- Well the answer to this is " Don't use guitars, violins, pianos, the human voice, ad inf.. they've been used for thousands of years and are therefore old hat ". This is all nonsense of course, otherwise we'd very soon run out of possibilities. The truth is that an instrument is an instrument, and it depends how it is played/used. The TB303 & TR808 appear on just about every Ultramarine track, yet in many different and imaginative ways, messers Cooper and Hammond have become something of masters of the subtle and musical use of this, often rather unsubtley used, box.

A sampler takes any sound and transforms it into an pitchable instrument or at least into a more useable, manipulable form .Also, aside from the issue of instrumentation, the superficially simple art of sound collage is viewed as very limited in scope. It is thought that once a sound is used once, in a single context it should never again grace our ears (this parallels the thoughts above on instruments); this is nonsense: take 2 or 3 specific sounds and there are huge numbers of combinations possible.

People take traditional instruments and come up with new music, and in sound collage the same is true; old sounds, but new contexts and relationships. Taken to an extreme one could say that humans will always be limited by the scope of their surroundings, hopes, and worries (writing is always about love, sex, death ... etc ), but as each individual is consigned to their own particular insanity, each will have a unique viewpoint on the superficially familiar.

However, The almost pious, self richeous views of people such as Anne Dudley (whose music is good, but who has not been voted in as world philosophical representative on sampling (Note that we have not either, so feel free to turn off your sets)) and magazines such as Future Music exemplify the narrow views on sampling and instruments described above.

Remake - Remodel (a fine bit of Roxy): An analogous gripe often expressed is towards remixing; i.e. nothing new, waste of time, blah, blah, ...! Remixing is another perfectly legitamate means of expression, just as bands rework through cover versions, bring a new angle on a song, or even improve it totally, so too can the remixer, who can take for example, a trite commercial pop song created within very restricted limits of form, length, etc. for the mass market and airplay, and produce a less constrained, more personal vision of a track, occassionally with greater creative freedom, realm of expression. Both versions could be valid within their respective genres, and each offer different things to different listeners.



And now the crux...

©1995 obsolete