Brian Eno
Celebrating Breaks And Music Samples
Entire genres have effectively been created because of the use of music sampling. Where would the electronic genre and dance music be without libraries of dance production music and all related resources? The soundscape has been so dramatically altered by sampling that perhaps a retrospective is on order to discover the roots of the technology and the sounds it enabled.
There were many experiments going on throughout the 60s by artists like William S Bourroughs and Timothy Leary. However, the same techniques were used to great effect on more mainstream records by Simon and Garfunkel (‘The Sounds of Silence’) and The Beatles (‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘I am the Walrus’).Though it involves essentially the same process, the recordings here featured the artists singing over recordings of themselves to create harmonies and other effects.
But it was in hip-hop that advanced sampling to the artform it is today. Intriguingly the use of borrowed breaks and tunes in hip-hop and rap weren’t always ‘sampled’ from a library music, some artists literally employed bands to cover songs live and they were then performed over. Grandmaster Flash was among the Hip-Hop producers of the early 80s bring a much saner and familiar sampling technique to music. Some of the breaks (such as the infamous Amen break) then sampled by hip-hop artists were Funk and Soul bands of the late 60s, and they endure in libraries even today.
Electronica production music owe a lot to ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ by Brian Eno and David Byrne, though the development of Hip-Hop sampling must also be acknowledged. Whereas hiphop was taking familiar sounds and putting them in the band, this album sampled a combination of Arabic music, disc jockeys and radio evangelists and made them the lead vocalists. But once we’re past this record, the history of sampling becomes a history of lawsuits brought against the practice, rather than the great records it has created.
Music For Airports
