Loop

Abstract

Fifty years after its release in the New York multimedia magazine Aspen (December 1966), “Loop”, one of the Velvet Underground’s earliest tracks, still represents something of an oddity in the group’s career–an unclassifiable bruitist joke that has hardly ever been taken seriously. However, if we delve more deeply into “Loop,” the work appears to harbor many qualities which would be qualified as “experimental” or “minimalist” less than 10 years later. If so, why has “Loop” been overlooked by the musical establishment? Furthermore, why has the track received so little attention from rock critics? These are the questions that I propose to answer in this article.

Notes

1 The release of “Loop” closely followed that of the singles “All Tomorrow’s Parties”/“I’ll Be Your Mirror” in July and “Sunday Morning”/“Femme Fatale” in November 1966.

2 A phenomenon that occurs when the sound produced by speakers interact with an input transducer such as a microphone.

3 On the transfer from machine to instrument effectuated by the New York repetitive composers, see in particular Girard.

4 Robert Ashley had in fact made use of feedback in his performance of The Wolfman as early as 1964.

5 Conrad was a member of the group from January to April 1965.

6 See the collection of his press articles compiled in ap Siôn.

7 “While hearing [the Ramones], I realized that, as a minimalist, I had more in common with this music than I thought,” recalled “post-minimalist” composer Rhys Chatam in 1990, thereby attesting to the fracture separating the popular and the classical approach to repetition in the 1970s.

8 By Bockris and Malanga, Zak, Witts, Unterberger, and so on.