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Score

Tom Clark

Untitled (Sound Collage Experiment 1) March 2010

I am working around the idea of appropriation, and particularly in this case, of sampling in music.

It is a tangent from my more visually based research, but maintains my investigation into the bewildering effects of mixing sources with vague reference to appropriated and often re-phrased cultural narratives or systems.

Here I have begun an idea based on the collision of medieval forms of rhythm (which is linked to), the use of the tritone – or devil’s interval, which was at first very much avoided by the church, but became more prevalent after mass deaths of the black death- hence the tritone’s use in classical music (Saint Saens’ Danse Macabre Benjamin Britten's War Requiem etc), Heavy Metal’s use of the tritone (which itself has a history of exclusion) and the aggressively sampled and synthesized genres of dubstep and its not too distant relative, re-mixing.

The last two references form the lynch pin to this exploration of and research into cultural sampling in that their formal foundation is a schizophrenic ultra-amalgamation of samples and completely synthetic sounds.

Interestingly they are very much linked to new(ish) drugs like ketamine and methadrone who’s highly zeitgeist form of digital and temporally and spatially distortion clearly mimic the confusing compound of sources and synthesized sounds.

I have not only sourced historical music sources and musical forms to mimic and therefore attempt to critique unstable and referenceless kleptomaniac composition, but to try and establish whether more contrived attempts – such as the Danse Macabre and the use of the tritone in Heavy Metal – at imbuing music with a specific meta-narrative or essential meaning beyond that of the purely analytical can work in a distorted digital, synthesized amalgam. Though the piece could provoke could evoke a certain feeling, what is at stake is the cultural use of its specific references.

Sources:

Chase and Status: Eastern Jam

Black Sabbath: Black Sabbath

Saint Saens: Danse Macabre

Benjamin Britten: War Requiem

Between The Buried and Me: Foam Born (b) The Decade of Statues

Burial & Four Tet: Moth

Deadmau5 & Kaskade: I Remember (Caspa remix)

Coldplay vs. MGMT vs. Daft Punk: Kids in Technicolour (Knights remix)