I decided to read another book on sampling and the ideas of culture around music, following again from the previous book and my attributes task. I’m still in the process of researching and trying, a form of practice-based research. Closer towards my hand-in I’ll make more focused studies but currently, I’m following my curiosity.
The book has several essays to discuss the issues presented in the introductory essay by the editors. I read about half of the essays that really spoke to me and found these two in particular the most interesting, ideas of archiving culture through sampling, reanimating sounds and the crate digger as an archaeologist interest me.
An Introduction, or My (Ambiguous) Life with Technology, Steve Reich
Steve discusses his early use of tape loops and his ideas behind them. He speaks about the first time he played two mono tape recorders at the same time and discovered this feeling of distance. At first, the sounds played at the same time but they slowly went out of sync phasing into each other. He carried on listening and eventually they came back around. He thought this was something to pursue.
He moved back to New York in 1966 and he did a second speech loop piece called “Come Out”, the voice of Daniel Hamm, arrested for murder. He moved back to New York in 1966 and he did a second speech loop piece called “Come Out”, the voice of Daniel Hamm, arrested for murder. I’ve previously done research on blog posts on this and found this continued interview interesting. He created a similar tape loop with the speech that phases in and out of time together. I’ve previously done research on blog posts on this and found this continued interview interesting.
Eventually, this lead to other practices, attempting to do this with instruments live. Steve considered real musicians to be able to perform live. He then went on to discuss the sampler as an instrument and his fascination with it. When he started working on operas again he used field recordings of New York soundscapes and used samplers to trigger, edit and change the sounds and control the trigger for them in his compositions. Unlike synthesisers which didn’t interest him that much, he didn’t see the point if he could use a real instrument than a copy. He considered a sampler as a different tool, which enables sounds to be performed and used compositionally.
The Musician as Thief: Digital Culture and Copyright Law
I found these quotes to be of real interest to me, which has given me research towards my portfolio.
Human culture is always derivative, and music perhaps especially so. New art builds on old art. We hear music, process it, reconfigure it, and create something derivative but new
I suppose sampling is different to having inspiration and this quote doesn’t exactly back my ideas around sampling, but it is interesting that we can find inspiration to be like this.
Contemporary music from the top forty to the most obscure live DJ set, reflects this technological change, taking the music that came before as raw material for research and configuration. As David Toop has noted, this cultural practice profoundly blurs the line between creators and consumers of culture, turning listening itself into a platform for creative production and performance.
I find this reference to be of interest to me because it communicates listening as a way of being creative, listening can lead towards production and performing and breaking the idea of listening not being that. It also reminds me of the ideas around knowledge and this explains that sonic knowledge is a thing.
Does a change in technology produce a change in how we make culture? And, if we are making culture differently now, how should the law respond?
Correctly written, we find many laws that are still behind current practices. It always takes years through scheduling to finally combat bureaucracy for new laws to come to fruition and reflect modern society and its practices.
David Toop says “Songs became liquid. They became vehicles for improvisation, or source materials, field recordings almost, that could be reconfigured or remixed to suit the future. In a humiliating way, musicians became technicians, alongside recording engineers, tape ops editors, and all the other technocratic laboratory assistants cleaning their glasses in the back room. At the front end of the medium was the DJ… playing music and people as one fluid substance.
The idea that songs can become liquid and reformatted into different uses beyond their original is a great point within my usage of sampling as well. Perhaps a song can have a different meaning once contextualised in a practice that sees different potential within the medium?
“Collage as technique: the selection, arrangement and juxtaposition of the found bits of prior culture is the art. The fragments “impact upon each other to explosive effect”—through the artist’s selection and arrangement, she generates novel information.
“It may be a culturally productive act simply to discover and draw attention to a fragment of text, image, or sound. Part of the mosaic- or collage creators’ art lies in the very process of rescuing the framing from obscurity and showing it to people. This Benjaminian urge to rescue and re-present culture is conspicuous throughout sample-based genres, and is illustrated in the following description of DJs making organised raids on collective culture—that is, going to record stores. This comes from Jeff Chang, aka DJ Zen, who describes feeling outclassed as a crate-digger by members of the now-defunct solesides collective.
“There’s nothing worse to them than the kind of guy who won’t bid his rent and food money for a Tanzanian Funk 45 or the impossible-to-get Invaders LP. The kind of person who doesn’t scour thin phonebooks from foothill counties and find teeny used record stores owned by unwashed proprietors who look like trolls. The kind of person who doesn’t know where and when all the record convention within 1000 miles are going down, and what hour before dawn to show up in a miner’s light helmet and backpack.”
This is a serious pursuit of cultural fragments—on par with the great granddaddy of all crate diggers, Grandmaster Flash, who claims to have performed with “something like 45” crates of records behind him. The critical and commercial success of these artists suggests that their compulsion to collect, reconfigure, to re-present prior recorded sound is finding a receptive audience. To listeners, crate-digging is a highly legitimate foundation for signification and innovative cultural production.
These last three quotes went one after the other. They affirmed my ideas that I’ve been curious about crate digging, what it means to crate dig, and what are some ideas around it? To reconfigure, to re-present works, to become an archival artist and connect to ancestors.
I also found a section that mentioned John Oswald and Plunderphonics, I’ll be doing research into this.
