Snaps

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.

How does the relationship of artists with their gear affect the composition? Listen to a mind bending mixtape-collage with statements about gear in electronic music compostion, eerie sounds and weird loops by the Peruvian musician and sound researcher Ale Hop.

2,816’000 people are suffering from a mental disorder in Ghana. In her essay, Ghanaian journalist Akosua Hanson reflects on how the perspective of wholesomeness in African philosophies could tackle this problem.

The Romanian music genre manele has recently undergone a very postmodern reception. Widely shared through memes seemingly ironically, the genre could also be the predecessor of a new counterculture.