Loop guru

A lone-wolf artist breaks out of the bedroom

by Matt Ashare

"If I tell you that, then I'm going to have to kill you," deadpans Alan Sutherland.

Ask the 27-year-old Sutherland to go into detail about the origins of any of the tracks on his debut album and that's the stock answer he'll give you. It's not that he doesn't want to say. In fact, he loves to talk about what goes on behind the sounds in Land of the Loops, the one-man project he's been directing from his apartment in Brooklyn for the past couple of years. But the self-taught sampler specialist knows enough about the law to realize that divulging too much about the raw materials of the work that went into the Land of the Loops' debut CD, Bundle of Joy, could bring him a bundle of trouble.

"People think that as soon as you have a sampler it means that you're just stealing everything from somewhere," Sutherland explains. "I know that there's some popular music out there that's made by people who are really good at weaving other songs in and out of their own songs. I never really learned how to do that. But I just read a review of Bundle of Joy by someone who claims to hear `recognizable snips of Yazoo and Duane Eddy' on it. I don't even own a Yazoo record. There are some tiny exceptions of taking stuff from other music. I did sample two guitar notes from an old record, which is probably what the person thought was Duane Eddy. But I slowed those notes down, cut them up, and pasted them back together. And they're definitely not from a Duane Eddy song."

The notes Sutherland's referring to are the twangy, reverb-drenched ones that bob in and out of the playful, patchwork backdrop of "Day Late & Dollar Short," a dub-inflected instrumental that also incorporates a sporadic hip-hop beat, a chorus of ethereal female vocals, some futuristic synth bleeps and blips, and a ominous sound of a man's voice saying "I hope I landed on my feet this time." Elsewhere on the disc, which opens with the sound of a needle being dropped on a vinyl 45 by an anonymous punk band, Sutherland does some old school, Jam Master Jay-style scratching, plays his own skeletal bass lines and keyboard riffs, and scavenges all manner of aural ephemera -- from the sound of a baby crying and the neigh of a pony to snippets of dialogue stolen from radio and television. Heather Lewis of Olympia's indie-pop trailblazers Beat Happening guests on a couple of tracks, lending her artless vocal stylings to the laid-back groove of "Growing Concern" and "Cruisin' for Sentient Beings," and giving Land of the Loops its ticket to a college radio audience. (Boston's WFNX-101.7 FM is one of the first two commercial stations nationally to spin Land of the Loops.)

There may be nothing new about using synths and samplers to create cut-and-paste pop. But the homegrown sound of Land of the Loops does represent a move away from the slick, studio stylings of most electronic-based music -- out of the boardroom and into the bedroom, so to speak. In fact, Sutherland, who grew up in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and just finished his first year of a masters program in art and design education at Pratt Institute, claims never to have been inside a professional studio. And he's the first to admit that his technical knowledge is far from complete.

"I've had my sampler for four years. I turn it on everyday, and I'm still figuring out new things about it. It was super-complicated and frustrating when I first got it. I wanted to throw it out the window. But when I finally figured out the basics of how to make a song on it, I put together a 45-minute tape and released it on a cassette label [Slabco] that my friend runs in Seattle."

The name Land of the Loops refers to the pre-sampler technology that Sutherland used to develop his mixmaster chops. "A friend of mine taught me how to make loops by pulling the insides out of a cassette, tying together a loop of tape, and putting it back in the shell. You can also make loops by putting a piece of electrical tape at a 45-degree angle in the groove on an album so that it keep skipping over and over again. I'd always wanted to scratch records the way they do on rap songs. So I found a turntable that someone had thrown out on cleaning day at college, bought a mixer at a pawnshop, hooked up two turntables, and started making songs that way. It was very lo-fi. I'd have a tape loop of something from television on a cassette. I'd put a drum-machine beat to it, and then I'd scratch along to that and record it all on a four-track."

Although his methods have since become somewhat more sophisticated, Sutherland's still very much a believer in bringing the ingenuity of lo-fi into the realm of high-tech.

"The indie-rock world that my friends showed me -- pick up whatever's lying around the house, make a song with it, put it out on your own seven-inch, and meet all these people who are doing the same kind of things -- that's been really welcoming and opening for me. I could spend $1000 a week in a studio, but I'd rather take that money and spend it on a DAT machine that I can keep and use to make my own music. It really doesn't matter whether you're in your living room beating on a pail or in a 24-track studio programming the same Roland drum machine that every house-music producer uses, as long as it sounds good."