VARIATIONS #6
The Library
Curated by Jon Leidecker
We encounter the establishment of sound libraries, collections explicitly curated for further use: sound objects presented as authorless, unfinished ingredients. Though some libraries contain newly commissioned generic sounds, specifically designed for maximum flexibility, the most widely used sounds are often sourced from commercial recordings, freed from their original context to propagate across dozens to hundreds of songs.
From presets for digital samplers to data CD ROMs to hip-hop battle records, sounds increasingly detach from their sources, used less as references to any original moment, and more as objects in a continuous public domain.
As hip-hop undergoes a conservative retrenchment in the wake of the early 90’s sampling lawsuits, a widening variety of composers and groups expand the practice of appropriative audio collage as a formal discipline. The aesthetic of the sound libraries gives rise to recombinant genres like drum and bass, the use of sampling as romanticized representation leads to the first quadruple platinum World Music collage, and we encounter a novelty single that quietly heralds a musical form that would soon become known as the mashup.
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.
By Jon Leidecker
"Radio Music" connects three examples from the history of the potential of the radio receiver as musical instrument.
Transcript of VARIATIONS #6. The Library, curated by Jon Leidecker.
Pastoral V.2
This layered 60 minute DJ set by Jon Leidecker underlines the history of those classic works of electronic and concrète music which sought to mimic and extend the voices and sounds of our pastoral landscape.
The Discipline
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 to its original roots in block party DJ collage.