Snaps

Music is certainly a way to express or reinforce our identity, but is it possible to represent and recreate an identity through the process of sampling? Our author says yes and mentions Stregoni, an Italian refugee project and an experimental space for music production.

The cut-up technique by William Burroughs is one of sampling’s predecessors. Burroughs’ logic of the perverse agent stealthily using the medium for manipulation seems foreboding of 21st century phenomena like the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal our author argues.

The «Beating Heart Project» repurposes ethnomusicological recordings from the International Library of African Music to raise money for charitable projects. A discussion of the project’s sampling ethics and the supposed unequal power relations inherent in EDM.

Eduardo Navas considers the political implications of sampling as a cultural variable in relation to aesthetics and labor in juxtaposition with the emergence of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Can music production portray nuanced, complex subjectivities relating to reminiscence and retrospection? In an examination of his track «22 – 122», Guy Baron shows how a musical interpretation of an «afterglow» can be made with audio processing and sampling techniques.

Noel Lobley considers if sampling ethnographic sound fragments must inevitably operate under pre-existing power dynamics or if there are other independent ways to sample, remix, and curate locally-owned culture.

Music scholar and producer Francesco Fusaro discusses one of his sample-based tracks. It is through the voice that dance music has proven a fertile territory for the expression of the political and social concerns that underpinned its history from the beginning.

What are the political implications and ethical concerns of sampling sounds of war? This is a question raised by «The End of Silence», a 2013 record from Matthew Herbert based entirely on a six-second field recording of the Libyan civil war. A critical examination.