Authentically Original

Can sample-based music ever escape the familiar charge of theft? Long branded as a bastard of disparate parts, taken without consent from the original context and intent, sampling seems to be beyond mere flattery - it seems lazy, covetous. Part of the prejudice stems from the rigid belief that to be a musician is to play an instrument, that any band worthy of the name write and perform their own material, that we judge music on how and who it is performed by. For many enthusiasts a live performance devoid of any studio trickery is the true measure of a band and their music, as the musicians and the listeners are both active participants in an experience that can never be repeated. Recorded music is then already a pale imitation. And a collage of stolen moments from a studio recording?
While the different sides of the authenticity argument are replayed, the end-product, the composition, still has trouble escaping it’s original sin. There seems now to be some acceptance that there is a degree of skill involved in the sampling process, but there is still the suspicion that as the musicians wrote the source material, sampled artists have more legitimacy, although to paraphrase Barthes, perhaps “it is music which speaks, not the author”. But the mainstream is slowly coming around to the idea that the sampler can be seen as an instrument, and that the producers that use them are composers, musicians even. With a band called Introducing taking a note-for-note performance of DJ Shadow’s Entroducing on tour, and a contemporary chamber music rendition album covering tracks by hip-hop producer J Dilla just released, musicians are now openly sampling the samplers. Is it too early to call it a trend? When did the sampled first look to the samplees for inspiration? One example I noticed was the pop band The Zutons, with their UK hit Pressure Point, released in 2004. It’s a sparse song built around a continuous guitar riff, a riff that has that undeniable X factor, but where did they get it from? I believe The Zutons are hip-hops fans, and a group called Dilated Peoples should feel particularly flattered by The Zuton’s admiration.
In 1998 Dilated Peoples released a track called Triple Optics which is also based around the same insistent, repetitive guitar refraine, sampled from an obscure 1972 recording called Funky To The Bone by Freddie, Henchi, and the Soulsetters. The sample is just a few seconds from Funky To The Bone, looped and edited by Dilated Peoples so that it becomes the basis of a new song. What are the chances of The Zutons hearing the same obscure, and very rare 1970s soul seven inch and latching on to the same few seconds, and re-arranging them in exactly the same way as Dilated Peoples did six years before them? Judge for yourself.

Backspinning Signifying - by Joe Allen

Here’s a well written essay on sampling I discovered on the web in ‘99.

Backspinning Signifying - by Joe Allen

The legitimacy of sampling in music production has been questioned and debated since the early days of hip hop. Sampling’s originality and legality has defined this cultural war.1 For some time now, the practice of sampling has become “common in the recording of all forms of music,“2 and in recent years, sampling has gained widespread acceptance. Yet the artistic merits of sampling are at best taken for granted and at worst left misunderstood and under-appreciated. A recent album review in Rock & Rap Confidential displays the limits of most considerations of sampling. The reviewer of Tribe Vibes, Volume 2, the second unauthorized collection of songs Tribe Called Quest has sampled, states, “Listening to this vinyl-only double album will leave you shaking your head in wonder at the vision and creativity it takes to sample skillfully, to hear a bass line, drum part, or keyboard fill in an obscure record and know just where to place it among other elements to create a new work of art.“3 However, the discussion of sampling often ends precisely here—we should be amazed that some invisible producer spliced together a few sublime samples to create a classic hip hop track, but we are left shaking our collective heads because of the enigmatic connection between the musical creativity and the end result. The uninitiated who feel sampling is a technique quickly and effortlessly employed by the lazy, unskilled musician will not be convinced by such vague sentiments because many questions, both technical and aesthetic, are left mysteriously unanswered. How do the producers know which parts of which records to sample? How do they find these records? Who has and who must have the knowledge of previously sampled records? How is this information disseminated?

Since I believe the whole economy of samples begins with the record collector; a re-examination of sampling from the perspective of the record collector as well as the record itself is therefore necessary. The hip hop DJ who morphed into the hip hop producer transformed the record collector into an artist. This tradition has spawned a plethora of independent labels, producers, and more and more record collectors. Any day of the week, one can find young beat-heads (people who collect breakbeats and samples) and established hip hop producers sorting through rare funk, soul, and jazz albums, the European sound libraries and obscure soundtracks, and all the other miscellaneous records that contain beats and loops, at the Sound Library or A-1 Records in Manhattan’s East Village. At these shops, one can not only unearth the grooves of today that will become the tracks of tomorrow but also trace the sources of the tracks already in circulation—as both producers and collectors search for unsampled sounds and original source material.

Read the rest of the article here.

Shoes

Canadian electro producer, Tiga, has a new album coming out in mid April called “Ciao Tiga”. In the past I’ve often felt his output’s been a bit hit and miss, but the first single to be released from the new album, “Shoes”, is really getting me quite excited. Rumors abound in the blogosphere about who performs the female vocals on the track. Some people are saying that it is in fact Madonna. Doesn’t sound like it to me, but I guess we’ll have to wait for a definitive answer on that one. The single doesn’t actually get a release for a while.

Meanwhile, why not check out Tiga’s own podcasts here:

February Show Now On-line

The February edition of the EBSS is now on-line. Just click on the link on the left and download the file from Mediafire. Due to some technical limitations of our new setup, we’re unable to stream the show any more. We’ve also had to cut the length down a bit to just one hour. Don’t worry though, we’ll be uploading some more DJ mixes so keep checking for updates. Here’s the tracklist for February’s show. Enjoy:

Vietcong Disco - moneymaker
Sisters Love - mister fix it man
Lightning Head - area boy
Barry Gray - captain scarlet pop theme
Slum Villiage - climax (kid sublime remix)
Lord Kitchner - cricket champions
The Olivia Tremor Control - a familiar noise called train director
Sebastian Tellier - la ritournelle
The Brogues - i aint no miracle worker
McDonald & Giles - wishbone ascension
Holy Fuck - lovely allen
Pierre Henry & Michel Colombier - psyché rock (Fatboy Slim remix)
RSD - over it
Brian Hyland - on the east side
Ultrasound - same band

New Show On-line Soon

Hello. We’re back again after a short break due to some technical difficulties. We’re still finishing a few bits of the website off, so bear with us. All will be working soon. We’ve also just recorded a new show and it will be on-line and ready to download soon, so stay tuned.