Snaps

The encounter between experimental club music and mainstream pop has become ubiquitous in the sampling practices of avant-garde electronic musicians of the 2010s. These practices have worked to question the inclusivity of electronic music scenes, our author argues.

The song «Apesar de Você» by Chico Buarque is one of the most iconic protest songs published in the context of the Brazilian military dictatorship. A sound collage made from clippings of the word «despite» in various instances of Brazilian pop music.

Sampling is an approach to composing music «with» others by incorporating audio fragments from various sources. Anthropologist Nicolas Puig discusses sample-based tracks by the Palestinian artist Osloob, who lived in Lebanon until he moved to Paris in 2014.

Restriction on the use of samples resulted in creative adaptations. In Belo Horizonte, Brazil, hip hop producers increasingly use the technique of sample chopping because of both economic and political reasons.

The frenetic cutting techniques by electronic music producer Kyoka stand for what our author calls «techno punk». With this techinique, the producer ambiguously positions herself outside of the club music versus experimentation binary and the unpolitical becomes political.

South Asian sounds have long occupied a place in the market of sample libraries while being advertised as «world» sounds. Here, the case of Sohan Lal is discussed, a Punjabi singer whose voice ended up in such a sample library and was used in many popular songs.

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.