____twoism

Hi all, long time lurker, new member, big fan. Just wanted to share an interesting article I read recently about the decline of sampling. It comes at it from a political standpoint but I think if you give it a read you'll get where im coming from and how it has probably had an effect on BOC and their composition techniques. I recently read a quote by one of the brothers (Marcus I think) where they said something along the lines of them not being so interested in full songs and being more interested in the small snippets of music leading into and out of ad breaks and music composed to be spoken over on documentary introductions etc so its clear they are constantly on the listen out for samples.

Sampling has changed a lot in the past 20 years, gone are the days of recording something off the radio, sticking it in your sampler, cutting it up then releasing it. Samples have to be cleared properly and quite often its a very costly process. The late 80 and 90s charts were full of songs prominently featuring samples, nowadays its only really big name artists etc who can afford to do it and when they do its more of a boast to show they can afford to do it or if the sample works so well they have to have the sample.

Think about many of the prominent artists who relied on sampling like The Prodigy, DJ Shadow, Fatboy Slim and Daft Punk. Think of their songs from the 90s and then compare them to songs released in the last 10 years. The amount of samples they use has dropped drastically and in many cases (DJ Shadow and The Prodigy especially) their work has suffered for it (Personal opinion obviously).

This brings us to the Sandison Brothers. They love a good sample, they've sampled plenty of songs but pretty much stopped around the time of MHTRTCs release. More than that they've sampled a lot of voices, particularly children off of TV shows. Earlier works featuring vocal samples were apparently occasionally recordings of friends and family but we all know how much they love Sesame Street etc. Im not 100% on this but from years of listening im confident in saying that MHTRTC has more or an equal amount of samples to Geodaddi which has more samples than TCH. Tomorrows Harvest is probably the album with the least samples used and I expect this is due to the rising cost. Gone are the days of being able to take 11 samples from one episode of Sesame Street or other copyrighted work. I think this definitely contributed to the sound of Tomorrows Harvest as it sounds to me like pretty much all of it was played live or sequenced. It is also perhaps one of the reasons for the large gap between albums since TCH (That along with them having a life outside BOC).

Anyway, heres the article, let me know what you think:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainme ... op/279791/

Palace posy and SYI have some sick samples.

I think it's an interesting question in music and art in general, the use of appropriation and the fine line between making something "new" or "unique" out of it (however subjective these terms might be) or simply taking advantage of another artists work with little creative effort. I'm not too familiar with how samples are really being used in todays pop culture or wether if they're fair or not, but tbh in some cases time would tell. BoC obviously come to mind for the pretty legendary usage of a variaty of sources for samples, but they also came to become a pretty important project in the contemporary electronic music scene. Another artist that comes to mind is a producer named Greaf, kind of an enigmatic figure that belongs to a team of hip hop/electronic related artists (team sesh). Although pretty underground, his music has relied on samples for a good number of years now (mainly tv shows and random videos) and most fans would agree that it works/makes sense in it's own musical environment. He also doesn't sell any of his music really so would there be any legal issues there? Personally i think, for the most part, the appropriation of someone elses art for the sake of art itself is justified, along with some common sense ofc.

I think Geogaddi has more samples than any album and the reason why we haven't found a lot of the melodic ones is because they re-record them. Re-recording samples is a great way to avoid some legal trouble with sampling, and it kinda makes you feel better about sampling a full melodic passage or something.
But yes, in popular music, in the last 10 years sampling has very much decreased. There just isn't as much, which in my opinion is a bad thing. Sampling is one of the best techniques in modern music and the fact that more people in the mainstream don't take advantage of it is pretty bad. Maybe they just don't know how to. But in underground music circles? There's some of the most sample-heavy stuff you've heard, and it's all been made in the last decade or so. Take vaporwave, a genre that probably relies on sampling the most out of all other primarily sample-based genres (hip hop, electronic, etc). I'm glad that vaporwave is so popular on the internet even if the sampling in certain works there isn't really creative at all. It still shows the art is alive and well.
And as far as Board's own work goes, I think Tomorrow's Harvest has quite a few samples that again, we just haven't found because they're either hidden too well or they just re-recorded a lot of them to avoid copyright/to rework them in their own way. MHTRTC had some of the most blatant samples, as well as their old work. For a lot of their old work, they were "shamelessly" ripping melodic passages with minimal editing because they were never going to release them publicly. You can put as much samples as you want when those tapes aren't going for sale.
In my own work, I sample quite a bit. I'd consider myself a plunderphonics artist because of just how much I rely on them. It's not a dead art form, it's just not appreciated in the mainstream as much as it was in the 80s and 90s with the majority of popular hip hop and electronic back then being based upon primary melodic samples or rhythm samples. Hell, hip hop even started in the 70s-80s with just looping breakbeats and rapping over it.

Whether it's audio, visual, or in the case of YTP's, comedic, sampling will always have a massive place in my heart.

While this may not be a BoC related video, I love how well it demonstrates how Akira Yamaoka was able to create an Industrial/Trip-Hop style of music that's practically synonymous with his name now using library samples as the backbone for a majority of it.

I understand and relate to the initial post, but I also came here to say that sampling outside of just dropping bits and pieces of other music or voices etc. is also an art in itself - I made an album that's going to be out soon that is made mostly out of samples of other sampled sounds. I think BoC do this a ton with their melodies and sounds, they resample over and over again to get very unique stuff you couldn't just play out on an instrument from the get go.

Sampling is just the most fascinating musical technique ever for me. The guys you named (though I would add at least The Chemical Brothers and Aphex Twin) are very good artists to begin with, but also one of the best and most interesting artists when it's about sampling, not so far from real geniuses, like Boards of Canada.

Your point of view regarding gaps between albums is interesting. I didn't even thought about that.

One of the first music videos I ever saw was Kate Bush, Wuthering Heights. The second was Art of Noise, Close to the Edit. And my musical taste was calibrated to that from day one.

Art of Noise weren't the first people to sample but they were one of the first to make such a huge deal of it in fact it was an art statement - they originally wanted only to release music made up of samples of other music and found audio, like the audio equivalent of Dadaist collage. To take the values of music performance and invert them: no band, no stars, no touching instruments.

They were studio boffins and one of the first people to get access to a sampler as we know it, another was Peter Gabriel who went out into a junkyard and smashed televisions and panes of glass which went into the Fairlight and later Kate would borrow it and those sounds turned up on Babooshka.

Being a naive kid I didn't realise how new these techniques were, everybody started using them and it was just how it was done. Every band I loved, Depeche Mode, the Prodigy, any number of rave acts...

When I got my first keyboard it was a cheapo Yamaha sampler and sampling was the only way I could make anything that sounded decent. All my stuff was made out of 100% samples, played in over a tape to tape double boombox. Sounded like shit, still. But everything I had in my record collection got listened to and any single notes, exposed drum beats, vocals with no backing got compiled into C90 tapes for maybe using later. Those tapes are still in my attic.

The first proper audio gear I got was a S950. I made shitty drum and bass I managed to convince a local DJ to spin on a graveyard radio show, one time. But everyone did it so much better and there was so much of it I was just happier to listen. See what more adventurous people could find. What more talented people could turn into gold.

Fatboy Slim became a millionaire with an Amiga and more records than God. Delerium made dead can dance and enigma CDs into an angelic world music art form. Future sound of London glued sounds together that shouldn't sit in the same room and made the wildest stuff id ever heard. DJ Shadow performed alchemy. Daft Punk made dusty records come to life. The caretaker made even dustier records mortally, existentially terrifying.

But then, people started getting sued... It's a bit of a shame really. For 20 years it was the wild west and electronic music exploded because it let people iterate and make things their own and branch off in different directions and you didn't need to be a rich, established musician to do it

People worked around it ... Portishead had to take time between records to make vintage sounding library music to sample instead of stuff they'd have to pay for down the line. Mark Pritchard made library music intending to do the same and then thought fuck it and put it out in its own right.

And of course, BoC, who took cheeky samples from places people hadn't gone before and turned treating them to fly them under the radar into its own very special art form. I sometimes wonder if they made stuff just to sample and if we'll ever hear it?

I know this is kinda self indulgent to talk about it this way, none of this is news and all these examples are... None of them are deep cuts, just things I have loved at one time or other. I'm not trying to claim anything like I know what I'm on about or I have deep musical tastes or skills cos I patently don't and I've still never successfully released any music and I'm a middle aged wine-mom now so it's not gonna happen any time soon.

Just to say that I've loved sampling since I first heard music and I love everything that people do with it and I can't imagine music without it. It's kinda geeky, it's why I love going in on sample hunts, and always will. Sampling is important, democratising, and one of the best ways to have fun with music

Negamuse wrote:One of the first music videos I ever saw was Kate Bush, Wuthering Heights. The second was Art of Noise, Close to the Edit. And my musical taste was calibrated to that from day one.

Art of Noise weren't the first people to sample but they were one of the first to make such a huge deal of it in fact it was an art statement - they originally wanted only to release music made up of samples of other music and found audio, like the audio equivalent of Dadaist collage. To take the values of music performance and invert them: no band, no stars, no touching instruments.

They were studio boffins and one of the first people to get access to a sampler as we know it, another was Peter Gabriel who went out into a junkyard and smashed televisions and panes of glass which went into the Fairlight and later Kate would borrow it and those sounds turned up on Babooshka.

Being a naive kid I didn't realise how new these techniques were, everybody started using them and it was just how it was done. Every band I loved, Depeche Mode, the Prodigy, any number of rave acts...

When I got my first keyboard it was a cheapo Yamaha sampler and sampling was the only way I could make anything that sounded decent. All my stuff was made out of 100% samples, played in over a tape to tape double boombox. Sounded like shit, still. But everything I had in my record collection got listened to and any single notes, exposed drum beats, vocals with no backing got compiled into C90 tapes for maybe using later. Those tapes are still in my attic.

The first proper audio gear I got was a S950. I made shitty drum and bass I managed to convince a local DJ to spin on a graveyard radio show, one time. But everyone did it so much better and there was so much of it I was just happier to listen. See what more adventurous people could find. What more talented people could turn into gold.

Fatboy Slim became a millionaire with an Amiga and more records than God. Delerium made dead can dance and enigma CDs into an angelic world music art form. Future sound of London glued sounds together that shouldn't sit in the same room and made the wildest stuff id ever heard. DJ Shadow performed alchemy. Daft Punk made dusty records come to life. The caretaker made even dustier records mortally, existentially terrifying.

But then, people started getting sued... It's a bit of a shame really. For 20 years it was the wild west and electronic music exploded because it let people iterate and make things their own and branch off in different directions and you didn't need to be a rich, established musician to do it

People worked around it ... Portishead had to take time between records to make vintage sounding library music to sample instead of stuff they'd have to pay for down the line. Mark Pritchard made library music intending to do the same and then thought fuck it and put it out in its own right.

And of course, BoC, who took cheeky samples from places people hadn't gone before and turned treating them to fly them under the radar into its own very special art form. I sometimes wonder if they made stuff just to sample and if we'll ever hear it?

I know this is kinda self indulgent to talk about it this way, none of this is news and all these examples are... None of them are deep cuts, just things I have loved at one time or other. I'm not trying to claim anything like I know what I'm on about or I have deep musical tastes or skills cos I patently don't and I've still never successfully released any music and I'm a middle aged wine-mom now so it's not gonna happen any time soon.

Just to say that I've loved sampling since I first heard music and I love everything that people do with it and I can't imagine music without it. It's kinda geeky, it's why I love going in on sample hunts, and always will. Sampling is important, democratising, and one of the best ways to have fun with music

Abso-fucking-lutely agreed!
This is articulated perfectly.

Thank you!