Hip hop, belonging to the same lineage, performs something of a transcendental form of call-and-response in beats that are produced by sampling from existing records and through the ‘flip’ – an ‘answer’ track to the ‘leader’ of the original recording
To see the ‘flip’ as a response to the original track is super interesting, something I’d never considered before either. I do find I only flip something I really like listening to. And that my piece of work is a reflection or inspired by this record I’m listening to. This call and response are super interesting.
Oliver argues that in sample-based beat-making (assuming the sampled material is mined from vinyl records), a fragment of a sound goes from analogue to digital as it is recorded in the sampling device’s computer memory, and then returns to analogue as it is projected into the air and thrown into a relationship with a recording MC; this process allows the sampling beatmaker to establish a collaboration with a musician on the original recording, albeit a virtual one due to the sampled musician’s physical absence and unwitting role.
Assuming it’s a vinyl record, this analogue to digital and back-to-analogue transformation is very powerful, and sampling usage is a form of collaboration with the musician, although it is a physical absence.
The technique of chopping, involving the isolation of small pieces of recorded phrases to be played in new rhythmic and textural arrangements,98 is demonstrated in the film Secondhand Sureshots featuring the beatmakers and DJs Nobody, Ras G, J.Rocc, and Daedalus who are tasked with spending $5 on five records in Californian thrift stores, then making one track each using nothing but samples (subjected to cuts and effects) from these records.
I have actually watched this video in the past, shot by stone’s throw, with all five artists creating a whole project from $5 records and then flipping it into 5 individual tracks, super interesting and it was really inspiring to do it. And then in the end they press 5 records of the material and release those back to the location they made it. I forgot this existed! I need to do the same.
the producers, relishing a sort of ‘thrill of the hunt’, search for records containing suitable sounds. Ras G picks out Machine Head by Deep Purple for his belief that it would be likely to contain isolated kick and snare sounds, Nobody buys Touch by John Klemmer as he notes that Klemmer’s records have been coveted by beatmakers for their ‘open’ passages of saxophone and organ. 100 Daedalus is eager to stress that he would not want to sample and chop something if it already sounds ‘done’, but only if he believes he can repurpose it in line with his own musical style: ‘The game isn’t to make it unrecognisable, the game is to make it your own
The thrill of the hunt being part of the practice, we want to try and find the heat. And that with sampling the aim is to make it your own, not to make it unrecognisable. It’s remix culture.
because otherwise all of my heroes become criminalised […] from DJ Premier to Large Professor to Pete Rock to Marley Marl […] it was a different era, and I don’t think you can apply the hyper-greed, hyper-capitalist kind of mentality that we’re living in now to three decades ago, or for that matter two decades ago’
Hyper greed, the Hyper capitalist kind of mentality that we exist in, is super true.
DJ Shadow, a producer who claims to have had to discard some of his tracks because of sample clearance problems, reflects: ‘We’re living in this strange dichotomy where music has technically never been worth less, and yet, where samples are concerned, people have never wanted more
Sampling really is a reflection of greed and wanting more and more due to its popularity.
Danny Brown’s production team used this approach when making beats for the album Old after Brown was sued for an uncleared sample on his previous release XXX; 111 while replayed phrases might originally be deployed as replacements for the sounds they are imitating, they are unlikely to match the originals exactly, and they might even produce results that sound better to the artist, as Brown explains: [For] this album [Old] they was extra cautious and made sure we got everything cleared or we had to replay it. And we had to replay a lot of them, but they ended up coming out better than the actual sampled ones, to be honest.112 Thus, replaying is a very useful option to Brown as it allows him to rhyme on beats that he feels he works best on, without blunting his ‘creative edge’.1
it’s a good workaround, to re-record anything you cant clear or pay for. Something I’ll do with my own work as well.