I should have specified Light Blue touch mode, however after more experimenting I figured out what I was missing. It didn’t click that the note in the manual about T1 and T2 being on page 4 mean that I had to tap Push 3x to advance to Page 4. Once I was there I had to increase the level of the two right knobs to 3 o’clock as mentioned in the manual. They must default to a very low value regardless of knob position when you switch to Page 4 which meant the loop was so short as to be non existent. New user issue 
@jaakjensen Perhaps in a future fw version the default value of Touch modes could be set to a medium/usable amount?
For anyone else who is having trouble here are my steps to getting it going.
These are starting from a factory reset so we’re all in the same state.
- Set two left knobs LP to Max. HP hard left.
- Set tow right knobs to 3 o’clock
- test levels
- press Push button, and tap Touch 5x until you’re Touch LED is flickering pale blue.
- press bypass so green light is on
- tap Push button 3x until the right-most light is red (that is page 4).
- set top right knob (T1, “decay”) to 1 o’clock
- set bottom right knob (T2, “direction/speed”) to 3 o’clock.
- tap Touch to start recording. Play some music.
- tap Touch again to stop recording. Loop playback will begin. Touch LED will start as dark blue, and will lighten as the loop progresses.
- adjust two right knobs to see how they effect the loop.
- tap Touch again to overdub. Tap again to stop overdub recording.
- keep in mind the effect of T1 only decays the tape loop when Touch is held down. So optionally, you can keep Touch depressed to record and overdub, then keep it down to allow the decay amount to do its cool thing. Then you can release Touch so the loop continues as is without further degradation.
All the info is in the manual, but can be misunderstood as a new user of Ribbons. Figuring this out the hard way actually helped me understand the whole setup much better.
Hope this helps someone.
J.