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How did Boris achieve the effect for the opening riff that plays at the beginning of Flood? The riff is played once, but then I am assuming it is repeated over the top a second time but in a fashion that makes the second drag just ever so slightly slower, or it stays the same tempo, it just starts at an ever increasing gap that eventually (10 min in I think) lines back up. I did something of the same thing tonight with two loopers; starting one and re-recording the looped phrase but with an ever so slight head start on the downbeat so that they wouldn't align perfectly. It kinda got it.

But it was only about 4 min before the phrase ended back to normal again. Would I just try to hit the rerecorded phrase downbeat a little closer to the original tempo? Try and be as precise as possible without being perfectly in rhythm? Or is there another trick to this...

Wikipedia says:
""Flood I" begins with a single guitar riff, which is then slowly shifted out of phase; a technique pioneered by minimalist composer Steve Reich."

So I'm guessing studio trickery.

That's a cool idea . My first thought was try and use a metronome but now I think about it.. the changes in speed are so small that it probably wouldn't work...

I think if you were recording into software you could just add a tiny bit of silence to the end of one track (you'd have to do the maths to figure it out exactly.) But yeah it would be hard to do with loopers other than play it a bunch of times till you get two loops that work together.

Yeah pulling it off in the studio I'd think would be much easier. Pulling it off just using loopers does it ok, but its not quite the same.

yeah I'm almost certain it's got something to do with tape manipulation.

I bet it's the Space Echo toans.

Achtane wrote:I bet it's the Space Echo toans.

Roland - Council of Japanese Tape Wizards

You know, they've played Flood live. You could talk to someone who'd seen them, 'cause it's not like that song does much else for the first ten minutes.

I... did not see them when they did those shows.

D.o.S. wrote:You know, they've played Flood live. You could talk to someone who'd seen them, 'cause it's not like that song does much else for the first ten minutes.

I... did not see them when they did those shows.

I saw them play Flood live. That whole thing just kind of melted into a blur of fuzzy feelings though so I couldn't say exactly how it was done. The space echo was right there sitting on a stand so it could well have been some sound-on-sound action. It would make sense.

They started with part 2 when I saw them.

I missed the Flood tour, but I caught the Heavy Rocks shows.
They played part of Flood, right after their Jpop stuff.
Only they could get away with that.

Achtane wrote:They started with part 2 when I saw them.

same.

Has always intrigued me as well. From the videos of Flood I've seen online, they seem to skip the minimalist first part when they play it live.

When I listen back to it, I notice the loop seems to speed up towards the end, so I'm guessing it's some sort of tempo / tape modulation for the playback speed.

For pulling it off live, using both of your feet to record the same loop on two looping pedals at the same time would probably get you there due to the slight timing imperfections.

But you gotta do it standing up after like three proper bong rips.