Y2K5 International Live Looping Festival - USA 2005

From October 5th to 9th 46 live looping artists from several countries performed at the Y2K5 International Live Looping Festival in Big Sur, Santa Cruz and San Francisco, California. Huge thanks to Kris Hartung for handling the webcast, recording most of the performances and providing the webspace so we can listen to most of the performances of the festival. Special thanks also to Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill who closely screened the webcast and recorded most of the performances. Many thanks also to Mark Hamburg for shooting the photos and posting them! More photos available from Village Savant. Presenting artists from the USA, UK, Japan, and Switzerland, the festival featured the creme de la creme of this burgeoning international musical movement (there were 20 live looping festivals in 11 countries in the last 12 months and https://www.loopersdelight.com, the mecca website of the movement averages about 900'000 page views per month). The live looping movement has no musical style or genre that defines it. Indeed, there were performances by solo guitarists, cellists, percussionists, flutists, vocalists, found sound artists, as well as avant garde electronic musicians. It is defined by the technology that allows the musicians to digitally clone themselves while playing live in front of an audience. The main festival featured looping acts Ryusei Hattori (Japan), Hideki Nakanishi aka MandoMan (Japan), and Bernhard Wagner (Switzerland) as headliners and Roberto Zorzi (Italy), Philipp "zurrigo" Zürcher (Switzerland), and Andy Butler (UK) as featured performers. The main festival occurred on October 8th and 9th in Santa Cruz where all 46 loopers performed on two stages with continuous music from noon to midnight. There were also 'Best of Y2K5 Loop Festival' performances at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur on Wednesday, October 5th and the JavaCat Coffee in San Francisco on Friday, October 7th, as well as a special Experimental Looping edition of the festival at the Luggage Store on Thursday, October 6th.