Snaps

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.

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.