Clebin Quirino producing in his Produto Novo Studio in Belo Horizonte (photo: Michel Brasil)

The Politics of Sample Chopping in Belo Horizonte

Short Essay

Sampling is one of the most important techniques used in rap’s musical production. However, its use declined throughout the 1990s due to, among other reasons, legal suits by record labels and publishers (Alaigh 2018; Marshall 2006). Such restriction on the use of samples resulted in creative adaptations by the artists (Sewell 2014). One of these shifts is the «chopping» technique. With regard to the local case study of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, our author argues that the option for using this technique is both economic and political, since producers are forced to chop samples due to copyright issues.

In the context of rap music production, «chopping» consists of cutting a sample into very short snippets, in order to reuse the resulting sliced excerpts to create a distinct musical arrangement. The chopping technique was popularized in the 1990s by beatmakers like DJ Premier and J Dilla. Since then, chopping has become a production trend among beatmakers who use samples. According to Schloss: «In the years since sampling began, in fact, chopping has largely displaced other forms of collage in sample-based hip-hop» (Schloss 2014, 151).

Chopping and other beat-making procedures have spread throughout the world along with rap music. In Brazil, rap started to be appropriated in the 1980s and has since spread to all the regions of the country. I have been in contact with Belo Horizonte’s hip hop scene since the early 2000s as a musician, communicator, and researcher. The South East Brazilian city has one of the most vibrant and diversified hip hop scenes in the country. Throughout its history, the local scene has been very much underground and regional, but its artists are increasingly reaching national visibility during the last decade. Even though sampling is not a prevalent beat-making technique in this local scene, chopping is a meaningful resource for local producers who still work with samples.

«É Noiz» by Tamara Franklin. The track is part of the female rappers’ collection «Desconstrução», produced by Clebin Quirino.

Avoiding Copyright Issues by Chopping Samples

Between 2016 and 2018, I carried out research on sampling among local beatmakers in Belo Horizonte. I observed that only a limited number of producers were using samples to make beats; among them Clebin Quirino, DJ Giffoni, Preto C, and DJ Sense. During the conversations with beatmakers, I have heard many times that there is a «right way» to sample songs. This «right way» would be using the sample in such a way that its source cannot be identified, in order to avoid copyright issues. In this sense, local beatmakers do not use long samples (with a full bar length, for example), neither do they use a large number of samples in the same beat. In contrast, these producers vividly use the chopping technique. In an interview with DJ Giffoni, the producer commented on the influence of legal matters on his choices:

If you sample in a way, for example, you sample it, you take a loop, and you make a beat with a song that already exists and it’s recorded. You take a loop of this song and make your song, then [if] you upload it on the YouTube, you’ll have problems. If you’re going to release a CD it will be a problem. When you send it to press your album, they’ll send it back [and say]: «Take the music from the CD or give me the [sample’s] legal authorization.» So there is the right way to sample. There is a way you can sample and there is a way you can’t. (DJ Giffoni 2017)

«O que acontece aqui?» by Família de Rua, produced by DJ Giffoni. The track is part of Família de Rua’s album «Ontem, Hoje e Sempre»

In this way, copyright issues clearly affect creative decisions in the local rap music scene. They contribute to the limited use of sampling and they also influence how a given sample might be used on a track. This fact was pointed out by producer Clebin Quirino as one of the reasons that made him choose chopping as one of his preferred beat-making procedures. He said:

I rarely use the whole sample because there is this copyright issue. But sometimes [if] the sample catches a lot of my attention, [if] it’s really cool, then I end up using it. It happens only a few times. But I’d rather re-arrange it, pick up only fast snippets and use one second from one, one second from another. (Clebin Quirino 2017)

«Que Assim Seja» by Ohana Santana. This track is also part of the collection «Desconstrução», produced by Clebin Quirino.

A Matter of Power

Since the early 1990s, music industry institutions have adopted the strategy of suing producers and rappers, forcing them to pay for using samples. This has been their main strategy for exerting power over their musical property. In a different time and space, Belo Horizonte’s beatmakers still deal with this issue, but in a rather indirect way. They rarely deal with major record companies, lawsuits, and royalties. As mentioned above in DJ Giffoni’s statement, copyright issues are made real when producers upload their tracks to streaming platforms or when they make large-scale print runs of their albums. Clebin Quirino also referred to this situation:

In Brazil this happens much more with monetization on YouTube and in other music streaming services. So people are using fewer samples because this falls into that copyright issue, depending on how you cut the sample. So most producers have chosen to create [their own musical arrangements], to avoid receiving a message from YouTube saying that their song belongs to someone else, or their song has excerpts of a someone else’s song. And to avoid the streaming platforms say they can’t make money with that song. (Clebin Quirino 2017)

The use of samples in rap music involves political issues insofar as it exposes and questions who owns a musical work and who is able to commercially exploit it. As sampling continues to be viewed as an unwelcome practice, underground rappers and producers remain on the weak side of this balance. While a new legal understanding regarding sampling is far away, local beatmakers in Belo Horizonte employ a tactic that addresses this struggle at a micro-level. By chopping samples, these beatmakers turn a beat-making technique in an everyday practice that, at the same, refers to rap music’s borrowing tradition, and serves to circumvent legal issues that may derive from this practice.

List of References

Alaigh, Arvin. 2018. «Evaluating the Past and Present of Sample-Based Hip Hop». In The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music, edited by Justin D. Burton and Jason Lee Oakes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190281090.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190281090-e-53).

Quirino, Clebin. 2017. Personal Interview. Digital audio recording. October 11. Belo Horizonte.

DJ Giffoni. 2017. Personal Interview. Digital audio recording. October 6. Belo Horizonte.

Marshall, Wayne. 2006. «Giving Up Hip-Hop’s Firstborn: A Quest for the Real After the Death of Sampling». Callaloo 29 (3): 868–92.

Sewell, Amanda. 2014. «How Copyright Affected the Musical Style and Critical Reception of Sample-Based Hip-Hop». Journal of Popular Music Studies 26 (2–3): 295–320.

Schloss, Joseph. 2014. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

This article is part of Norient’s online publication Sampling Politics Today, published in 2020 as part of the research project «Glocal Sounds – Re-Working and Re-Coding Place References» (No. 162797), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and supported by the Bern University of the Arts HKB.

Bibliographic Record: Brasil, Michel. 2020. «The Politics of Sample Chopping in Belo Horizonte». In Sampling Politics Today, edited by Hannes Liechti, Thomas Burkhalter, and Philipp Rhensius (Norient Sound Series 1). Bern: Norient. DOI: 10.56513/nftg6449-15.

Biography

Michel Brasil is a researcher, musician, and communicator. His research interests are black music (from Brazil and abroad), rap/hip-hop, «baile funk» music, and Brazilian popular music. Michel performs as a drummer in several acts involving funk, rap, rock, and black music. He is also a collaborator at a rap music radio show called «Hora RAP», broadcasted by the radio of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Rádio UFMG Educativa 104,5 FM). Follow him on Instagram.

Published on September 24, 2020

Last updated on April 09, 2024

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Textural sampling: Experimental electronic producer Kyoka samples tiny bits of sound material (photo: pxfuel)

The Material Politics of Techno Punk

Short Essay

by Marcel Zaes

Experimental electronic producer Kyoka’s track «Toy Planet» is not overtly political. Yet, our author argues that the frenetic cutting techniques that Kyoka uses to arrange her sampled sound materials stand for what he calls «techno punk», an attitude that emerges at the re-contextualization of samples that reduces them to a pure sonic fabric devoid of semantics or extra-musical meaning. This technique is political inasmuch as it enables Kyoka to ambiguously position herself outside of the club music versus experimentation binary.

In «Toy Planet», a track from Kyoka’s 2014 album, Is (Is Superpowered), Kyoka assembles a variety of found and self-made sound materials into a track of experimental dance music. I refer to the technique used here as «sampling» instead of «recording» because once she has the sound materials as digital files at hand, she heavily processes, cuts, plays with, and rearranges them.1 The compositional process emerges from the sound material itself, rather than following a pre-made plan that then is recorded. The sound materials that she samples are extremely diverse. Some of them stem from inherently musical contexts, such as a portion of a drum groove from a found record, much reminiscent of African American underground styles such as Chicago house or early Bronx hip hop.

Yet, she also improvises with analog synthesizers and records real-world sounds in cities around the world. These rough materials only later acquire musical meaning, when Kyoka finds portions that she uses as loops in the new track. As Kyoka says, «I try to find some nice groove or rhythm from that [the field recordings]» (Ableton 2017, 00:25). She uses such portions as background tracks for vocal improvisation, which she similarly captures, and in the case of «Toy Planet», uses both as lead vocals as well as fragmented snippets, woven into the dense sonic fabric.

«Textural Sampling» in «Toy Planet»

If we understand «political» to mean that traces of the socio-cultural origin of a given sample are present, then neither the materials from which «Toy Planet» is assembled, nor the context of the track are inherently political. Traffic noises from a generic city, an analog synth oscillator recorded in an unspecified studio, sometimes not even by Kyoka proper; it is simply impossible to pin these sounds down and associate them with a particular place, community of practice, or political agenda.2

In «Toy Planet», after 1:33, we start hearing vocal snippets that are chopped up and appear as a repeating pattern with a lot of variation. The pacing of the cuts, the brevity of the snippets, and the pure amount and speed of slices that my ears encounter when listening are so high that not only do the socio-cultural traces of the sampled materials disappear, but the sound material itself dissolves. Soon after, these samples reduce slowly to one single pitch, and the resulting texture is purely rhythmic at around 3:00. Finally, after 3:45, the vocal snippets are even briefer, giving rise to a sound that is only loosely reminiscent of a human voice and which, therefore, in the words of Madrid-González (ibid.), «make[s] it impossible to recognize these sounds as markers of any particular ethnic identity, making [the track] more abstract». We are left with a texture of sound, in which the individual samples completely lose their original meaning.3

Kyoka’s music is fundamentally different from other sampling or synth-made dance music, which is why I call her technique «textural sampling» in contrast to what has been coined «glitch» or «granular».4 The essential difference is that Kyoka playfully blurs the line between her samples, temporal shaping of samples, editing artifacts, and musical functions. As a consequence, it is hard to distinguish between materials and techniques. Short bits of an undisclosed texture stand in for what would otherwise be hi-hat patterns. Abstract loops, aligned to a metric software grid, render the meter audible and render it bodily, that is, ultimately danceable. Not surprisingly, «Toy Planet’s» BPM (beats per minute) of 105 is a reference to a medium hip hop or slow dance track. At the end of «Toy Planet», after 4:42, the making of the low-end component of the track is revealed. The noisy bass or kick drum line, which perhaps in other club music would be of clearly synthetic nature, here is a sampled and heavily processed groove, enriched with noisy field recordings and artificial reverb.

The Material Politics of «Techno Punk»

Kyoka’s «textural sampling», although devoid of the «political» in the first place, clearly brings to the fore a «material politics» – by which I mean that there is a deep ambiguity in Kyoka’s work. Is she a sampling artist? Or is her music based on synthesis? Well, she is both to the same extent: even though she uses mostly sampling, the aesthetics of her sound is that of synthesis. In the words of Tara Rodgers, I call Kyoka’s music a «machine-produced veneer that always reflects back on human conditions, relations, desires», and so her music showcases «instances of the imploded and deeply interwoven categories of natural and cultural» (Rodgers 2015, 7).

This is what I call «techno punk», a punk aesthetics characterized by Kyoka assembling and destroying out-of-context materials, stripping them of their meaning, rendering them extremely dense collages and adding vocals in a more spoken than sung way. All of this occurs within the realm of, and is crafted with the means of, «techno» or «technology». The political of this «punk aesthetic», then, is manifest in Kyoka’s attitude, for she is departing from more «pure» electronic genres toward heavily ambiguous, distorted, skewed sonic DIY5 collages that are «fine» and «pointillistic» (Madrid-González 2008), «natural and cultural» (Rodgers 2015), and yet crude and dense. They are anti-establishment and anti-institutional as they evade the music industry’s standard classifications – it comes as no surprise that Kyoka is never categorized as a mainstream club music producer, nor is she sufficiently recognized in experimental music.6 Indeed, without being overtly political, Kyoka’s «Toy Planet» and her technique of «textural sampling» are covertly political, for they challenge listener expectations and value sets that are attached to the experimental or the popular music market. I read her «techno punk» as the subtle resistance of a conscious, self-designated outsider.

Kyoka in residence at the University of Gothenburg (University Gothenburg 2017)

1. Two interviews with Kyoka on YouTube reveal some of her techniques and materials. One is a short interview conducted by the company Ableton with certainly a commercial agenda of product placement (Ableton 2017). The other is an institutional interview done by the Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg, Sweden (University Gothenburg 2017).
2. The same holds on the level of distribution, for «Toy Planet» is published by the prestigious Berlin-based electronica label, raster-noton, and is globally visible as a finished product, while also being performed by Kyoka in various clubs around the globe. These situations are mostly dance venues and venues for experimental electronic music; they will rarely exhibit any political agenda as their primary objective.
3. When I write that samples «completely lose their original meaning» then it is clear that while they lose the traces to the original context from which they stem, the process of sampling itself will always index the history of appropriation, as is discussed, among others, by Théberge 2004.
4. For a discussion of «glitch» as a musical genre, see Cascone 2000, but also, for a feminist critique thereof, Rodgers 2010. For a technical explanation of «granular synthesis» as a technique in electronic music, see Roads 1988.
5. DIY stands for «do it yourself», an expression that I use here to emphasize the peculiarity of Kyoka’s sampling techniques, which exist beyond the standard use of customary electronic music gear.
6. A blog poster, in an album review, writes, «This is a fun record, but not in the sense that it doesn’t take itself seriously as a valid musical statement away from the dance floor. There can be an introspective, earnest academic endeavor to the play involved in making music», and also, that «this album has that rare breed of crossover appeal that maintains ‹authenticity› to the underground kids, yet offers palatability to a wider audience beyond the clubs, the 5am dance parties, and the niche festivals» (Sheriffbart 2014).