A few months ago, Peter asked me to write a short bio for the then-hypothetical Coffeeloop website. His reply when I emailed these rambling thoughts to him a fortnight later:
Absolutely *not* what I was expecting yet, curiously, this was precisely what I suppose I should have expected.
Delighted that just this evening I wrote “Coffeeloop is the tidal wave to blow away the ripples” and there you are writing about your seaweed… and sea urchins and… Music Television.
I forget what Music Television had to do with that early version. Here is the final one.
* * *
I’m Ben, and to the left I can be seen some years ago expressing my enthusiasm for the fauna of shallow seas.
I was always drawn to the intertidal zone. Throughout my childhood I wasted no opportunity to trawl underwater crevices, draw aside veils of seaweed and capture unwitting creatures for pleasure. For there in the rock pools and beneath the seaweed lie strange animals that are swept in from the alien sea world, sit awhile, and are swept out again. Briefly, in this zone, they can be isolated, tamed, and safely played with by human infants.
It is a child’s paradise, for a certain sort of child. Safe, but psychologically powerful. The allure, of course, the thrill, is the possibility of coming across something strange or exotic, many-legged, or betentacled. Momentarily we are brought out of our world and into contact with something else; something beyond our grasp but which, here, can be gingerly touched; something huge, and exciting.
* * *
Coffeeloop is something huge and exciting.
In Spring of 2008, I was delighted to join Peter and Milton for our first joint project, SPEM. In music tech terms, this event was exceptional. Preparation for the multi-tracking epic at the programme’s core had stretched to many months. Some frankly breathtaking speaker technology was employed, courtesy of our friends at Fujitsu Ten. I was brought on board relatively late in the day, tasked mainly with broadcasting the concert over the net.
For each of us, and this came I think as a genuine surprise to all, this event became an absolute wellspring of inspiration. Much discussion and coffee was had in the days following the concert, and our perspectives mingled in the slanted Edinburgh sunlight. SPEM, a strangely successful blend of musical coherence and technical sorcery, began to look like just the first stage of something, a set of possibilities, that might lead far into the distance.
Of all this, Coffeeloop is the natural progression. SPEM was merely one event, and in some ways relatively conservative. It was our intertidal zone. But, for us, in some important way it blew the doors off the concept of the musical experience. It gave form to the ideas – for publicity, format, venue, presentation and more – that will fuel Coffeeloop. It is in fact the reason I am involved. To virtually any other music outfit, that one third of the founding team might be programmers would be unthinkable. For Coffeeloop, it could not be otherwise.
Technology is right there at the heart of Coffeeloop alongside music. Our vision is as much about the ways music is brought to people as about music itself, because each is nothing without the other. Technology has brought previously unimaginable possibilities to enterprises of all kinds; it’s time to start weaving that magic into the fabric of classical music.
That is Coffeeloop’s grand aim in a nutshell. I’m here to make the technology go. We have some exciting things planned. To establishmentarians, some of it may seem strange, heretical; even downright outrageous. We say there’s a tide of change coming, and it’s time to hire a boat.
Coffeeloop – we’ve been playing along the shoreline.
Let’s get wet.
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