From Greg Clow Sent Wed, Jan 6th 1999, 15:15
On Wed, 6 Jan 1999, Irene McC wrote: > Ah! Yes, this does shed some extra light on things. What I > gathered initially is that ONLY the runout groove can be turned into > an endless repeat lock groove, which I understand and can see. > What you are saying though is that it can be anywhere on the > record, providing that one physically picks up the stylus and moves > on the needle, otherwise it will keep on repeating itself, right? This is correct. I own a couple of records that have locked grooves in the middle of a side. I think V/Vm's Privileged Frames compilation is one of them if I'm remember correctly. Toronto's Legion Of Green Men are also masters of this sort of thing, and have been playing with locked grooves since their very first releases of experimental noise/ambience under the names Electro Static Cat and Emperical Sleeping Consort. Almost every release they've put out under their multitude of aliases has included several locked grooves. And then, of course, there's the infamous RRR100 (the 100th release on experimental label RRRecords), a 7" featuring 100 locked grooves by 100 different artists. It was followed up last year sometime with an LP featuring *500* (I think it was that many, anyway) locked grooves by 500 different artists. In both cases, each "track" was the length of a single revolution of the record, so the needle would be instantly "locked" everywhere it was dropped. > And the POINT of lock grooves is .... ? I imagine it is useful for > mixing - is that the only purpose they serve? Nah, they were around a long time before IDM and other forms of music where DJ mixing was prevalent, and are more commonly found in the realms of experimental music, where I suppose they're used to make an "artistic statement" or something. If done well, they can be a wonderful thing. I often finish my live DJ sets with two locked grooves pitched out of sync with each other, and the resulting "track" is usually quite interesting, Greg