VARIATIONS #5
The Discipline
Curated by Jon Leidecker
As art and industrial practitioners formally map out the discipline, hip-hop’s discovery of digital sampling technology in the mid-80’s provided a reintroduction its original roots in block party DJ collage. The international success of the new genre then prompts a legal backlash against the art form, with a rash of lawsuits filed against both commercially successful pop artists like De La Soul, Biz Markie & 2 Live Crew and left-field provocateurs like the KLF, Negativland and John Oswald.
The audience that had come of age during the era of the studio-produced pop song was ready for a genre of music which made explicit use of earlier recordings to construct new music. A song with recognizable but altered samples reveals to the listener the same editing techniques used by engineers to compose music from disparate elements in the studio.
The audience’s growing comfort with the definition of a recording as the true site of a musical composition, instead of merely a document of a live performance, gives rise to a music that can now be made from any sound, including those made by any previous artist, sourced from any recorded age.
The Explosion
An overview as the art music tradition of collage music is joined by the popular culture tradition of hip-hop, which would establish many of the same aesthetics and practices solidly in the mainstream.
The Composer
If sampling had seemed an inherently revolutionary practice in the eighties that called into question the definition and the authority of the composer, the proliferation of artists in the decade that followed reasserted that authority. Mainstream audiences finally recognized appropriation as a legitimate form of creativity once artists became comfortable practicing it as a form of self-expression.
The Relationship
The convergence of mainstream and social media platforms sidelines traditional record labels and sparks new sub-genres from mashups to vaporwave, but also reinforces the perception of music as consumable entertainment. How are we being retrained to our new environment by an aesthetic that has become so pervasive as to turn itself nearly invisible? Never conclude a historical narrative in present time.
Transcript of VARIATIONS #6. The Library, curated by Jon Leidecker.
The Library
Sound libraries are collections of sounds explicitly designed or collected for further use, presented as unfinished ingredients. Sounds increasingly detach from their sources and are used by new authors less as references than as simple objects.
Transcript
Transcript of VARIATIONS #5. The Discipline, curated by Jon Leidecker.