A journey into loop composition

420421 | Last updated: May 24, 2025

Some of the sound that bounces around the inner chambers of your ear holes that resembles patterns we can recognize coupled with frequency syncopation that you’ve heard up until the dawn of techno is music that is—or was—performed in real-time by a human. Since then, we have been encroaching on a new paradigm in which systems of language conspire to produce a simulation of the same thing. So far, we have chosen to entertain this notion of soulless expression without a call to arms to suppress it.

“Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.” — Terence McKenna

Could it be possible to construct an instrument performed by a human that would allow free-flow of human expression but use the soulless product of these systemic language models as a sound source? What if we played the thing that was playing the simulation of something being played?

Now, I’m not a scientist. I don’t claim to do things systematically or follow some rigid practice in order to gain answers to questions. I like to think that there is room in this world for the miraculous; confusion is just as exciting as an answer, and in our short experience of time within this plane of existence what difference does it really make? Therefore, to start this journey I purpose we limit to what can be possible within standard MIDI 1.0 messages.

In the summer of 2024 I started to long for loose time keeping in music composition and had the thought that creating my own command-line interface (CLI) for doing such a thing could be a ‘fun’ experience. I had started a weekly ritual of performing live coded composition using Orca under the name Shadowtackle and kept finding myself in situations where I needed an indefinitely held note or a phrase performed on a MIDI controller to loop over and over instead of being programmed on the spot. Keeping my head within the feeling of the music was an important aspect to me. I could use a loop pedal, but the messages coming from MIDI to perform the loop was one step closer to the system in which the phrase existed at all in the first place. The end result of my time experimenting landed in early August of that same year.

Krait, a MIDI looper that takes record of MIDI messages over the course of time determined by the performer was born. A couple weeks later my second born child would also emerge into this world, and for the months that followed I would be preoccupied with this new life unfolding in front of my eyes.