Dropping Off A YouTube Sample

Some thoughts on sampling prompted by this and a brief Twitter exchange with Zone Styx.

Firstly, as far as the YouTube sampling goes, we've done it and been happy with the results - you might realise they're samples but you can't tell what the source is (either YouTube or the film/kitsch 70s US drama etc that the YouTube clips are of) and once played/effected through a sampler they take on a totally new quality in the context of the sounds around them, and they're of a piece with the rest of the sound-picture that they're part of, almost organically so. That's kind of the idea I was referring to in the brief Laika post below, about samples seeming to be coming from the inside out rather than being laid on top - but that's not to say I don't like it when you can hear the 'edges' of samples, that's obviously part of the appeal of samples, these foreign bodies or elements in the mix, rubbing up against everything else, setting off sparks.

There's a spectrum in sampling, at either end of which there's a kind of seamlessness. At one extreme you've got your virtual 'full track' samples, like Kanye West's 'Stronger', where it's seamless because there are virtually no other musical elements in the track other than the original recording. At the opposite extreme, you've got the seamlessness of a sample chosen or treated in such a way that the listener can no longer tell that they're hearing a sample at all. Between these you've got degrees of 'visibility' or 'hearability' of the sample, how gritty it is (vinyl crackle and so on) how much it juts out and creates - ideally pleasurable, or at least hovering near the pleasure/pain boundary - friction. The 'hearability' also relates to how well known the source of the sample is (how many times has the difference between me liking a rap track or not been down to whether I'm overly familiar with the source material for a key sample or not..?)

At the end where samples are no longer recognisable as such (musical instances of this are harder to recall, naturally!) this is still worthwhile for the producer/musician if it adds something new to the palette. While you're working on a sample, it's still a foreign element, it reacts unpredictably to different treatments, its behaviour under various conditions is not something you can entirely control. So it can be pleasurable (and frustrating) to try and tease a sample into a shape where it's useable as an element of your track in a seamless way but you don't get the satisfaction of knowing someone's going to acknowledge and enjoy the cleverness of your steal. On the other hand, if the results sound great, then why worry and, on the plus side, there's definitely no concern about infringement cos you can be damned sure even the original composer won't pick it up.

Specifically on the YouTube thing, I tend to view that as part of the recordability/samplability of pretty much anything around you. With the right means, you can rip something off YouTube, and then turn to your left and hit your desk lamp with a pen and record that and so on. They key thing is how you integrate those elements. In the case of that Drake track, you can hear the YouTube quality of the sample but the recording of the vocal and the beat is far crisper, so you've got a panorama, a perspective, across the different levels of sound quality (and with sampling that can be also be a perspective across different places, times, cultures, registers..). It doesn't have to be that way, mind - there's always someone willing to go all-out cruddy. Whether that succeeds or not is down to their ability to paint in different shades of crud.

My Legendary Garden

In reference to this

Latest Transmissions

Couple of band-related items - firstly, and despite the misspelling of the name, Bubblegum Cage III gives a very nice account of 'Grazed Red' from a UK post-rock-y perspective (well, it is Postrocktoberfest). Couple of things worth noting - there is going to be a vinyl release, on a label, and that's not unrelated to the fact that you can no longer freely download the album from Bandcamp. You can however go on there and listen to it as many times as you like.

Also, our involvement in a project where local producers remix local artists has resulted not only in a remix but also this video, featuring members of a Cambridge dance school. Had very little to do with this apart from being filmed miming some of the words (that aspect is slightly embarrassing for me!). It's an entry into a BBC music video competition, anyway. It's an odd little detour for us but I kind of like it. Something for the kids, I think!

On that note, went to Warning on Saturday night, Cambridge's venerable jungle/drum n bass institution. Room1, the big room, was the 'new stuff' - what dnb has become now, while room two was for more the old style, for the older lags or old-headed youngsters. Just ended up in the latter for most of the time - Fabio and a bit of DJ SS who didn't get much of a set (I think maybe Fabio went on for too long). SS even Started with Super Sharp Shooter... Contrast with Hype in the main room, who has clearly stayed alive by embracing the ADD dnb styles. It's not all bad to be honest, and there was a high quality of MC-ing in the main room but the way I was drawn to room 2... it has to be an effect of age, that was the sound I wanted to hear. When SS dropped several old-skool classics in a row I just felt "ahhh (just easing into it like a bath that you've got to just the right temperature) this is what I came for." Just like an old blues purist or something.

Going Postal

Generally very laudable piece here.

Been relistening to Laika a lot recently, perhaps my favourite band of that 'lost generation', particularly for the first two albums. I think 'Silver Apples of the Moon' pips it, it has more sharp edges, more urgency, but 'Sounds of the Satellites' also, with its wonderfully amniotic textures, and it's musically more of a piece. Some later stuff is decent too, though 'Good Looking Blues' comes over, in places, like Suzanne Vega rapping over 'On The Corner.'





To contrast them with Disco Inferno, whose melding of indie/guitar pop and sampling could sometimes feel a little gauche (perhaps occasionally even gratuitous), I felt that with Laika the samples, synths etc were fully folded in, absorbed, so that they seemed to be coming from the inside out rather than layered on the top. That's something DI attained with 'Lost In Fog' (their best moment for me). Mind you, I like DI's gaucheness as well.

A Limerick

with help from Ultrafoetus, who contributed via Twitter

There once was a man called Dave Starkey

Who was scared we would all become darkies

He appeared on Newsnight

Started talking bare shite

And got paid for the shameful malarkey

If someone says "I'm not condoning their actions but I think I understand where this is coming from" and you hear that as "I condone their actions" then that is your intellectual failing. For you, stage-managed images of Boris with broom and calls for water cannons, the 'natural' economic pecking order and the primacy of property restored, and no lessons learned.

There's definitely a problem with the word 'excuses' isn't there - 'oh you're just making excuses for them'. Actually it's things like 'it's just the fault of the parents/the school holidays' etc that sound more like excuses (expedient justifications) as opposed to any deeper reflection on the causes/context.

20/20 Foresight

Baotou to Shanghai

Video for Kelvox1's Drugsbox by Matt Tompkins, who I last visited out in Shanghai in 2006.

Kelvox 1 - Drugsbox from GreatOne on Vimeo.

He explains a little about the video here

The Real Rupert Murdoch

A little review I wrote of a Cutting Edge documentary on Rupe around 2004, I think

"By his own standards of character assassination, everyone's favourite Australian media magnate got an easy ride in Tuesday night's Cutting Edge, "The Real Rupert Murdoch."

Newspapers were in the blood (along with gambling and Presbyterianism). His father Keith, a journalist of principle and creator of the Melbourne Herald Group, was delighted to see that his son appeared to be following in his footsteps. Through jaunty sketches, we watched young Rupert progress from employing his sisters as cut-price labour, to sacking his friend Rowan Rivett, heading off Robert Maxwell in London to gain control of The News of the World and eventually relaunching a union broadsheet, The Sun, in 1969 - the end of the idealistic sixties and the dawn of modern tabloid journalism.

The account finally heated up during the Thatcher years, when the one-time socialist found that Maggie's championing of the free market was exactly the excuse he needed to bypass the unions and set up News International HQ in Wapping.

The programme found many advocates for Murdoch's business 'philosophy' and publishing style but any critics - "Guardian readers" Murdoch called them - were noticeably absent. Andrew Knight, ex-chairman of News International, considered him a "facilitator", while others praised his libertarianism and his challenging of the establishment.

In fact, the only person who seemed to have a bad word to say about him was his mother, Dame Elisabeth, who admitted: "I'm not keen on digging into people's personal affairs."

Grazed Red

Ehem... personal announcement. Kelvox1 has a new recording, 'Grazed Red', which is available in unmastered form as a free download here, along with another newie, 'Drugsbox' which, at around 22 minutes, is the longest single thing we're ever likely to record. It's us in our most 'jam'-y mode - in fact I think it takes that mode about as far as it can go. Good to get these things out of the way.

We're pleased with 'Grazed Red' anyway - it's a significant step on from the first EP. There are lots of reasons for this, not least the fact that we spent four days rather than four hours recording, a process we're getting better at anyway.

Ideally we'd like a properly mastered physical release at some point - any help with that, reviews, blog posts or just (honest but kind) feedback would be greatly appreciated.

As you were.

Structure, Milieu &...

So this is a good chunk of what I've been feeling/trying to express for quite a while minus one extra level - say we're doing the 'universe-galaxy-solar system-earth' thing, does it go 'Structure-Milieu... phenomenology? phenomenal experience? It's because of the deep structure of the latter that we struggle with the big structure. Anyone with brighter ideas than me please contribute if you stumble over this.

I was right about that intro to 'Clean' then


(sad, very sad young man)

Le Quietus

I've started doing these columns over here. It's my niche, it's an odd one, not because liking French music is strange per se but because it's so broad as a category to 'like'.

But still, music that emanates from France, whether good or bad, is a near-constant source of interest for me. But it’s not because I necessarily think the country’s musical output is in any way superior to that of any other country. (I get the impression, though, that there’s a lot more going on than in Italy, the land of my mother, for example, but I’d love to find out that I’m wrong). But I’ve spent various periods of time living there and, as music is my primary interest, I couldn’t help but explore the musical landscape, and Rockfort is a way of putting the knowledge (and the records) that I have accrued to some use. France is also appealing simply because it’s not England or North America, and so what happens there often hasn’t been picked over, analysed or hyped to death in the UK (or in France for that matter - the French don't really do that in the same way). It doesn’t make me Columbus but, outside academia, informed Anglo commentators on French music are thin on the ground (Mojo's Kieron Tyler being one notable exception). The fact is that my interest can be piqued regardless of the quality of the actual music, just because, even when a record is rubbish, I have some ideas about the context in which it arises, of its place in the culture. Even if I wanted to ignore it, I couldn’t – the subject of French music always sets my antennae twitching. I've come to know the terrain.

Attention to French music on the web tends to be about the fetishisation of certain aspects, kitsch-and-all, of the 60s and 70s (Yé-Yé/girl singers/France Gall, BB and the Gainsbourg girl axis – and Gainsbourg himself, French psych etc), or modern derivations thereof such as the ‘fragile girls, singing in French, making me sigh’ of Guuzbourg’s admirably single-minded ‘Filles Souries’. I say admirable because I have a great deal of respect for that kind of devotion to mining a single seam – or, in Guuzbourg’s case, doing more than that and pretty much willing into being his own genre.

But I can’t follow that approach myself. Firstly because, well, why would I want to, when other people do it perfectly well.

Another reason for this is my own changing tastes. When I was in Paris in 2002 I noted the arrival of New new wave (for there have been others) of chanson artists like Benjamin Biolay (who, natch, writes for lots of breathy girls, including his own sister) and Keren Ann. At the time, I was charmed, it was the perfect complement to my French dream. How perfect that the French had again started making music that sounded like the classic 60s pop of yore! All my Francophile fantasies fulfilled! I could put on Coralie Clement, smoke a cigarette, and instantly be in my own little Truffaut film.

But at the time (and a piece a wrote for Time Out Paris backs that up) I already anticipated that this specific fascination would be relatively short-lived. Fantasy is an essential component of the pop experience but for me it is not enough in itself to sustain my interest in largely insipid music. Again (and maybe I’m being overly defensive here) I want to make it clear that I don’t think every French girl singer, or every nouveau chansonnier is insipid, but certainly that the ratio of inspired to just plain old respired is not so hot. Furthermore, although I understand that the idea of ‘the future’ may have become an irrelevance in pop music (as it has in culture more widely), I can’t accept the total surrender artistic surrender of straight-up pastiche. Yes, chanson (or folky, wafer-light pop in the case of most modern ‘chanson’) is a pillar of French culture, but in 2010 it’s no more a sign of the vitality of that culture than a group doing Beatles and Kinks-y pop or music hall (yes, Britpop basically) would be in Britain.

I can anticipate a counter-argument, and I have some sympathy for it – that it’s at least a properly French mode, a vibe that is particular to the country. I'd always be open to discussing that. I don’t want to shy away from discussing nouvelle chanson (in fact I have just spent the last few paragraphs doing just that) or the way that chanson’s influence might manifest itself in current French music. But, also, let’s take the cases of French Touch, French rap, Cold Wave, Yé-Yé (and all the 60s stuff that gets grouped with Yé-Yé these days) – all examples of a French tendency to refract outside influences in subtly unusual and captivating ways, possibly because of that simultaneous superiority/inferiority complex (particularly relating to Anglo-Saxon culture) that puts French music-makers at more than just a geographical remove from any sources.

Simon Reynolds, mentioned this ‘distance’ a while back in a post called ‘We Are All French Today’:

“It's no secret that France has a bit of a chequered history with la musique roque. There tends to be this twice-removed, distanced aura to that nation's guitarband output. It can be enjoyable for precisely that quality: Plastic Bertrand "Ca Plane Pour Moi" (he was Belgian though right? apparently he didn't even sing on his own records, sez Malcolm McLaren, admiringly), Les Ritas Mitsouko on their one great track whose title escapes me (sounded very T.Rexy though), even things like Metal Urbain and Les Thugs. And of course Daft Punk took that nonreal vibe and turned it into a positive aesthetic strength. But maybe that degree of twice-removed and hyper-selfconsciousness is our common condition today, maybe it's impossible for anyone anywhere to rock in that basic pure from-the-gut unreflecting scare-quote-free way that was available to James Gang or AC/DC or whoever. Maybe we are all French today.”

Some might see as arrogantly Anglo the assumption that French music is only interesting when contending with the influences of UK and US music. I don’t think it’s the only way French music can be interesting, but it is fertile territory: French pop as a distorted mirror held up to UK/US sounds, and (as Simon Reynolds suggests above), of pop at large. The recent obsession among some French artists (M83, Phoenix, Valerie Collective) for the atmospheres and sounds of 80s teen-films/John Hughes is just the latest example.

And things can get more twisty and post-modern than that – take the two very obvious examples of Air and Daft Punk, who are simultaneously French and ‘French’ (aware of, and drawing on, the nebulous associations that for a foreigner might constitute ‘Frenchness’ in music, from ‘sophistication’ to ‘naffness’. It’s not for nothing that their first album bore the legend ‘French Band’).

I guess this is all my way of saying there’s plenty of meat for further discussion and elaboration. In what ways does French music parallel British/UK stuff - or not? Does a French rock group, for example, sound different to an English or American one? If it does, is that just an impression, or is it based on something more tangible? Also, there’s plenty to say because (even though it probably seems as though I’ve been trying my hardest to say the opposite) and there are plenty of French musicians (bands/artists/music-makers…) I want to celebrate too. So yup, going to be doing this on The Quietus for a bit.

Crisis Is the Order of the Day

Selectors

This is a lovely companion to the Reggae Britannia programme which, aside from anything else (Linton Kwesi Johnson discussing the dub engineer's art is brilliant), is a timely hour and half counterblast to Cameron's 'multiculturalism has failed'. 'Failure' or indeed 'success' don't enter into it - the territory is constantly mutating, constantly up for grabs. Alliances, mimetism, dialogue or, conversely, fractures and antagonism occur along all kinds of lines that reductive views about wholly consistent, self-contained 'cultures' don't even begin to take account of.

Incidentally, my new masthead quote (from The Fatima Mansions' 'Brain Blister') is a response to the curious victim mentality (ok, maybe not so curious, maybe it's part of the pathology) that has been noticeable in the outbursts of our masters. Things like this and of course Cameron's 'failed multiculturalism' speech.

If we boil their arguments down, they're making those tired old 'inverse racism'/'inverse sexism' claims, those laments of the historically/socially dominant group attempting to justify its phobia and its feelings of aggression.

"Not long ago, one of those good French men said in a train where I was sitting: "Just let the real French virtues keep going and the race is safe. Now more than ever, national union must be made a reality. Let's have an end of internal strife! Let's face up to the foreigners (here he turned to my corner) no matter who they are." It must be said in his defence that he stank of cheap wine; if he had been capable of it, he would have told me that my emancipated-slave blood could not possiblybe stirred by the name of Villon or Taine."

"Statements, for example, that the north of France is more racist than the south, that racism is the work of underlings and hence in no way involves the ruling class, that France is one of the least racist countries in the world are the product of men incapable of straight thinking."

Frantz Fanon, 'Black Skin, White Masks', first published in France in 1952

***

On a separate note, here's a mix I did.

Actually, the new Charlie Brooker series is kind of 'Ways of Seeing' meets 'Being No-one'. OK, an exaggeration but at least it ties critical viewing of TV into a broader critical assessment of our experience of the world - which, because of 'phenomenal transparency', according to Metzinger, we intuitively find to be 'natural' and direct, that Cartesian idea that we cannot be wrong about the content of our own minds. To an extent, the likes of 'Ways of Seeing' and 'How TV Ruined Your Life' can be usefully linked to the lessons of 'Being No-one'. They highlight certain typical learned responses, judgements, reactions that, if repeatedly reinforced, no longer become accessible to us, 'dropping' to a subpersonal level perhaps (effecient storage, says Metzinger) becoming part of the frame that we're not aware of around the transparent partition of the Phenomenal Self Model - unless something prompts you to scrutinise it again, to make it accessible for attention and cognition via the opaque portion of the PSM.

And the 'Orlov' sequence was a little piece of brilliance,quietly haunting.

(Via Stylopoke)

An Awkward Post

Since moving to Cambridge and leaving behind my job working for a 'media company' I've survived on some freelance writing work and also working in a framing shop. I don't actually make picture frames, that's taken care of in workshop - I'm at the retail end. One aspect of the job that's strangely gratifying is that I can very easily describe to someone what it is I do to someone of any age, background etc. I wouldn't go so far as to start talking about 'honest toil' or anything like that, it's simply that I recall numerous situations where I would, quite apologetically, give long and tortuous explanations of my job and the function of the company. And there's also that lack of any real commitment to the company and the job, going hand in hand with the company's lack of real commitment to you, particularly when an American CEO takes up the reins. Many people I knew at the company were also: freelance journalists, stand-up comedians, playwrights, bloggers, musicians etc. The office was our 'day job'. So Adam Kotsko's 'Awkardness' hit home on that point, in its tackling of the office (and The Office). I was in that classic job about which people would ask 'So what is it that you do exactly?'. My sister told me on many occasions that she still didn't really understand what it was I did. (Let's say I, and others like me in the company, provided a range of services to TV companies.) I'm also conscious that I was largely guilty of using the irony tactic of dissociating myself from a role I ended up in, that of a Team Leader. Highly symptomatic behaviour would be that in an appraisal situation with one of team where I'd basically be going through the old 'you and I know this is bullshit, but we've got to go through the motions together' routine. It's worth mentioning, though, that in retail - so, not necessarily in an office environment - I've encountered numerous people who have gone the other route, overidentification. That's a shop manager's speciality.

That aside, what I wanted to look at was Kotsko's assertion that 'radical awkwardness' is what ensues when people from two radically different cultures meet. But perhaps there's a more fundamental, radical awkwardness than that, which is the awkwardness of subjectivity. I see that the social context is still key - an individual doesn't exist in isolation first and then enter society; I'm thinking more that subjectivity engenders the situation not just of trying to identify with a managerial role when there's nothing there you could wholly identify with, but of trying to identify with yourself - where, equally, there's nothing to identify with. That's where society (including family, government, media, the whole apparatus) is, giving you explicit cues and implicit clues as to the person you're supposed to be but can never fully inhabit. That's in part because those cues and clues are contradictory (double binds), but also because there is no authentic self. I'm going with Metzinger here: we are no-one. That's my (rough) idea of radical awkwardness, and I see it as leading to the same coping mechanisms of over-identification or that technically un-ironic irony.

I'm surely not the only person to feel this kind of awkwardness quite deeply to have used the latter mechanism as shelter, largely from people who seemed to be more of the first persuasion, the kinds of people most likely to pierce a fragile carapace and witness your fundamental inadaptedness and lack of sympathy with yourself as something shameful.

The ironic stance can clearly be a dead-end, but it can also be a phase that is moved through (as our culture has, according to Kotsko, started to move through it), perhaps more easily than the over-identification setting, although the overcoming of the latter, if it can/could occur, would be more dramatic, revolutionary.

Either way, on the other side, Kotsko suggests, is the potential for a solidarity based on 'awkwardness'. I'm now at the point of dropping that word 'awkwardess' and opting for: a solidarity based on an awareness of the problems of subjectivity, of being systems with Phenomenal Self Models.

That's the beginning of where, lately, I think I've accidentally started grasping some of the political implications of Speculative Realism, without having had any direct contact with work by the relevant philosophers, but more by stitching together threads of reading/viewing from last year - Metzinger, John Berger, K-Punk, the Kotsko book, Frantz Fanon maybe. So coming soon, where 'Ways of Seeing' meets 'Being No One'.