The excellent composer/ journalist Dominique Leone points us in the direction of a massive and comprehensive project for the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art on the history of sampling in music by the also excellent composer Jon Leidecker a.k.a. Wobbly. Featuring tons of essential music and info on everyone from Charles Ives to Grandmaster Flash, this is a serious feast. Dive in with me, won’t you ?
This is sample-rific! It is very pleasant to listen to; I feel like I dropped in and out of thirty different points while teleporting and my only functioning sense was the hearing.
This series is great. I’ve been following it for some time (I think he’s put up a segment every couple of months or so).
Wobbly is also guesting this week on Don Joyce’s (of Negativland) show Over the Edge on KPFA, along with Phineas Narco, TradeMark G (Evolution Control Committee) and Otis Fodder (The Bran Flakes).
Thursday night at midnight at KPFA.org.
if you liked this, you could also check Jon Leidecker’s mix INTERRUPTIONS #1. Pastoral V.2. By Jon Leidecker (An overview on the relationship between birdsong+pastoral music and avant-garde)
“Pastoral V.2” is a curated overview hoping to underline the history of those classic works of electronic and concrète music which sought to mimic and extend the voices and sounds of our pastoral landscape, which can be closer to the heart of the medium’s inherent potential than the more common identifications with inhuman or alienated expressions of industrial culture.
Link: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/curatorial?id_capsula=667
Related documentation: http://bit.ly/d2JCdr
MP3: http://bit.ly/a4LREP
Episode #5 of the VARIATIONS 5 sneak preview: http://bit.ly/bPrXq7. 100% recommended. Very soon available at: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/curatorial/
Enjoy!
“The Discipline”, VARIATIONS episode #5 now available online:
http://rwm.macba.cat/en/curatorial/
MP3: http://bit.ly/bKxl8m
Curated by Jon Leidecker
As art and industrial practitioners formally map out the discipline, hip-hop’s discovery of digital sampling technology in the mid-80’s provided a reintroduction its original roots in block party DJ collage. The international success of the new genre then prompts a legal backlash against the art form, with a rash of lawsuits filed against both commercially successful pop artists like De La Soul, Biz Markie & 2 Live Crew and left-field provocateurs like the KLF, Negativland and John Oswald.
The audience that had come of age during the era of the studio-produced pop song was ready for a genre of music which made explicit use of earlier recordings to construct new music. A song with recognizable but altered samples reveals to the listener the same editing techniques used by engineers to compose music from disparate elements in the studio. The audience’s growing comfort with the definition of a recording as the true site of a musical composition, instead of merely a document of a live performance, gives rise to a music that can now be made from any sound, including those made by any previous artist, sourced from any recorded age.
Interview with Jon Leidecker (Wobbly), related to his VARIATIONS series (on the History of Sampling):
MP3
http://evolution-control.com//images/ecc/mp3/radio//soundofplaid.mp3
