Sampling Stories Vol. 16: Eomac

Commentary

Sample-based electronic music often relies on extra-musical content such as media material from YouTube that, however, remains unknown to the listener. Tracing the genesis of a track by electronic producer Ian McDonnell (Eomac, Lakker) we can follow the steps to learn how sampling is used to replace a conventional vocal track. Last but not least this sampling strategy opens a bundle of continuative questions on the circulation and handling of media material in times of Web 2.0.

It is a murmuring and rotary vocal sample that catches the ear of the listener after the song’s pulsatile but indeterminate rhythm for a while. No words are understandable, not even syllables. What remains is a distant and uncanny fragment of something that once had been a human voice. Little by little, the rhythm gets stronger, industrial noises and drones slowly fade into background and the sample, in turn, dissolves. Yet, in the memory of the listener, the voice still seems to be there, but it is now nothing more than a haunting ghost.

Elephant Road by Eomac

Intending an Eerie Atmosphere

The track «Perversas» (2017, Candela Rising) by Eomac is one of those tracks where extra-musical content has been sampled, but the source and its meaning remains unimportant, at least to a certain degree. What McDonnell has processed here is a short loop from a YouTube excerpt from a documentary on people who feel sexually attracted by animals (bestiality). It is a disturbing topic and it was this feeling of uneasiness and discomfort that Eomac wanted to incorporate into the track, as he explained to me. After having «bookmarked» the video in his personal sampling library, he eventually returned to it when he started to work on the track, beginning with some synth sounds that have a kind of eerie and strange atmosphere. McDonnell remembered the video and thought it might suit the intended atmosphere. To avoid the track being too «cheesy», he increasingly obscured the sample. While one could still follow the words in older versions, the sample appears manipulated until obscurity in the final track due to a couple of applied effects.

When YouTube Defines Popular Music

Obviously, for Eomac there is no need to refer to the original source – apart from the title that gives a little indication of the sample’s origin (but hardly to decode without any further knowledge). Although the vocal sample is used to replace a conventional vocal track, it functions as a melodic line that borrows from its source nothing more than an abstract feeling. Below the line this sampling strategy represents the characteristic flow of viral media material through today’s digital culture. And it opens a bundle of continuative questions: What does it means for the future sound of popular music when the algorithms of YouTube (thanks to them McDonnell came across the source video at all) are influencing what we are listening to? Or what does the consumption and procession of the viral video tell us about the relationship of today’s Web 2.0-shaped society to the practice of voyeurism?

This commentary has been written on the basis of an interview in Berlin on 24.1.2018. This article has been published in the context of the PhD research on sampling in experimental electronic music by Hannes Liechti. For more info click here.

Biography

Hannes Liechti lives in Bern, Switzerland, as a popular music scholar/lecturer, curator, cultural producer, and content editor. He is the head of KULT Student Agency at Bern Academy of the Arts HKB. Since 2021, he is part of the executive board of the concert organizer bee-flat and in 2024 he was elected as a member of the Cultural Commission of the City of Bern. Liechti teaches history of popular music at Paderborn University, Germany. From 2013–2024 he worked as a producing manager and as a curator/editor for Norient. He co-published «Seismographic Sounds: Visions of a New World» (2015) and co-curated the corresponding exhibition on global pop. He edited the digital publication «Sampling Politics Today» (2020) and published his PhD on the culture of sampling in experimental electronica with Norient Books (2022). Follow him on Instagram or LinkedIn.

Published on April 01, 2018

Last updated on April 30, 2024

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Landscape of Science Fiction (moon and clouds) (photo: Luc Viatour)

Sound Creates Reality: Sonic Fiction

Short Essay

by Adam Harper

Music is not escapism. It is a machine that creates reality. This was the core of Kodwo Eshun's masterful book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. For musicologist Adam Harper, the concept of Sonic Fiction challenges the oppressive prison called reality.

Sound is fact, music is fiction. Or rather, sound as it exists as an acoustic phenomenon or an electric signal has an empirical reality; sound recordings have a documentary quality akin to photography. Music, conversely, involves manipulation in the generation and arrangement of sounds for the purposes of contrivance, performance, fantasy, fictions — alternative realities. These alternative realities may in turn become new empirical realities. As such, music is (to paraphrase Picasso) the lie that tells the truth.

Music's role as a reality engineering machine is at the core of Kodwo Eshun's masterful 1998 book on futurist popular musics such as funk, dub, hip hop, and techno, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, which will be republished this year by Verso Books with a new introduction by dubstep pioneer Steve Goodman aka Kode9. Note the subtitle. In fact, the introduction is entitled «Operating system for the redesign of sonic reality». Eshun treats music as a form of science fiction, one that we experience in uniquely embodied ways, but one directly comparable with the aims and effects of the genre in literature.

An Emblem of Wider Social and Technological Changes

Indeed, music has been discussed and presented in fictionalised narrative contexts since at least the Ancient Greeks, as part of the dialogue form of philosophising, practiced until the early Baroque era by music critics such as Artusi. Storytelling and song were for centuries much less separated forms than they are today. But since Romanticism's fascination with fantastical worlds, music and the modern understanding of fiction have been closely intertwined, even in purely instrumental music. Symphonic music became illustrative and took on narratives. Music frequently played a special role in early fantasy, gothic and science fiction stories. E. T. A. Hoffman's fictional composer Johannes Kreisler and his compositions appeared in many of his texts. In 1921 H. P. Lovecraft wrote «The Music of Erich Zann», about a viol-player who keeps interdimensional horrors at bay with surreal melodies. Music frequently appears in science fiction as an emblem of wider social and technological changes, such as in the 1996 film Gattaca, about a future of genetically engineered, exclusive elites, which featured a performance of a piece playable only by pianists with twelve fingers.

«The Music of Erich Zann» Illustration by Andrew Brosnatch, drawn for the reprint of the story in the May 1925 issue of Weird Tales (photo: Robert Weinberg’s online collection of fantasy and science-fiction art)

Engineering the Self

Musicians have long fictionalised themselves (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Ziggy Stardust are two of the most famous examples), but usually the line between fiction and reality is somewhat blurred. But this is one of music's functions as a form of engineering of the self and the world and the relation between the two. Elysia Crampton once told me in an interview that her music engages with the «monstrosity of the embodied dream of an erased family, a lost history that I re-build, scraping utopias, a minimal place of freedom». Crampton does this inventively, to beguiling degrees of consciousness, but it is something that all music does, whether made or listened to.

Music’s Flight of the Imagination

Eshun understands such a process in More Brilliant Than the Sun in his reflections upon Cybotron's early techno track «Techno City»:

«Techno City»… is Sonic Fiction: electronic fiction, with frequencies fictionalized, synthesized and organized into escape routes. Sonic Fiction replaces lyrics with possibility spaces, with a plan for getting out of jail free. Escapism is organized until it seizes the means of perception and multiplies the modes of sensory reality.

«Which is why you should always laugh in the face of those producers, DJs and journalists who sneer at escapism for its unreality, for its fakeness; all those who strain to keep it real. These assumptions wish to clip your wings, to tie your forked tail to a tree, to handcuff you to the rotting remnants of tradition, the inherited stupidities of habit, the dead weight of yourself. Common sense wants to see you behind the bars it calls Real Life».

As Eshun provocatively puts it, «reality» and all its attendant authenticities is an oppressive prison compared with music's flight of the imagination. When the mind, body and perspective become reordered, a new reality begins to take shape.

Cover picture of Kodwo Eshun’s groundbreaking book on Sonic Fiction (photo: Verso Books)