BA Sound Arts Year 3

I decided to follow in this idea of vinyl recycling, after reading eco-sonic media and watching the second-hand sureshots video I felt like it was a good thing to recycle abandoned cheap records that no one wanted or wanted anymore and create something artistic with them.

I started by going crate-digging and buying five records the same way as the artists in the documentary did, without listening and just off-label and instinct.

These were the five records I purchased, I listened through all of the sounds and managed to find a drum break, I also kept recording interesting parts within my SP404MK2 which was sampling the records. After I had a few interesting parts and the drum break I began chopping it up into individual hits and sound designing the sounds. I ended up making one loop instrumental and one other instrumental combining three different records from sounds.

after exporting to Ableton, cleaning up the files and making two projects for both instrumentals I bounced them and saved them. Now I have ten instrumentals on the project. Now to slowly over the next 8 weeks rap with friends and myself and mix/master.

After doing research into graphic scores and copyrighted material, I had an idea of making a graphic score with copyrighted or stolen images and then making a collage.

I started by going to the library and just going through graphic books and finding interesting images.

After picking a few photos and images, I scanned them and printed them and took them home to make something.

I had a spare canvas around and started cutting up parts that I liked and layered down a few for an idea of a composition on the canvas. At the same time, I was inspired by Basquiat and what was written about music and sound being displayed through images, so I put on some music to inspire me while I was doing this, in hopes that the music came across In the visual work. At the same time, I was being fluid with what a graphic score could look like.

After this, I decided to add some texture and layers to my graphic score, so I removed the pieces and started painting a background in the sections I identified as being part of the graphic score.

In a similar style to Basquiat I acted on instinct and just painted with and without paint brushes, in some instances I just squeezed the paint onto the canvas from the paint itself. After this, I started glueing on the cut-out pieces to form another layer of the graphic score.

So it ended up like this. I glued it all down, drew around it with a biro pen I had in hand and wrote my artist name on the top right-hand corner. “dereck d.a.c.”. I also added a reduced sticker off my dinner that I bought on the way home, in a way it felt interesting to put this on art, to speak as if it’s commodified and now reduced, similar to my ideas around this portfolio project.

So to reflect on this, for me it does not look like a graphic score, perhaps because I acted instantly I didn’t think about a graphic score and let the music and my creativity guide my process. I will either attempt this as a score or perhaps have the cover as a score, so use this as the artwork cover for the project and consider it a score of the album.

So I thought this would be a good blog post to set for what is coming next. I currently have around 7 weeks until my hand-in is due. I’ve spent a lot of time on this first project and also working 3 days a week. It’s been difficult to output the same amount of work that I previously have been doing.

I believe I am at a point now where I’ve done enough reading and reflecting. I have created ten instrumentals, tested techniques and really pushed myself as far as I can. I want to now being project 2 which will be a piece of work that is reflecting my Dissertation title, using the same sources and a few more.

So I had a session with my friend barns, he needed to record 5 tracks for his EP he wants to drop, as I have been learning about recording and will soon record vocals on all the instrumentals I thought it would be good to use him as practice for what is to come and refine my process.

I was lucky enough to receive this Aston Halo vocal shield for untreated rooms during my PRS Funding to help with recording in bedroom home studios. We set up the mic shield and new mic stand I bought that could hold it. And a pop shield. I then recorded it into my UAD Apollo Twin X. Setting Levels correctly and making sure the take was good, like how I read in the recording secrets for the home studio book.

Next, I organised the session and exported the tracks as stems for him to mix. It helped a lot to do this.

So the next step is to rap, mix, artwork. Finished. I can do this slowly over the next two months, record features and then it’s done. For now, it’s time to switch focus to the number two project to submit.

After reading about the Amen Break and the ideas around that sampling and copyright ownership, I found a book called The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies. Which piqued my interest. I saw it had a few short essays that caught my attention. Here is the reflection and quotes.

An Oral history of sampling From turntables to mashups Kembrew Mcleod

Artists have traditionally borrowed from each other and have been directly inspired by the world that surrounds them.  

I think this idea that someone can own an idea, a drum break or a melody is completely taking away from the facts of existence and knowledge sharing.

During the 1970s, hip hop Djs in the south bronx reimagined the record player or turntables as a device that could appropriate and create music, by manipulating vinyl records with their hands, rather than simply replaying complete songs.

This vinyl record manipulation really was the start of sampling, Djs found a perfect spot they loved or enjoyed and looped it up. They were remixing and recreating the song for the crowd.

Today it would simply be too expensive to clear copyright licenses for albums such as Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Million to Hold Us Back—a record considered so culturally important that The New York Times included it on its list of the 25 “most significant albums for eh last century” and Fear of a Black Planet, which the library of congress included in its 2004 national recording registry. 

It’s ironic to think such an important part of the culture within the entire world. Would not be viable to release at a professional industry level. Goes to show the importance within the music industry and society is not artistic endeavours but more so control and financial gain.

The end of an aura 

Nostalgia, Memory, And the Haunting of Hip Hop

Mining for past samples and sounds, hip hop hacks technology for self-expression, and, like cyberpunk, hip hop has a global range, Both are part of a globalised network culture that decentralised the human subjects stability in space and time and in which the technologically mediated subject reforms and remixes idea of body normativity.

I think this idea of decentralising the human subjects’ stability in space and time is something I consider to be true. I think humans, ideas and our existence is not stable. To flip a record and sample it, take it and rehash it, we are playing with the ideas of fact and fiction, truth and lies, appropriation and development.

Sampling… is a uniquely post-modern twist, turning folk heritage into a living being, something that transfers more than just DNA. Through sampling, hip hop producers can literally borrow the song that influenced them, replay it, ruse it, rethink it, repeat it, re contextualise it.

This is it, we are making a sound or expression that was sampled from the past a collaborator, bringing it into a living breathing thing. Not a non-malleable listening experience.

McLuhan once declared that an individual is a “montage of loosely assembled parts,” and furthermore that when “you are on the phone or on the air you have no body.” Technology dismembers the body. Our media might be “extensions of ourselves in McLuhan’s terms, but they’re also prosthetics, amputating parts as they extend them.

media being a prosthetic is also interesting to the ideas of hip-hop. When sampling and creating the ideas become on longer human, and when creating and flipping records the tools and media become an extension of ourselves, these machines can become part of the representation of the creatives, such as J Dilla and his MPC 3000.

Weingarten draws a lengthy and effective analogy between records and the body, using samples as organ transplants. Tales of transplanted organs causing their recipients to adopt the tastes and behaviours of their dead donors read like the “meatspace” anxieties of cyberpunk: Can the essence of a hip-hop record be found in the motives, emotions and energies of the artists it samples?

So when we sample, are we being inspired by the motives, emotions and energies of the artist within the record. I THINK YES! what a great quote, completely true.

After speaking to Milo in a feedback session he advised that I read Eco Sonic Media. I read through the first chapter as I felt the green vinyl section was really relevant to my portfolio 1 project. Here are some reflections and quotes.

Can an ecological critique be brought to sound media in a way that still allows us to hear them? Can we have a sound media that is ecologically sound? 

It’s interesting to think that perhaps eco-sonic media can mean a silence of sorts. but I think this quote makes a great point that perhaps there is a good middle balance, where electronic amplified media is still eco-friendly.

The fact that sound media can be an energy-efficient alternative to screens is the beginning, not the end of the discussion.

This constant battle between ocularcentrism and sound is funny to me. But also seriously, I think it makes a great point that I never thought of, speakers take less energy than screens.

this book is guided by a few central questions: How can we evaluate sound- media technologies and practices from an eco-critical perspective? What might a sustainable sound-media culture look and sound like? How can sound media be mobilized to increase environmental awareness? In short, how can sound media become eco-sonic media? 

I completely agree that there needs to be a reformed structure to sonic media, how its built, distributed and recorded. I think that fact that the canon of sonic media is dictated by the users, and the users are dictated almost I’d say by the manufacturers who create the sound objects and then the music industry. Commodification means that eco products won’t succeed unless they are profitable.

Historians also distinguish between an era when discs were made out of shellac and spun at the rate of 78 rotations per minute (rpm) and the era when long-playing records (LPs) were made of the synthetic plastic polyvinyl chloride (popularly known as PVC or vinyl) and rotated at either 331⁄3 or 45 rpm. The period when phonography was acoustic and when discs were made with shellac is what I call the “Green Disc” era, green to the extent that its media infrastructure was “unplugged,” incorporated human and nonhuman industry, and facilitated a culture of resource conservation.

I never knew that shellac discs came from bugs. Really interesting to think about this process of a green disc, that it was acoustic and unplugged, spun through a handle that gave the players the power to spin. I’m curious to see if a modern version of that would work, I don’t see why not.

Vinyl is notoriously difficult to recycle, with the result being that vinyl records are “hyperobjects”: a term Timothy Morton uses to describe substances such as Styrofoam and plutonium that exist on an “almost  unthinkable” timescale. 

This idea of hyperobjects, something Timothy Morton describes is correct. I never considered that it could not be recycled or reused as such, a record is created and never destroyed in a way that it takes hundreds of years to decompose, unlike the shellac disc.

Eco-Sonic Media aims to make sound media negotiable in a way that hears a future in the sustainable media practices of the past, that listens to more of the world with less environmentally harmful technology, and that orchestrates an ecologically sound media that is also a feast for the ears. 

To listen to the environmental practices of the past and reconsider them for the 21st century is correctly assumed as a good practice I’d say. Just how we can create a better product is a good way of thinking also. To really make a difference one would have to convince the consumers that it’s better and just as good as the Vinyl record.

vinyl is generally made from petroleum, which is a nonrenewable resource. Nonrenewable resources like minerals and mineral fuels can only be used once, and the geological processes that form them are too slow to be sustainable. By contrast, shellac is a potentially renewable resource, given that the forest ecology that supports it is allowed to regenerate faster than the rate at which it is consumed. The shift from shellac to vinyl records thus speeds the depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels.

The contrast between these two vinyl records or shellac and vinyl is disturbing to know, I now even consider the use of sampling to be good for the environment, we are putting these records to use. Instead of purchasing new records, typically only older records that are in second-hand stores are used.

This short Journal was really interesting with its ideas on sampling culture. The first line caught my attention. Anyway here are some quotes and reflections.

In 1956, John Cage predicted that “in the future, records will be made from records” (Duffel, 202).

John Cage really is a pioneer in his way of thinking, to understand or possibly consider that this would become an actuality is interesting. I wonder what was his ideas behind this and how he pictured this happening.

Similarly, Nirvana adapted the opening riff from Killing Jokes’ “Eighties” for their song “Come as You Are”. Musical “quotation” is actively encouraged in jazz, and contemporary hip-hop would not exist if the genre’s pioneers and progenitors had not plundered and adapted existing recorded music. Sampling technologies, however, have taken musical adaptation a step further and realised Cage’s prediction. Hardware and software samplers have developed to the stage where any piece of audio can be appropriated and adapted to suit the creative impulses of the sampling musician (or samplist). The practice of sampling challenges established notions of creativity, with whole albums created with no original musical input as most would understand it—literally “records made from records.”

I read this in another journal that Milo sent me, that in jazz quotation is actively encouraged and the same thing with jazz standards, pushing for the performance to be your own version. Again further pushes the idea of what cage predicted, records made from records.

Sampling is frequently defined as “the process of converting an analog signal to a digital format.” While this definition remains true, it does not acknowledge the prevalence of digital media. The “analogue to digital” method of sampling requires a microphone or instrument to be recorded directly into a sampler. Digital media, however, simplifies the process. For example, a samplist can download a video from YouTube and rip the audio track for editing, slicing, and manipulation, all using software within the noiseless digital environment of the computer.

I agree that the modern idea of sampling is from online or Youtube. Half of my major project was sampled from online sources and online crate digging as well as physical crate digging.

The extent of the sampling may range from subtle influence to dominating significance within the new work, but the constant principle remains: an existing work is appropriated and adapted to fit the needs of the secondary creator.

I never considered this to be true but I can agree, it’s always to the needs of the secondary creator. To the person who is sampling, often it does not matter what the first creator did or how they used the audio. Once sampled the secondary creator can do a lot.

Dangermouse’s approach is symptomatic of what Schütze refers to as remix culture:

an open challenge to a culture predicated on exclusive ownership, authorship, and controlled distribution … . Against ownership it upholds an ethic of creative borrowing and sharing. Against the original it holds out an open process of recombination and creative transformation. It equally calls into question the categories, rifts and borders between high and low cultures, pop and elitist art practices, as well as blurring lines between artistic disciplines.

Schütze and his ideas are interesting towards my portfolio project 1. it’s interesting to consider the ideas between artists and disciplines. Ownership authorship and controller distribution.

The “Amen break” is so ubiquitous that, much like the twelve bar blues structure, it has become a foundational element of an entire genre and has been adapted to satisfy a plethora of creative impulses. The sheer prevalence of the “Amen break” simultaneously illustrates the creative nature of music adaptation as well as the potentials for adaptation stemming from digital technology such as the sampler. The cut-up and rearrangement aspect of creative sampling technology at once suggests the original but also something new and different. Sampling in general, and the phenomenon of the “Amen break” in particular, ensures the longevity of the original sources; sampled-based music exhibits characteristics acquired from the source materials, yet the illegitimate offspring are not their parents.

Music adaptation and the success of the amen break showcase the ability of sound to form a whole genre and adapt to other means. It suggests the original and offers something new and different. It brings longevity to the original records and sources.

 Individuals such as DJ Dangermouse, Gregg Gillis and Tom Compagnoni appropriate, reshape and re-present the surrounding soundscape to suit diverse creative urges, thereby adapting the passive medium of recorded sound into an active production tool.

I never considered the medium of recorded sound to be passive but it is true. Once sampled it becomes this active production tool that we can mould and sculpt. Really interesting points.