Do samples kill the *real* electronic music?

[deastman]

Really? I don't recall hearing any samples on any of Kraftwerk's seminal albums

I guess you don’t consider Electric Cafe one of their “seminal albums”?

No, and if you look up the meaning of seminal you will understand why. Electric Cafe came out a year after I bought my first sampler (Korg DSS-1).

“(of a work, event, moment, or figure) strongly influencing later developments. synonyms: influential, formative, groundbreaking, pioneering, original, innovative”

That doesn’t mean only their first albums (Kraftwek 1&2, Ralf und Florian) or even Autobahn. It means essentially their entire output through Electric Cafe, IMHO. They were all seminal works of electronic pop.

Then again, why are we even going down this rat hole? If you meant only their early works, so be it. Sometimes we argue for argument’s sake.

Getting back to the original post that started this silly discussion, the answer is simply no, samples are not killing “real” electronic music. Never have, never will.

[ghettosynth]

For what it's worth, I've been encouraged to double check my assertion that the Tenney piece utilised digital sampling in the true sense of the word, and I suspect I may be wrong. 1961 would be extraordinarily early in this regard (Xenakis discusses the difficulty of finding labs equipped with decent DACs at all 10 years later in Formalized Music) and the pieces on which Tenney is unequivocally known to have used a computer and DAC (e.g. the ironically titled Analog #1, also from 1961) contain nothing like the complexity and high sound quality of the Elvis fragments heard in Collage #1. So yes, perhaps not the first work to utilise digital sampling of an audio signal, but perhaps the earliest to realise the 'plunderphonic' use of the word sampling that we're familiar with today.

Yes, AFAIK, that's tape. 1961 is probably too early for digitized audio. Even at a well funded university lab, the cost of computational resources for any sort of real time capture would have probably been prohibitive. I don't know, but, I suspect that significant real time sampling probably coincided with the wider availability of minicomputers in the mid to late 60s. It would be interesting to know if there were any attempts to use digital sampling without the aid of a computer.

EMS generally gets credit for the first sampler, which was PDP-8 based. That doesn't mean, of course, that the ideas weren't used in a research lab somewhere.

http://www.historyofinformation.com/exp ... hp?id=2717

[whyterabbyt]

Do you actually know the work of Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry?

That's not something I asked, its something I quoted.

[whyterabbyt]

Dunning-Kruger should be renamed to Whiting-Rabbyter. He's got them totally beat.

You know the name comes from the people who did the research, dont you?

No, I guess you dont.

[whyterabbyt]

Sure, my borderline Dunning-Krugerness was finding this:

Sampling was responsible for the single most radical musical movement of the 20th Century (hip-hop) and now we're wondering if it's killing music a mere 40 years later..

Really? So not Cage, Stockhausen or the French music concrete crowd? Not even the Italian Futurists?

He doesn't know those, or what they did. He just started listening to music with hip-hop

You are wasting your time.

I know them very well. None had the immediately transformative cultural and musical impact hip-hop did. These guys were recycling other people's music. Yeah, Musique Concrete occasionally did that (e.g. James Tenney's Blue Suede Study) but it wasn't built around that by default. Add use of the voice in a completely rhythmic/timbral way without a hint of melody and you've got, well, extremely radical music that's a larger conceptual break with the past than just about anything before it. And it stuck, then evolved. It changed the world.

suspect.

Yeah, I said you can't know Cage and Stockhausen at all, then.

And I actually later said why I think this does not work at all for me. I'll be frank: I think this is incredibly pretentious and it seems (note that word, seems; I may be wrong) like it comes from a professor. Cultural impact. And It seems to me whyterabbyt lives pretty far from Oakland if you get my drift.

This is not about my assessment of my own capacity to grok this which led me to a false impression of what cron *knows*. Information is not knowledge.

He penned a little story about how hiphop evolved and "changed music". This was reflected later in a thread at Everything Else 'When did "pop music" become synonymous with "music". I hear the 'urban' stuff all the time, it's inescapable.

So Jan's assertion is that anyone who thinks the avante garde electronic music of the 50's had less of a broad cultural impact than hiphop is 'incredibly pretentious' and is not in touch with the real world.

And then goes on to talk about the ubiquity of hiphop, and disparage it as dumbed-down and formulaic.

I find that pretty ironic myself.

And of course, the fact that she's taken my defence of cron's knowledge of a thing, opposition to her dismissal 'you cant get away with avowing that opinion because you are too ignorant of the subject,' as some sort of indication of my actual position on the matter in the first place is interesting. No true Scotsman would disagree with identifying someone as invalidly Scottish, amiright. Funny then, that I dont fully agree with cron, though unlike the circle-kneejerks, I actually get his point.
(Though it strikes me the alleged offence is that in not agreeing that the 50's avante garde had a larger impact than what is now basically a mainstream 'primary' music genre (cf 'rock'), one is trying to marginalise the impact it had, or denigrate the art or artists themselves, which is very suspect logic.


I mean, obviously, Im not a professor. But I do occasionally spend a certain amount of time trying to give students a tiny bit of context and awareness of Schaeffer, Cage, Derbyshire, Lucier et al. Because they dont have it and, given why Im talking about it in the first place, I think they need it.(*)
They know hiphop fine, though. Maybe Oakland has a better awareness of Schaeffer and Cage. Here in (true) Scotland though, Ive never heard much Shaeffer out of the windows of cars passing through Glasgow or Dundee city centre, though. I guess Im just too to have noticed it amongst all that hiphop that had no cultural impact on music. Music is a 'culture' thing, right? Or is that too 'professor' to think?

(* And of course because they're a significant influence on my own work. I do have at least two hiphop albums though. Maybe even three, so clearly Im too highbrow to properly get the Cage et al. )

[_al_]

Is this a joke? Hip-hop has had zero cultural impact on anything

well i don't know where you live, but here in east london, it seems like everyone under the age of 25 is walking around with baggy trousers, hanging below the ass, and talking like gangsters.
and i don't just mean blacks, i mean english, romanian, even muslim
in fact, they even developed a style of trousers called "drop crotch", which made them look like their trousers were falling off, when they actually weren't, and these are massive sellers where i live.
i remember one time, this schoolkid was walking with his trousers so low, he was literally walking like a penguin wtf

edit:
ok here's an example. a little more extreme than usual, but you get the point

[Grizzellda]

Oy-vay, wait just a minute here - now we are talking about 1950's avante garde...and I thought the topic was sampling.

Well, alright, I mean, if jancivil wants to be a beatnik...then let jancivil be a beatnik...

I thought this was KVR! But apparently we are at a beatnik convention here...

Seriously, all that earlier experimental stuff likely influenced Kraftwerk, and they surely influenced hiphop. German dudes having a creative effect on urban African American dudes.

I think that could be called "cross pollenization". It's how the world advances, isn't it?

[whyterabbyt]

Seriously, all that fifties experimental stuff likely influenced Kraftwerk, and they surely influenced hiphop. German dudes having a creative effect on urban African American dudes.

I think that could be called "cross pollenization". It's how the world advances, isn't it?

Although I also think there's a certain amount of 'parallel evolution', (just not parallel in time/demographic) Vinyl scratching and then digital sampling technology made roughly the same set of techniques as had been plowed in the 50's available to the 'masses.' So even where there wasn't a direct route of influence, having the ability to do certain things became an influence on the direction taken, much as it was for the avante garde, and thus the territory was 'rediscovered.'

[Grizzellda]

having the ability to do certain things became an influence on the direction taken, much as it was for the avante garde, and thus the territory was 'rediscovered.'

Nicely put. Sure, that is kinda what I meant in an earlier post, about sampling being a technique...a modern high tech musical instrument that was not available back in the day. So, like a piano or horn, it simply depends on how it is used.

The Mellotron was mentioned earlier...the tape based approach, well that is an interesting, but clumsy type of sampling. Computer based sampling is so much more efficient, so it had an more of an immediate impact.

So if I'm hearing you, affordable drum machines & samplers helped rediscover sonic territory that may have been explored earlier by say, Musique Concrete?

Because IMO, the hiphop guys always went for a kind of mechanical, futuristic sound from the beginning, so there is that influence, maybe?

Or maybe just some fat reefers, yo!

[whyterabbyt]

So if I'm hearing you, affordable drum machines & samplers helped rediscover sonic territory that may have been explored earlier by say, Musique Concrete?

Samplers definitely. Drum machines i'd not really thought about in the Musique Concrete context. They inherently bring a particular kind of synchronised repetition into the picture; looping becomes more closely tied to rhythm.

But then we have this...





its an interesting thought, when something like this



inform this

[Distorted Horizon]

I bounce my tracks, so basically I'm making samples.. Then I make various kinds of stuff to those "samples". I really think that samples are important part of electronic music.

[trampofnine]

Surely the authority on this matter is a certain David Robert Jones. Here are his thoughts on samplers. Take particular note of his hand gestures that show his appreciation of the issues and subtleties:

[jancivil]

note: my "professor" above should be followed by 'in teh ivory tower' but that didn't make it in the post, 'my bad'.
and it's rhetorical, figurative rather than 'j'accuse! Academic!'.


An illustration of my point:

In 1993, the hiphop group Souls of Mischief had their biggest hit with the title track of 93 'til Infinity.
In it is a sample taken from Billy Cobham's Heather, off of Crosswinds, his second album [1974].

Which way does the impact flow? Obviously they wanted that sound in "their" track. Where is Bill Cobham significantly (if at all) impacted by Souls of Mischief? Or hip hop. I can't say for certain there is none but I'm somewhat familiar, this is an area of music that I've paid attention to.

Again, I found an assertion just like cron's, elevating the genre to do just this, it's so impactful; one of the proofs was Rufus with Chaka Khan. Now, I was definitely impacted by Tell Me Something Good and I'm def a fan of Chaka Khan to this day. I'm not hearing it. Seems like some bullshit to me.


Now, I bring that group up as the alternative to gangsta glorification and perhaps an instance of 'conscious' rap.
I personally think their raps are a cut above in terms of chops. NB: I am in fact very interested in the possibilities, still. It does occur to me that there can be a difference in terms of technical command in making rhymes/beats.

It was their best charting record any way you look at it. Was it their best-sounding?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/93_%27til_Infinity

No mention of the sample, there, funnily enough. Did the sound of George Duke's Rhodes make the diff? This entity was still around ca 2009, scarce on the charts.

BUT:
Hip hop's impact on hip hop, even; what is that? No one has to have an idea to make hip hop. That's because *re-cycling* is it, it's not means to an end, it is the beginning and the end. So the best thing that happens is the sound of George Duke's Rhodes et cetera. Why not pay some musicians and get your hands dirty?

Here's the dunk as far as I'm concerned: where is hip hop's George Duke or Bill Cobham? Seems almost a silly question.


and as far as 'they recycled other people's music', what could be more *radical*?: I have to ask, was there never a cover of a song before? the quotes in 'concert' music or classical, do they vanish as a fact because being unmusical (sorry, that's the crux of your argument) is the most radical thing which ever happened and hip hop was at the vanguard of not giving a f**k?

It's bullshit to me.

[BONES]

“(of a work, event, moment, or figure) strongly influencing later developments. synonyms: influential, formative, groundbreaking, pioneering, original, innovative”
That doesn’t mean only their first albums (Kraftwek 1&2, Ralf und Florian) or even Autobahn.

Of course that's what it means. That's exactly what it means. Electric Cafe didn't influence any one or any thing because plenty of people were doing the same stuff by then.

It means essentially their entire output through Electric Cafe, IMHO. They were all seminal works of electronic pop.

No they weren't. You can say that Kraftwerk were a seminal electronic band but that doesn't then make everything they did seminal.

Then again, why are we even going down this rat hole? If you meant only their early works, so be it. Sometimes we argue for argument’s sake.

Exactly! I don't even like Kraftwerk, I think they are boring as batsh!t.

[ccDuckett]

On second thought, let's not reply seriously to this thread- it is a silly place.