Sampling

2) Not quite, but I think it's a threat that said other forms of music would do well to take more note of. A good chunk of my favourite non-hip-hop music (at least sonically) of the last decade is rock music that took notice of hip hop, even if peripherally, and tried to come to grips with its promise and its challenge in one form or another.

I get the sense that your initial questions are intentionally over-the-top and provocative.

I get the sense that your initial questions are intentionally over- the-top and provocative

understatement of the year shocker.

Listening to music solely based out of samples would be like watching a movie completely made up of parts from other movies (not metaphorically, literally.) Or poem made from other poems. I think it says something that we would even entertain that notion--how different our appreciation of music is from our predecessors. Gone is the notion that patience is rewarded or that a large work with continuity and one pay-off is an endeavour worth pursuing. I guess if all one looks for is the collage-effect, then music could be satisfied by a string of "hooks" or samples that provocate, but have no serial relevance or nuance.

Otherwise, there's still a great deal of value in music that is not created by sampling, not to mention the obvious fact that what you're sampling is, of course, "real" music. And unless you want to end up sampling the same things over and over again, you'd have to come up with more music--reminds me of that fellow in the turn of the century who declared that there was nothing else left to discover or patent.

i think a good deal of us do more than entertain that notion: we let it entertain us.

i would have to guess that there are somewhere between 20,000-30,000 records released on a level above a limited edition 7" @ 1000 copies in a given year. if at least half of that is new, "real" music...well... couple that with the fact that i probably only have the ability to hear (really hear) 2-300 new records per year (and that's stretching it) and the ability for a sample to reach my ears "new" is increased a thousand fold.

likewise, the notion of a sample reaching my ears "cleanly" presupposes that you can't do anything to the sample, even if it's just throwing off the scent through juxtaposition. the only sample i recognized on the avalanches record was the bass bit from "holiday." even that was detourned enough for me not to immediately recognize it without context. a better, cheaper example would be the horn riff in shizuo's "trouble"; it's world-reknown (do you know what it is?) but so soaked in shitty fx and warped beyond recognition that it becomes a new piece of music to these ears.

an interesting avenue of discussion might be the microtrend in hiphop towards producing tracks with "real" instruments (or at least synths and keyboards played in real time, for the first time), but deployed like loops and samples rather than with the fluency that retro-funk crate diggers try to capture (swiz beatz, mannie fresh, neptunes, etc.)

Ok, I give--I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Is that supposed to be a retort or a neat twisty thing?

Just because you haven't heard the other "20,000" records doesn't mean that we should stop recording them, with or without real instruments. That's pretty narrow-minded--declaring a moratorium on new art because we've got enough to reference from. By that argument, all art should stop sometime around the 1950's, because I'm pretty sure there was enough literature, visual art, dance, music, and architecture to last every human on earth a good while by that point. God forbid we add anything else to the world.

I think the fundamental issue here is that we've begun to recognise the ability to whittle down samples so far that they are mere microseconds of sound, in which case I would argue that that is no different than playing an instrument--insomuch as you have the same building blocks of "elemental" sound. But using a sampler that way is pretty much not using a sampler, because if you're going to do that, you might as well start with real instruments--there's no difference. And real instruments give you a degree of continuous control that you could never have with a sampler and a pitch bend knob.

That's not to say that sampled music doesn't add another dimension--I pretty much use over 50% samples in my stuff, but I would never want to replace it all--there's definitely something to be said for realtime, nuanced human interference.

* A sample-only world would be a sad, sad world, one that would be shattered to bits as soon as someone learned the ancient art of playing a piano chord and was hailed as a visionary.

Which raises an incredibly interesting point. Written music and music theory -- these things were essentially invented as language, as a lingua franca to remove the need for intuitive shouting. They were meant to make musical concepts concrete, writeable, speakable, so that you have to use vague intuitive instructions. And yet music over the past century has been working pretty hard to break down that language from avant composers with their non-traditional scoring systems to hip-hop and sampling. The idea, I suppose, is that the traditional "language" of music will lock us into recreating the specific types of music that that language was written to describe. The question is: as we break away into new ways of using music, are we doing enough to create new languages for expressing them? I suppose turntablists have their new "notation" systems, but this strikes me more as an intellectual exercise than a workable form of communication -- I'm talking more about things like the turntablist slang that those systems are based on and also creating. (E.g., "Hey, DJ, do a spider!" And the DJ can do it. Communication!)

Jess: Yeah, I'd agree that there's the same thrill in untutored sampling, no question. Especially since the learning curve with sampling is so different -- an hour or two of instruction and suddenly you can pretty much start banging about with your own creations. But on the other hand, I'd rather hear a non-musical person play an instrument (where at least the confining structure of how to play it will give them musical direction) than a sampler (with which you can do some horrific things just by not knowing what you're up to). I'd even argue that it's easier to throw together a passable track with just an acoustic guitar and vocals than it is to put together something sample-based that actually sounds good.

Sampling can go awfully wrong. You never hear that stuff, so it sounds easy, but I'm assuming everyone here who's learned to work with samples has, at some early point, pressed play to check out a work-in-progress and found something just hideous unexpectedly streaming out.

Speaking of Stravinsky earlier, he is the man with the quote "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." He was pro-sampling!

Having said that, I think that sampler-artists and electronic artists in general have a MUCH better sense of pacing and suspense than traditional arrangers, who perhaps don't regard a piece as a whole sometimes because they are so caught up with the intricacies of arrangements. Mind you that's more because of the vagaries of untalented but intelligent composers than some intrinsic part of "composing" from scratch. But I think it's much easier to sound better with samples--we tend to be much more forgiving because the sounds are so perfect. A bad guitar played badly is much more naked, I think.

And the argument about language breakdowns, I don't buy at all-- curiously, we have not really seen a breakdown of that in the written arts--be it literature or poetry. I mean, Getrude Stein et al aside, most people flirted with the idea of deconstructing words, and then went happily about creating gorgeous and transcendent art using traditional syntax and grammar. Another words, the content, however self-referential and ironic, was supple enough to supply great art-- and I think that the traditional framework of Western notation is still very supple--not that it's the only method by any means.

the point here is not whether it is acceptable for an artist to reference or utilize pieces of compositions created by other artists. In fact, Stravinsky takes for granted that they will do so, just as painters and writers borrow themes from past artists to explore in their own work. The difference is in how these "borrowed bits" are assimilated by the borrower. Stravinsky's "good artist" would take a bit of another's composition, build on it, write a piece that (hopefully) does it justice, but the original composer's idea will still permeate this new work to an exent. The "great artist" would likewise take a bit of music from another. Rather than simply augmenting it, this artist would completely reshape the borrowed bit to the extent that, even if it were still technically recognizable, the inherent meaning of the phrase would be completely altered and expanded beyond its initial boundaries. The "great artist" manages to make the borrowed phrase truly his own in a sense that the "good artist" is incapable of. In legal terms, the good artist takes possession of the phrase, has custody of it, but it always remains the property of the original composer. The great artist takes possession and title; he or she truly owns the "stolen" phrase when he or she has finished with it.

There are two very big reasons to play instruments besides samplers that I can think of off the top of my head:

1) It's FUN. You get to use your BODY. I do computer music, and I play electric bass and electric guitar in a couple of rock bands, and I love the latter because it's so PHYSICAL. Makes collaboration a lot more fun and immediate, too.

2) You can change the timbre, timing, etc. in the instant it occurs to you, with infinite degrees of subtlety. Obviously you can do the same thing with a sampler, even more broadly, but it can't go from thought to sound instantly.

Obviously, yeah, Disco Inferno = something of a frontier, though it's interesting how Hood do something similar and it doesn't wow me nearly as much. Anyway, the answer probably isn't just to pick up where '94-era bands left off, but rather to try the same approach with an ear for what's happening now. I listened to Simple Minds' Reel To Real Cacophony this morning (still probably the post-punk album for me) and then the < i>Ayia Napa 2001 2-step comp, and it struck me that today's equivalent of that Simple Minds album would be riddled with "street" rhythms. All I could think was, "fuck me, why aren't there any bands at all who are trying to capture some of this rhythmic invention? The finesse of the arranged sounds? The awesomeness of the bass? The sheer kineticism???" The Beta Band make allusions to it, but they're the wrong band for the task (though obviously the right band for a hell of a lot of other stuff). I refuse to accept that rock is simply inferior on this level. Someone should do it, and do it properly.

... Or am I just critically handicapped without a Dismembermant Plan album?

Now, I do not think it's very useful at all to try to imitate real instruments with a sampler. It's pretty pointless to attempt to make an "authentic" sounding jazz track or something out of samples. With a sampler, you could create original trumpet phrases or whatever, but to go nowhere with them would come across as sub-par live instrumentation. The sampler is a pastiche weapon, its strength is in stealing disparate snippets and manipulating listeners. Way too many crate-digger types just want to make digested vinyl beats when they could be doing something cooler like biting off Jan Jelinek. Jazz loops --> glitch = interesting use of samples.

If you are an inept samplist, you are the musical equivalent to those fake sunset-backdrop juxtapositions they put in local car-dealership commercials (although skilled samplists can use this effect to their advantage).

Manipulation = work. Puff Daddyesque manipulation involving a direct and literal revoking of past pop glory is lazy. Manipulating 37 samples to launch listeners through free jazz, techstep, and IDM all at once is not lazy. What actually sounds good is another question entirely.....

That is *completely* unt-...uh, wait, you're right.

I think Tim has a good manifesto. Radiohead are steering clear of the 'street' per se, so if not them, who? I like the Dismemberment Plan but I don't see them quite rising to that level Tim is asking for, at least not yet -- though they might well, they keep expanding their range. Then again, is the question perhaps whether a band should in fact really be where we're looking in the first place?

Radiohead are on the right track, but their explorations are not as physical as maybe what I'm looking for. There is a very good reason why disco was such a winning influence on so many post-punk bands.

Josh: you're really leaving me no choice but to brave import prices, are you. If I'm displeased you'll hear about it soon enough.

Why? Can't we just stick to asking em about pompous self-regarding fraudulence, at least till one or other comes up with an actual decent "record"? (Disclaimer: I haf not bothered listening to every record by either of these shyster outfits...)

(Ditto Culturcide, while we're at it. i hate em i hate em i hate em *mumbles furiously to self for many minutes: meanwhile sane life goes on*)