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Looper's Delight
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At 09:12 PM 8/15/01 -0700, you wrote:
>I hate it when people try to tell me what I think, and bitch
>about it for days whenever it happens. Please accept my apologies; I
>*should* have said "evidently" or "apparently", at the very least.
No apology necessary. But you're doing it again. (See below)
>But isn't the selection and juxtaposition of those chunks *potentially*
>original musical input? Look at Pink Floyd -- the order of the songs on
>each album is profoundly important to the work as a whole, and has
>definite musical value.
Besides short snips like Gomer Pyle ('Surprise, surprise, surprise!') and a
soccer stadium crowd singing 'You'll Never Walk Alone', most of the Floyd's
sampling has been of original material (e.g. roadie Roger the Hat's stoned
laughter on 'Dark Side' which was culled from interviews conducted and
recorded by the band itself) or nature/machinery sounds (The EMI tape
library/bugs and birds on 'Grantchester Meadows', Syd's clock montage on
Piper, Waters' cash register loop on 'Money', stuff like that), and most of
their looping has been of passages played by band members (such as Mason's
drum loops on the studio side of 'Ummagumma') so I don't see the
connection. Sure, the sequencing of an album's tracks is *extremely*
important to the way the work is perceived, and IS an art in itself, but we
were talking about using unauthorized eight-measure chunks of OTHER
people's well-knownm, commercially relased music, and I can't think of any
time Pink Floyd did that.
>But you've already stated that you don't feel rearranging the samples
>constitutes originality.
When did I say that? It's the nature of the samples themselves as
previously prepared and complete musical statements (you say 'phrases')
that I was referring to, not the act of altering/editing/mutating them.
(Those things are fun.) What got me into looping in the first place was a
series of musique concrete pieces I did about 20 years ago. (Hear one at
<http://www.music.columbia.edu/%7Ececenter/mhl21/ct/works_foundsound.html>,
track #9). I have a deep respect for skilled practitioners of audio
montage, not that I include myself among them; as I've stated (and this is
the last time, honest), what I object to is how BLATANTLY unoriginal some
sampling is. (Note that I said 'some', not 'all'...)
Anyone can drop a needle on a turntable and play 45 seconds of an Abba
record, but it's not everyone who can use a turntable (or a sampler) as a
musical instrument to express their own creative voice.
-t