Recently, I’ve been reverting back to old practices of making art; entirely for fun, just for myself and my friends with my friends, not to be shared with the rest of the world. Within these sessions, my recent influences of my sound have become apparent in the compositions; Coldcut, J Dilla, Pat Thomas, The Underwolves amongst a range of other trip hop and experimental breaks music artists. In underground music genres, it could be argued that sampling is the single most important factor by which the music’s sound is defined. Some people may take issue with this, as it could be dubbed as “unoriginal”, and a theft of previously generated material.

How can this criticsm be right, though, if our entire world is constructed of a sort of remix culture?

It could be argued that no idea created in modernity is original- we are all inspired by pre-existing concepts. It is important to embrace the practice of sampling and remix culture if we are to be honest and authentic within our art, to be able to pay homage to our inspirations. To go against this would be to be inauthentic as an artist.

(soundcloud link to sp-555 experiments)
(second link)

Here, you can hear the experiments myself and my friends have been playing around with on my latest instrument, the SP-555. We worked with sampling and manipulating CDs we’ve found in the street, and using the delay and looping functions on the SP-555 to create soundscapes far away from the material which we’ve found.

To contribute to my portfolio pieces, I can use these experiements to further develop the soundscapes I may use in my performance by resampling them. With my friends, we experiemnted with this by making a rap song that re-sampled these experiments on the SP-555.

(development of SP-55 experiments into rap music)

This is where the idea of ‘The Great Feedback Loop’ becomes apparent. Pre-existing art being regenerated into new art, and that new art can be re-sampled to create even newer material- this process could go on until the end of time. I would argue that even by recording through a microphone we are sampling the ambience of the environemnt in which we are recording in. We live in a world of sampladelia, to argue against that would be to live in a world of delusion.