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The Man attracted The Controversy:
>> But the whole idea of (re)contextualising comes from how the sample is
>used
>> in another piece of music. Sure 5 guitarists will play "Black Dog"
>slightly
>> differently, and 5 techno artists will use the sample from "Black Dog"
>in
>> different ways in wildly varying styles, but the guitarist is still just
>> playing "Black Dog".
>And the DJ is still "just" sampling it!
The way I look at it is like this: either view it as a partnership between
DJ and player, or a partnership between composer/conductor and orchestra.
Either is still considered creatively acceptable@ :)
>> So in a way, just as the guitarists sensibilities
>> affect how he plays the guitar riff, a DJ's sensibilities affect how he
>> uses the sample in a song or dropped into his set.
>But again, the "sensibilities" that are at work with a guitarist are an
>intangible, organic, built-in thing, and they're there from the crack of
>the cosmic DNA.
Woah, I think there may be a touch of overemphasis on that point.
Guitarists are no nearer the cosmic source than anyone else ('cept maybe
Jerry Garcia), we're just hittin' bits of wire an' wood in a way that
pleases us. I _do_ understand where you're coming from, in that I find
synths etc sort of "isolating" instruments where I don't have enough
control over the sound, like I do with guitar. But that has nothing to do
with the quality of music produced.
A good example - how do the sensibilities of a harpsichordist fit into
this?
>It's like the difference between a painting and a photograph. Different
>photographers will take different sorts of pictures of the same thing, but
>the degree of implicit, preliminary variation and distinction just isn't
>on par to what you'll get if different painters work off of the same
>model.
Yes, but a painter will never be able to achieve the look, the clean lines,
of a photograph. And I (as a guitarist) will never be able to sound like
Kraftwerk. Damn. :(
>This is all very true. I think for me the bottom line is that if you're
>working with samples, even if you're tweaking and recontextualizing the
>thing to the nth degree, you're still working with blocks of other
>people's material, in a way that's far more overt and undiluted than if
>you're translating that material through your own performance.
Andre, you mentioned in another post that you would be playing in coming
gigs with a guitar synth. If this is anything post '88 or so, you are
fundamentally _playing_with_samples_. OK the samples are short sections of
sampled intrument waves, but samples nonetheless. Now we get to a second
question - how long does a sample need to be before it ceases to be the
DJ's own creation? :)
>True, but within that general realm of similarity is contained a universe
>of different possibilities. (This is getting a bit high on the "muso"
>scale... maybe I'd better go watch "Contact." 8-/)
No, I think maybe The Simpsons... back to ground level! :b
Michael
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|Dr Michael Pycraft Hughes | Tel:0141 330 5979 | Fax: 0141 330 4907 |
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|Bioelectronics, Rankine Bldg, Glasgow University, Glasgow, G12 8QQ |
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| http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/groups/bio/Electrokinetics/main.html |
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