on sampling
#Ever since getting the OP1 I've been thinking more about sampling. While Enveloped and much of Serial Human were produced using samples, they were more instruments - clean, isolated, single sounds, often synth patches - than they were samples in the hip-hop sense of the word - recognisable pieces of another record - mixed to some other timing and all.
With Scateren and Aquanaut I almost went against this, trying to distance myself from that sampled past and arrive at my own preferred sounds, be they all synthetic (like in Dispehrse), or Kontakt instruments (like in Ssyeru) or treated recordings of actual things (like in Resilients).
I've stayed away from hip-hop type sampling for a long time but the OP1 makes me wander back into that sonic territory. I don't think I realised this until I watched this video of Khryo's Live Set sampling MC Solaar. I didn't even realise it was sampled and rearranged.
A hundred Youtube videos later, I'm here:
First of all, Q-Tip is crazy. This video (desktop only) and this one have all the markings of a genius nerd, of the influential kind I'm only now seeing people acknowledge.
Take your pick about J-Dilla: here's a great one, or here or here, one really gets the sense that for some people this has been a meaning of life, and for others, also life in a constant haze of inspiration (by proximity), and passing the time unburdened by the modern day's (western) demand for productivity. Wow, do I miss that.
There's plenty of the "democratic" side of this on Youtube and boy does it make you feel normal - no bling, no expensive studios, just a clever guy, a turntable, and a sampler. And there's a brief record of the much later sampling scene in LA here experiencing the mainstream effect.
Essentially the technique is still the same - curiosity, time, patience, and acceptance of imperfections which are so hard to find in the synth-only world, other than that there is no formula.
Some early comments on sampling are shameful, regardless of their "correctness". I myself am very interested in what happens when one starts sampling their own music, digging for patterns, ways to recombine material that otherwise wouldn't make the cut, and as a sort of feedback - one's own ideas powering their own idea factory.