Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (64 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Critiques of sampling focused on the regurgitative, referential nature of the practice, the gleeful disregard for conventional musical skill, and the fact that these records were brazen extravanganzas of sonic larceny. Enthusiasts promptly seized these accusations and turned them around into proof of sampling’s subversiveness: its transgression of copyright, its punk-style democratization of music-making. Coldcut’s ‘Beats + Pieces’ pre-empted and mocked the anti-sampling fogies with the sleeve slogan ‘Sorry, but this just isn’t music.’
By 1990, sampladelia had blossomed into a more subtle and covert aesthetic. Hip hop and rave producers increasingly eschewed blatant lifts in favour of microscopic fragments from obscure sources – partly out of a desire to be more creative, and partly because music publishers had their hawk-eyes trained on the extra royalties they could glean by prosecuting unauthorized usage of their clients’ compositions. Once the sampling-as-theft notion dropped off the agenda, attitudes to the instrument split between postmodernist versus modernist. For some, the sampler is still a tool for collage, for elaborate games of Pop Art referentiality. For others, the sampler represents an easy-as-pie update of
musique concrète
’s tricky and time-consuming tape-splicing techniques. Here, digital technology functions as a crucible for sonic alchemy – the transmutation of source material into something ‘new’, sounds that seemingly originate from imaginary or even
unimaginable
instruments. The guiding ethos is a fierce conviction that all samples must be masked, all sources unrecognizable. Yet there’s a sense in which this approach reduces the sampler to a synthesizer, and thereby misses what is truly idiomatic to the machine: taking the known and making it strange, yet still retaining an uncanny, just-recognizable trace of the original’s aura.
musique concrète
’s tricky and time-consuming tape-splicing techniques. Here, digital technology functions as a crucible for sonic alchemy – the transmutation of source material into something ‘new’, sounds that seemingly originate from imaginary or even
unimaginable
instruments. The guiding ethos is a fierce conviction that all samples must be masked, all sources unrecognizable. Yet there’s a sense in which this approach reduces the sampler to a synthesizer, and thereby misses what is truly idiomatic to the machine: taking the known and making it strange, yet still retaining an uncanny, just-recognizable trace of the original’s aura.
In late nineties dance music, sampladelia mostly falls somewhere between these two poles of postmodernist referentiality and
musique concrète
re-creation. The texture of these tracks still has a touched-by-human-hand feel, but the lifts are sufficiently brief or arcane as to preclude triggering specific pop-cultural associations in the listener. The model of creativity here is seventies jazz fusion; not only is the ideology borrowed from that period, but so are most of the samples. A lot of trip hop and jungle is basically fusion on the cheap: instead of a band jamming together, the producer is like a band-leader deftly arranging the expert playing of musicians from different genres and eras.
musique concrète
re-creation. The texture of these tracks still has a touched-by-human-hand feel, but the lifts are sufficiently brief or arcane as to preclude triggering specific pop-cultural associations in the listener. The model of creativity here is seventies jazz fusion; not only is the ideology borrowed from that period, but so are most of the samples. A lot of trip hop and jungle is basically fusion on the cheap: instead of a band jamming together, the producer is like a band-leader deftly arranging the expert playing of musicians from different genres and eras.
Trip hopper Howie B, for instance, described his track ‘Martian Economics’ as a ‘collaboration . . . like me doing a tune with [keyboard legend] Jimmy Smith, even though he wasn’t there.’ For Howie B and similar artists like Beck and DJ Shadow, part of the creative process is the pre-production research of going on record buying sprees, then sifting through hundreds of hours of music for suitable samples. ‘I’ll take anything, it can be as small as a triangle hit, and I’ll spread it across a [sampling] keyboard and turn it into a tuned piano,’ says Howie B. ‘I’ll take a Latin timbale recorded in 1932 and make it into a percussion pattern, or snatch some vocal and take it four octaves down until it’s a lion’s roar.’
The Body ElectricAlthough it can be performed live, techno is rarely
born
in real-time. Rather, electronic music is programmed and assembled sequence by sequence, layer by layer. Even the separate constituents of a track, like keyboard riffs and arpeggios, don’t necessarily come into being as a discrete musical event. Step-writing, a technique whereby sequences are written on the computer screen, allows for the note-by-note construction of complicated riffs that are often beyond the real-time capababilities of even the most dextrous keyboardist. Not only does this make it easy to correct errors and add nuances, but sequences can be rearranged, run backwards and generally fucked around with on a trial-and-error basis. Furthermore, the same basic riff-pattern can be played in any ‘color’, with the musicians free to choose from a vast sonic palette of synthesized instruments and self-invented sampladelic timbres.
born
in real-time. Rather, electronic music is programmed and assembled sequence by sequence, layer by layer. Even the separate constituents of a track, like keyboard riffs and arpeggios, don’t necessarily come into being as a discrete musical event. Step-writing, a technique whereby sequences are written on the computer screen, allows for the note-by-note construction of complicated riffs that are often beyond the real-time capababilities of even the most dextrous keyboardist. Not only does this make it easy to correct errors and add nuances, but sequences can be rearranged, run backwards and generally fucked around with on a trial-and-error basis. Furthermore, the same basic riff-pattern can be played in any ‘color’, with the musicians free to choose from a vast sonic palette of synthesized instruments and self-invented sampladelic timbres.
On the surface, this would appear to be a radical break with the spontaneism of rock ’n’ roll. In truth, from very early on in the music’s history, rock bands used studio technology to correct mistakes and overdub extra instrumental parts, if only to make the records sound as densely vibrant as the live band. In
Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock
, Theodore Gracyk argues that it is precisely rock’s interest in phonography (the art of recording) that separates it from folk and jazz, where records are usually documents of a performance. In folk and jazz, it is respectively the song and the improvisation that count; in rock, the record is the basic unit of musical meaning. In this respect, hip hop and techno represent the apotheosis of rock’s interest in sound-in-itself (timbre, effects) and virtual space (unrealistic acoustics).
Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock
, Theodore Gracyk argues that it is precisely rock’s interest in phonography (the art of recording) that separates it from folk and jazz, where records are usually documents of a performance. In folk and jazz, it is respectively the song and the improvisation that count; in rock, the record is the basic unit of musical meaning. In this respect, hip hop and techno represent the apotheosis of rock’s interest in sound-in-itself (timbre, effects) and virtual space (unrealistic acoustics).
Gracyk points out that even at the primal origin of rock ’n’ roll – the Sun Sessions – studio artifice was involved, in the famous echo that Sam Philips slapped on Presley’s voice. The brilliance of late sixties psychedelia derives from the way artists like The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd combined gritty ‘feel’ (live, interactive playing between a seasoned band) and the fantastical (hallucinatory effects, ultra-vivid timbres, an artificial sense of space conjured using echo and reverb). Digital music abandons all those elements of ‘feel’: the inflections and supple rhythmic interplay that communicate the fact that flesh-and-blood humans physically shaped this sound together in a real acoustic space. But by way of recompense, it dramatically intensifies the
trompe l’oreille
side of psychedelia: its fictitious psycho-acoustic space, its timbres and textures and sound-shapes to which no ready real-world referents attach themselves. At its most inventive, sampladelia lures the listener into a soundworld honeycombed with chambers that each have their own acoustics. This music is ‘like walking through a maze whose walls rearrange themselves with every step you take’ (James Gleick’s description in
Chaos: Making a New Science
of fractal theory’s nonlinear equations).
trompe l’oreille
side of psychedelia: its fictitious psycho-acoustic space, its timbres and textures and sound-shapes to which no ready real-world referents attach themselves. At its most inventive, sampladelia lures the listener into a soundworld honeycombed with chambers that each have their own acoustics. This music is ‘like walking through a maze whose walls rearrange themselves with every step you take’ (James Gleick’s description in
Chaos: Making a New Science
of fractal theory’s nonlinear equations).
If rock phonography uses multiple takes and overdubs to create a quasi-event, something that never ‘happened’, what you hear on record usually sounds
plausible
as a real-time occurrence. Sampladelia goes further: it layers and concatenates musical fragments from different eras, genres and places to create a timewarping pseudo-event, something that could never possibly have happened. Different acoustic spaces and recording ‘auras’ are forced into uncanny adjacence. You could call it ‘deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence’; you could also call it ‘magic’. It’s a kind of time travel, or seance: a conference call colloquy between ghosts-in-the-sampling-machine.
plausible
as a real-time occurrence. Sampladelia goes further: it layers and concatenates musical fragments from different eras, genres and places to create a timewarping pseudo-event, something that could never possibly have happened. Different acoustic spaces and recording ‘auras’ are forced into uncanny adjacence. You could call it ‘deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence’; you could also call it ‘magic’. It’s a kind of time travel, or seance: a conference call colloquy between ghosts-in-the-sampling-machine.
Sampladelia is zombie music: dead sound reanimated like the
zombi
– a Haitian corpse brought back to robot-like half-life by a voodoo sorcerer, then used as a slave. Disembodied beats, licks, cries and riffs – born of human breath and sweat – are vivisected from their original musical context and then literally
galvanized
, in its original meaning; when electricity was first discovered, physicians would electrocute cadavers to make their limbs and facial muscles twitch, for the public’s ghoulish delectation. Early hip-hop sampling was like Frankenstein’s monster, funk-limbs crudely bolted together, the stitching clearly audible. With its quasi-organic seamlessness, today’s sampladelia is more like the
chimera
, that mythical monster composed of the parts of different animals. Its chimerical quality parallels digital video effects like morphing, where faces blend into each other imperceptibly, and human bodies distend and mutate like Hanna-Barbera animations.
zombi
– a Haitian corpse brought back to robot-like half-life by a voodoo sorcerer, then used as a slave. Disembodied beats, licks, cries and riffs – born of human breath and sweat – are vivisected from their original musical context and then literally
galvanized
, in its original meaning; when electricity was first discovered, physicians would electrocute cadavers to make their limbs and facial muscles twitch, for the public’s ghoulish delectation. Early hip-hop sampling was like Frankenstein’s monster, funk-limbs crudely bolted together, the stitching clearly audible. With its quasi-organic seamlessness, today’s sampladelia is more like the
chimera
, that mythical monster composed of the parts of different animals. Its chimerical quality parallels digital video effects like morphing, where faces blend into each other imperceptibly, and human bodies distend and mutate like Hanna-Barbera animations.
In their jeremiad
Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class
, Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein warn that the ‘archivalism’ of cyberculture is hatching ‘monstrous hybrids’, that ‘archived body parts are disguised in the binary functionality of data and pooled into larger circulatory flows’. This could be a description of the process of converting the vinyl-encoded musical energy of flesh-and-blood musicians into the zeros-and-ones of binary code, which is then disseminated as currency throughout contemporary pop culture. ‘Ours is a time of non-history that is super-charged by the spectacular flame-out of the detritus of the bounded energy of local histories’: this is the
fin de millennium
sampladelic supernova, where the last eighty years of pan-global recorded sound is decontextualized, deracinated, and utterly etherealized.
Ghosts in the MachineData Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class
, Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein warn that the ‘archivalism’ of cyberculture is hatching ‘monstrous hybrids’, that ‘archived body parts are disguised in the binary functionality of data and pooled into larger circulatory flows’. This could be a description of the process of converting the vinyl-encoded musical energy of flesh-and-blood musicians into the zeros-and-ones of binary code, which is then disseminated as currency throughout contemporary pop culture. ‘Ours is a time of non-history that is super-charged by the spectacular flame-out of the detritus of the bounded energy of local histories’: this is the
fin de millennium
sampladelic supernova, where the last eighty years of pan-global recorded sound is decontextualized, deracinated, and utterly etherealized.
In
The Third Wave
, Alvin Toffler wrote of ‘blip culture’, where ‘we are all besieged and blitzed by fragments of imagery, contradictory or unrelated, that shake up our old ideas and come shooting at us in the form of broken or disembodied “blips” ’. Sampladelia can be seen as a new kind of realism that reflects the fact that the late twentieth-century mediascape has become our new Nature; it can be diagnosed as a symptom of, but also an attempt to master and reintegrate, the promiscuous chaos and babbling heteroglossia of the information society.
The Third Wave
, Alvin Toffler wrote of ‘blip culture’, where ‘we are all besieged and blitzed by fragments of imagery, contradictory or unrelated, that shake up our old ideas and come shooting at us in the form of broken or disembodied “blips” ’. Sampladelia can be seen as a new kind of realism that reflects the fact that the late twentieth-century mediascape has become our new Nature; it can be diagnosed as a symptom of, but also an attempt to master and reintegrate, the promiscuous chaos and babbling heteroglossia of the information society.
But sampladelia may also be prophetic, offering hints of future forms of human identity and social organization. Cyber-theorist Arthur Kroker confronts the prospect of ‘digital recombinant’ culture with a weird mix of manic glee and dystopian gloom. In
Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music, Electric Flesh
, he hails sample-based music as the cutting edge of consciousness, a preview of post-human life in the age of virtual reality. ‘Just like virtual sound-objects in sampler music technology, subjectivity today is a gaseous element, expanding and contracting, time-stretched, cross-faded, and sound-accelerated.’
Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music, Electric Flesh
, he hails sample-based music as the cutting edge of consciousness, a preview of post-human life in the age of virtual reality. ‘Just like virtual sound-objects in sampler music technology, subjectivity today is a gaseous element, expanding and contracting, time-stretched, cross-faded, and sound-accelerated.’
Kroker’s belief in music as
portent
is shared by Jacques Attali, author of
Noise: The Political Economy of Music
. Attali traces a history in which each stage of music-making is a ‘foretoken’ of future social transformations. Music begins as sacred noise, the accompaniment to sacrificial ritual, a bacchanalian clamour in whose creation everybody participates. The next stage is the age of Representation, where music-making is the preserve of specialists (composers, professional musicians), and takes place at special events that have a symbolic, socially stabilizing function. The modern age is characterized by Repetition: the mass-mediated circulation of music-commodities (records). Reified as product, tarnished by everyday currency, and ‘stockpiled’ by isolated collectors, music loses its magical aura. Individuals in the twentieth century are exposed to more music in a month than someone in the seventeenth century heard in a lifetime, but its meaning is increasingly impoverished.
portent
is shared by Jacques Attali, author of
Noise: The Political Economy of Music
. Attali traces a history in which each stage of music-making is a ‘foretoken’ of future social transformations. Music begins as sacred noise, the accompaniment to sacrificial ritual, a bacchanalian clamour in whose creation everybody participates. The next stage is the age of Representation, where music-making is the preserve of specialists (composers, professional musicians), and takes place at special events that have a symbolic, socially stabilizing function. The modern age is characterized by Repetition: the mass-mediated circulation of music-commodities (records). Reified as product, tarnished by everyday currency, and ‘stockpiled’ by isolated collectors, music loses its magical aura. Individuals in the twentieth century are exposed to more music in a month than someone in the seventeenth century heard in a lifetime, but its meaning is increasingly impoverished.
The fourth era of music is the age of Composition: ‘a music produced by each individual for himself, for pleasure outside of meaning, usage and exchange’. Attali is vague about what this music would sound like.
Noise
was published in 1977; subsequent commentators have argued that punk’s do-it-yourself creed fits Attali’s criteria, while others have suggested free jazz. The Karaoke craze, where the consumer displaces the star vocalist, could be seen as industry-sponsored, top-down attempt to involve the listener; other future half-measures will involve playback equipment that allows you to remix tracks (a form of music-customization already approached by some CD-ROMs).
Noise
was published in 1977; subsequent commentators have argued that punk’s do-it-yourself creed fits Attali’s criteria, while others have suggested free jazz. The Karaoke craze, where the consumer displaces the star vocalist, could be seen as industry-sponsored, top-down attempt to involve the listener; other future half-measures will involve playback equipment that allows you to remix tracks (a form of music-customization already approached by some CD-ROMs).
Lo-fi rock and electronic dance are the two contemporary genres that come closest to Attali’s notion of ‘composition’. Both are usually created in home-studios and are either self-released or put out by tiny independent labels, in small pressings sometimes as low as 200; both reach the public via marginal distribution networks and specialist retailers. And both are marginal scenes appealing to audiences who pride themselves on being more than ‘mere’ consumers. In lo-fi, a high proportion of the audience are in bands, while in dance music there’s a high ratio of DJs (professional and amateur) to punters.
DJ culture represents that threshold stage at which repetition morphs into composition. DJs are chronic consumerists and collectors, who nonetheless use their stockpiling expertise as the basis for composition in its literal sense, ‘putting together’. They create a metamusical flow by juxtaposition and segue. As an extension of DJ cut ’n’ mix, sample-based music at its best is fully fledged composition: the creation of new music out of shards of reified sound, an alchemical liberation of the magic trapped inside dead commodities. Attali claims that the age of Composition will be characterized by a return to music’s ancient sacred function. DJ cultures fit the bill; surrounded by ritualized festivity, they emphasize participation and the democratization of noise (ravers blowing their whistles and horns rhythmically).
If music
is
prophecy, as Attali contends, what kind of social organization or disorganization is heralded by dance music? The transformation of music into a mass-marketed commodity (sheet music, records) anticipated the late twentieth-century triumph of what the Situationists called ‘the spectacular-commodity society’ (with its alienated, passive consumer/spectators). Rave culture’s decentred networks – cottage industries, micro-media, temporary one-off gatherings – may herald some post-corporate hetero-topia of the late twenty-first century. Then again, sampladelia might equally be a component of a Krokerite dystopia of ‘cold seduction’: ‘a cool hallucinatory culture of special effects personalities moving at warp speed to nowhere,’ a virtual-reality pleasuredome where the self is a will-o’-the-wisp buffeted by ‘ceaseless movement in the eddies of cultural matter.’
is
prophecy, as Attali contends, what kind of social organization or disorganization is heralded by dance music? The transformation of music into a mass-marketed commodity (sheet music, records) anticipated the late twentieth-century triumph of what the Situationists called ‘the spectacular-commodity society’ (with its alienated, passive consumer/spectators). Rave culture’s decentred networks – cottage industries, micro-media, temporary one-off gatherings – may herald some post-corporate hetero-topia of the late twenty-first century. Then again, sampladelia might equally be a component of a Krokerite dystopia of ‘cold seduction’: ‘a cool hallucinatory culture of special effects personalities moving at warp speed to nowhere,’ a virtual-reality pleasuredome where the self is a will-o’-the-wisp buffeted by ‘ceaseless movement in the eddies of cultural matter.’
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