What happens in that workshop is that we produce ideas. I think that would be great.

We’re keeping a very open mind about what kind of experiences we create for Loop this year.

Craig Schuftan: When I talk about the program themes at Loop this year, that’s really a way of saying these are the things that we would like people to be talking about at Loop this year.

In a way, if we do nothing more than that, I’d be super happy.

And, if we’ve got people talking or thinking about these different aspects of music, collaboration and community, the future, the idea of all the different types of people who go into making music, the idea of performance and what it means … If those conversations are sort of debated and energized and happen among people who might not otherwise have met each other, I think that’s a great result.

Synthtopia: Is there anything that you can share about what you learned from last year’s Loop that will shape the way you plan this upcoming Loop?

Craig Schuftan: I think what I learned from the last Loop, most of all, is the importance of social space and social time at Loop.

The content of Loop is something we work very hard to program and create and put together, but the experience of the Loop summit is inevitably something that the people who come to Loop … create by themselves. In a way, it’s like there’s a kind of invisible, intangible content to Loop which has nothing to do with a particular workshop that we design or an interview that we facilitate, although the experience is related to, and a result of, all those things. It’s what happens when people get together and talk about music in a particular kind of way.

To answer your question, what was super surprising to me, was watching the way those installations and juxtapositions evolved in situ over the weekend. I think as we work on Loop’s open zone this year, we’re interested in, if you like, engineering more of those surprises, like by creating more formats in which people can do things over a longer duration and have them evolve and change and transform in response to the interaction with attendees.

Synthtopia: One of the things that people have loved over the last few years about coming to Loop is the Berlin experience. Loop has felt very quintessentially Berlin.

How do you see that changing as you move Loop to Los Angeles? Does that in any way create a vacuum? How are you thinking about that change?

Craig Schuftan: I certainly don’t see it as creating a vacuum.

What Berlin and LA have in common is not much, but they are both cities with rich musical histories, as sites of innovation.  Neither of them is a museum; both cities are places where music-making, at all levels, is still very alive and happening today.

I’m not too worried about there being anything “missing,” in that sense. I think when people come to Los Angeles for Loop, they will have plenty to see and hear and do besides what’s going on at our venues and our event.

In the process of planning this event, it’s been a pleasure for me to discover that LA itself is thriving musically. There’s all sorts of stuff going on and often in unexpected ways. Sometimes, we have to work very hard to get away from first impressions and cliches and things. A lot of people, when they first think of LA, they think of it as a hip hop city, or like a city of beats. There’s definitely a lot of that going on, but then there’s also this thriving underground techno scene going on there. There’s a super popular scene of, like, modern day psychedelic bands in, I think it’s Echo Park?.

And the musical history of LA, as I’m sure you both know, is extraordinary. Right from the days when … Well, this is another story of like Berlin to LA migration, you know when refugee composers moved to LA in the 1930s and 40s and set up shop in Hollywood,…

Synthtopia: So many of the Hollywood composers of the 50s came from Germany.

Craig Schuftan: Somebody said to Max Steiner once, “Don’t you know you’re in Hollywood? Speak German.”

In a way, the whole European avant garde kind of moved over to Hollywood during the war years. In the immediate postwar years, LA was a hub for R’n’B, with all these incredible small R’n’B studios where a lot of the forms of that music were worked out. As you know, in the 1960s, there’s was the scene around Sunset Strip and this flowering of youth culture, which later modulated into the psychedelic movement.

Right through history, you have this unfolding story of music in this city which, as you walk around there, is inescapable. You see the names of streets and studios and places and bars and cafes that you’ve recognized from hundreds of songs. That’s all the sort of ghosts of all that are still there.

But then, at the same time, there is a contemporary music scene going on as we speak where music is changing and evolving all the time in totally unpredictable ways.

As we go on in planning this event, I’ve learnt so much about music culture and also musical subculture in that city. There’s so much going on there.

Synthtopia: On last question for you. For those people who maybe didn’t consider coming when it was in Europe, how would you explain Loop and the experience they’re going to get if they attend?

Craig Schuftan: I think I’d probably tell them a story, because I think these things are always better when it’s specific.

This is one of my favorite things about Loop last year … I remember three or four months before Loop, I was looking at this list of ideas that people had suggested for Loop’s Open Zone. One of them was from Dennis DeSantis, saying that he would love it if there was a performance of [Hungarian composer Gyorgi] Ligeti’s Symphony For 100 Metronomes.

I love Ligeti and also I’ve always been curious about that piece, I had never seen it performed, but the idea of it sounded great. The symphony calls for 100 wind-up metronomes to be wound up and then started by a kind of orchestra of players all at the same time, but with the speed /tempo of each metronome set slightly differently so they all tick out of time.

Synthtopia: So they all go out of phase.

Craig Schuftan: Yes, they’re all completely out of time with one another. You set them all off, they all start playing, tick, tick, tick, at different speeds.

Eventually they run out, but they don’t run out all at the same time, of course, so the rhythm changes all the time, as the different metronomes drop out in different parts.

I just thought, that would sound amazing. I put it right at the top of the list. I was like, we have to do this, that would be great and then set about the practical business of trying to figure out how to do it.

Synthtopia: Where can you actually get 100 metronomes?

Craig Schuftan: It turns out, there’s a company that does just that! They will rent you the Ligeti score, and they have 100 metronomes sitting in a box there, just to perform that piece.

Synthtopia: That’s fantastic.

Craig Schuftan: We planned to do it in the Funkhaus in that beautiful long, rounded corridor there. All the metronomes set at equal distances along that hallway. We had the idea that we would conduct the symphony every night by asking Loop attendees to volunteer to be part of this metronome orchestra.

Then, as with so many other things with events, you plan and plan them and then you just cross your fingers and go, “I hope this works!”

I guess that’s what was lovely about all this, seeing not just that I was working in a place where someone could suggest a music technology company putting on a music event where something so un-futuristic, like technically un-futuristic, but intellectually super futuristic could be performed. I was like, “That’s great!”

I love the joke in there as well – you know, the idea that one of the most famous things about [Ableton] Live is the metronome. The idea of us doing this performance with 100 metronomes, but the metronomes all kind of messed up and out of sync was ironic enough. But what really surprised me on the night was just how enthusiastic people were about it.

We had no problem at all getting 20+ volunteers every night who wanted to be part of this performance. Also, it was great watching people perform the piece, and also watching the people gathering around to listen to it, seeing the way the sustained and careful way that they engaged with it. I really liked how people listened basically, because that’s what that piece demands.

It’s one thing to talk about Ligeti’s symphony, or to plan a performance, or to see it written about in a history book. But, like that other famous piece that everybody thinks is a joke, John Cage’s 4’33”, it has to be seen, experienced, to really believe it and understand it.

That’s what happened. I think for me, that’s as good a summary as any of what you might expect to see and do at Loop.

If I was trying to persuade somebody to come to Loop this fall, I would say it’s a place where something like that can happen. Where we can have a transformative music experience based on close and attentive listening. Also a kind of communal involvement where everybody gets involved in realizing a project, in a way that pushes our thinking about music in different directions. Sometimes in totally unexpected ways.

There was no modular synth with this thing. There was no laptop, there was no tech in the sense that we would currently understand it. There was just an idea, and a bunch of people who are interested in music, who all have a willingness to listen.

I think we all walked out of that with our heads slightly adjusted. That’s what I would say … That’s the basis on which I would recommend it.

Synthtopia: Where can interested folks go to find out more about Loop?

Craig Schuftan: All the latest information on Loop 2018 is available on the Loop site, where, if you want, you can also sign up for us to send you updates as they become available. The full program and list of participants, presenters and performers for Loop 2018 will be announced soon.

 

100 metronomes photo via Prepared Guitar.Blogspot.com