Re: (idm) lock groove

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