makeitlookliketheydidit-blog

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C: Btw have you read Décor Holes by Seth Price?

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C: The idea of suggesting a political framework as encoded within specific snare sounds, and the aesthetic choices surrounding them, is absolutely the type of (simultaneously speculative and revealing) conversation i am here for. I had to google the 10cc song as i’ve never had that stuff in my listening. First time hearing it and yeah, it’s an oddly distinct snare sound. I’m happy to let your description lead my thoughts on it too: stubborn… britishness… Roger Moore... the archetypal (wilful) disregard and self assurance of Bond’s imperial britishness… i feel like it’s all there. ’Art for Art’s Sake’ was released in 1976, then. Curiosity encouraged me to look up some other albums released that year, i think there could be a longer piece of writing in comparing the snares on the 10cc record to, say, those on The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein by Parliament… or Radio Ethiopia by Patti Smith? Also released that year are Rush’s 2112 and Kiss’ Destroyer, which i thought might pique your interest… (all of these albums were presented via the algorithm ofc).

I like the use of photorealism in relation to production, and i think you’re right (if i’m understanding correctly) about it not necessarily being synonymous with naturalism. But i do like that it seems to suggest the practice, or set of aesthetic concerns, that are required to provide any mythic sense of “capturing the band in the room, for real”. So although it might not quite fit, i like that it might help to recognise the work of (seem[ing] to) strip away studio craft. I think this might be what you’re getting at, but i guess i feel it useful to consider that “naturalness” is always going to be constructed to some extent, even at the relatively non-“commercial” level of Spiderland. But also (importantly) to allow such a consideration to extend beyond any negative rockist cynicism and towards a place that might agitate “authenticity” as any sort of prevailing system of value.

In terms of “the beat-maker’s orthodoxy” i identify with what you’re describing re: putting together / working with a library of drum samples. I have never really worked that way either tbh, but i finally got round to downloading logic onto my laptop (having not had a DAW since my old laptop broke in the middle of writing up the PhD) and i’ve tentatively been putting some things together with programming and sequencing. The past few months i’ve put together/found online a handful of folders of samples that i’ve (stupidly, probably) imagined will provide the starting point for a bunch of new Competition songs. I’ve had this thought that any upcoming recordings might be built a little more around programmed beats, so i’ve been putting a few things together in that mould. As you say, i felt quite excited and proud of myself when i loaded logic’s esx24 with my library of sounds, and i’ve made a handful of “demos” that will hopefully become something. And yet, the irritation you mention - “the obviousness of their sound, their demeanour” - felt very real to me too. For example, i have one thing which sounds (to me) like trap in a lot of ways. That is undoubtedly a musical world i am into, and one that i think probably should be acknowledged within the types of contemporary music making practice i (we?) are interested in exploring. I am cautious, however, of being lazy with any sonic gestures in that regard - of representing a parody, or a(nother) colonisation - be that in the sampled sounds or the programming itself. I guess the “obviousness” thing, for me, has to do with the way technology is able to lead the practice towards certain tropes, and a sense of discomfort when you recognise that has been the case?

The other thing probably worth acknowledging is that the act of putting together a bank of drum samples and/or a “useable” kit is actually (obviously) a subtle and sophisticated art form unto itself. For me, then, in my own excitedness to put together a new bunch of songs (or whatever), i’d overlooked a massive bit of the work - sharpening my ear in selecting samples, fine tuning the sounds, delving into the nuances of programming beats.

One thing that i have found when working in logic is that i’m prone to second guessing my instincts much more quickly than when working on the sampler, and i’m also conscious of “the mix” and how it sounds. The latter can probably be written off as my feelings of insecurity in terms of mixing, i’ve never felt technically “good” at making things sound “right” (getting enough low end in a kick, or whatever). But i think i’m ok with that. That other thing - second guessing my instincts - has, i think, something to do with the way ideas can feel fixed at the moment of creation when programming, and also the way a “moment of creation” can be ongoing, spanning minutes, hours, days, months. In many ways, this tension was something that i turned to the (hardware) sampler-as-instrument to avoid, to find a mode of working that didn’t feel rigid, that felt more live. In writing this, then, i think i’m realising that finding a balance between those two approaches to composition is the struggle that i’m going to be entering into over the next however-many months (wish me luck).

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GT: OK. So you’ve raised quite a bit there that I would like to follow up on, so bear with me, these avenues will have to be pursued in a convoluted, interweaving manner over subsequent posts. For now, I want to just pick up on the snares thing, but first I’ll answer that question at the end there, about “process” in mastering. I can answer very succinctly on that: there is none. I’ve always relied on the moment of “capture” like a photographer does, channeling Lee Friedlander’s untutored impulsiveness. I asked Vicki Bennett the same question some while back and she said pretty much the same thing: allowing the quality and character of the raw sources (roar sauces?) to “be” the production in its finalized manifestation. It’s something you hear so rarely in, say, Hip Hop, i.e. the straight-up loop without any supplementary drum hits. Off the top of my head the only example I can think of is ‘My Definition (Of a Boombastic Jazz Style)” (!) by Dream Warriors. Yet that’s how Hip Hop was done in its original form: one DJ looping two copies of the same vinyl on a pair of decks.

So, yeah. Snares. I like how you’re tugging at that strand because it promises to unravel a whole range of perspectives on its (the snare’s) place. The ‘in the studio with Slayer’ videos I need to watch – Paul Bostaph will be the drummer you’re on about, my brain has that data riveted in… As far as I know the only other drummer they had that wasn’t Lombardo was some guy called Ron Detti… American Rock band names, always a mosaic of unfamiliar (to British ears) concoctions (and that they’re strange sounding to British ears is not just because I come from the UK but because America’s predominant language is English, thus their context becomes anomalous): Ron Detti, Tom Scholz, Brad Delp, Geoff Porcaro, Tom Araya, Don Van Vliet, Madonna Ciccone, Joanne Germanotta…

OK, so I allowed a tangential observation on names to spin away into a momentary diversion apparently irrelevant, but to me the accent of snares as the coding through which certain musical identities, in their historic moments, is like the American accentuation of a multifaceted difference to the imperial template of colonizers. I need to watch those videos, then; as ever I’m aware of your facility with the wider range of sources and media through which insight can suggest in the age online dissemination; when Paul Bostaph says that thing about snares, his observation must surely, at least in part, be informed by the dramatic transition in sound and presentation between Hell Awaits and Reign in Blood. The hyperrealism of the latter always reminds me of Rudy Van Gelder’s 1960s Blue Note recordings whose attention to naturalistic detail (or rather the microphone and mixing trickery with which he invents a convincing illusion of an impossible “real thing”) seemed on the one hand to “finally” bring to record buyers a true-to-life Hard Bop experience, while on the other achieved an illusory ‘invisibility’ on the part of the engineer/producer. Funny, because just this evening I was reading about Slint’s Spiderland being an album on which the producer is invisible - in Jack Chuter’s text on Post Rock, Storm, Static, Sleep (Function Books, 2015) - and he uses the word ‘photorealism’ there (when relating the band’s choice of producer, Brian Paulson, ‘who shared Slint’s desire to make the recording as straightforward and photorealistic as possible’) even though I think what Spiderland sought to achieve was a kind of naturalistic candor, an embroidered nakedness, rather than photorealism, a discipline I associate with the likes of Chuck Close whose work manifests a perversely painstaking level of artifice to achieve an apparent naturalism which is actually anything but. Spiderland strips away studio craft (or would seem to) in order to reveal the sintonic intimacy of musical reverie.

That naturalism becomes a kind of fulcrum-barometer around the crafting of snares. Bostaph’s observation is interestingly astute. The first vinyl aesthetic I was drawn to when I started crate digging for samples was of that luxury-studio era that follows in the wake of Dark Side of the Moon, ca. ’ 73-76, even though I’d say the snares on that album are atypically naturalistic for the period. If I cursorily forage the memory bank, it’s probably 10cc that would surface most readily. A song like ‘Art For Art’s Sake’ has a snare that conveys a tacet confidence in the world of things cloaked in a veneer of trust in economics whose vision stubbornly seeks to gaze past the oil crisis in the same way that Roger Moore’s 007 does in Bond movies of that time. And actually, in the synthesized accumulation of impressions congealed in my mind, the snare sound of that time, in its chrome-dry naugahyde-leatherette warmth, is somehow synonymous with Roger Moore, his beef-nourished, obesity-flirting squareness woven through with that fatuously British disregard for the cause and effect of multiple oppressions. It took me a long time to gravitate towards the willfully cold modernist projections of those ’80s reverb-gate snares referred to in the first post. Perhaps partly because, having been an adolescent musician/fan during that period, I actually hated them then, I think I associated them with the fantastical-unrealistic projections of Reagan-Thatcher economic policy, the foundation of neo-liberalism.

Yet recently, the whole matter of assembling a kit according to the beat-maker’s orthodoxy of kick-hat-snare-ride (or whatever it is) has become a preoccupation for the first time, really, in my life. This is because I’ve actually done very little DAW sequencing, apart from the Virginia Pipe post-breakbeat stuff which sourced someone else’s sampled drum hits anyway. Yeah You has gotten plenty of mileage out of the Korg Monotribe, but its sync-able cousin, the Volca Sample, became an obvious way to expand the range of sounds with its CV tempo alignability with the Monotribe allowing you to work beyond the primitive selection of its bass-snare-hat configuration. The Volca Sample is basically a drum machine which you can fill with your own sounds. For some reason (lack of imagination, the fear of unfamiliarity?) I decided to make my first assembly of 100 sounds (which is what the template is) exclusively out of conventional percussion hits. It’s like when I won the top 7 singles on Radio 1’s Record Race in 1981, the BBC were meant to send me the actual 7-inches but instead sent me a record token to cover the equivalent cost; I could’ve bought any record, but out of some misplaced sense of duty I just went out and bought those singles that had been the top 7 a few weeks earlier when I was playing the game as a contestant on the Peter Powell show, even though I probably barely liked any of them. So here I went through a bunch of vinyls, including some of those Boogie/Electro-Soul LPs I talked about before, doing something I’d never before done, isolating individual drum hits and editing them to fit onto the Korg’s sample grid. I felt pleased with myself once I’d achieved m first 100-hit assembly. But once I started using them in gigs, I found myself irritated by the obviousness of their sound, their demeanor, within the complex weavings of an improvised beat/groove. I realised that what my internalized mental groove plotting was arching for was a percussive element within the arrangement that contradicted the flow and challenged the ear, not in a confrontational way, but in a manner that could sustain questionability, suspicion and doubt (in the mind of the audience as much as in mine).

One thing I realised was that the very process and habit of taking one’s actual sounds from previously released (and then abandoned) records opened up a sense of affordance with sound that couldn’t have been possible without first nurturing a mentality that exercises that affordance. Then I thought, ‘Stealing yields freedom,’ and wondered how far I could extend that principle, either/both in art or in regular routine: I guess both things are true.

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C: You know, i'm struck by the idea that the reason so many of those books turn up at oxfam is maybe, actually, you. The coincidence of coming across books you've recommended in lectures is maybe not so eerie - jesmond is a real student area and, when it comes to leaving newcastle at the end of degrees or moving house at the end of term, that oxfam will likely be the local charity shop for people looking to shed some of the books and things they've accumulated over the years that they maybe don't want to lug around on buses, trains etc. And as the the only lecturer teaching those types of modules (on hip hop or jazz or subcultures etc), and setting those types of reading lists, as part of the only popular music degree in the city, it's maybe no surprise those books are turning up... its (probably) your students putting them there. It's a pretty good little racket you have going tbh.

I'd love to chat about the snare thing. In that series of "in the studio with Slayer" videos i was talking about the other day, the current drummer (i forget his name, not Lombardo but someone who has been in the band before...) spoke about the time they took to decide on a snare for the record, because (paraphrasing) "it really defines the character of the kit, and ultimately the record as a whole". I wonder if that idea, the snare becoming an important character on a record, is somehow established in that 80s moment? It probably makes sense given the shift in technology and production, but even beyond those monster reverb gated snares synonymous with the 80s as you say, there's also the way the 808 becomes a definitive characteristic of hip hop at that time too. I guess i'm wondering if there's something about "snares in the 80s" as a way into a discussion of aesthetics (and how they're established) more widely?

You mentioned boogie's response to synth pop and its angular bass-lines too, and in that sense i suppose the snare thing probably has something to do with technical sonic concerns as well as aesthetic ones. I wonder if by using those particular production tricks producers are using the snare to help fill out an area of the frequency range left exposed by those "angular" bass-lines, an area that would conventionally be occupied by "traditional" bass playing? That frequency range stuff is the type of thing understood by the engineer (and/or producer) and felt by the listener i think. The wask once explained the 808 to me in terms of its strict separation of the kick, snare and hats across the frequency range and the effect that has sonically (and compositionally), so i imagine he might have some hot takes on this.

I know you're going to pick up where you left off discussing those four records, but i might just jump in and say a little about my thoughts about sampling as a practice now...

Beyond it being a lot of fun (which i think we both acknowledge is v important) i feel like sampling is a really important part of my practice in exploring and figuring out ideas around the things that i'm drawn to or the things that tend to preoccupy my thoughts i.e. minimalism/efficiency and potential "political" implications of that; hip hop and its resourcefulness; performance; engaging in the world in a way that is critical and relevant, and continually reassessing and interrogating those positions etc. (it actually feels pretty strange to list those there, because we talk a lot and i know you know that's what i'm thinking about a lot. But i feel the need to "establish" that now given that we're writing; even though i know this is for you, writing somehow also implies an ambiguous "other" reader who needs to be kept abreast of context and our prior conversations etc)

I'm into thinking about how efficient you can be in music making, and particularly in pop music making which is explicitly trying to communicate with an audience in some way - to get people out a show, to have a good time, to dance, to feel... something...

So i guess the first thing to say is that i generally use one loop per "song" which will typically be a couple of bars grabbed from one of my own recordings or from youtube. I impose this "one loop per song" creative constraint on myself partly because I like the game of finding the sample that has enough about it to sustain itself over five minutes (or however long) while i sing/talk over it and is able to do that thing of evolving and becoming something else simply through its repetition. And part of my "research" is about exploring the elastic potential of that idea, seeing how far you can push it before it breaks, and thinking about the "songwriting" strategies you can deploy to maintain interest and delay the point when it does break. It's a subtle thing to negotiate i think: a stripped down repetitiveness that is powerful rather than just flat and boring. And there is an efficiency to it which i like to think has a political resonance re: the aspirational acquisitional ideologies and narratives surrounding us...

One of the thing that continues to excite me about sampling is finding loops that can add new layers of meaning to a piece, that the loops themselves can take on new meanings and (more romantically) that you might unlock a latent potential in the original work that has been overlooked. This is all informed from hip hop and signifyin' really, and it seems like such a great distillation of the creative act and artistic ingenuity - in the seemingly simple act of grabbing a sample, so much meaning (or whatever) can be unearthed. There are definitely the ethics of this to consider (me as a cis white dude) and the point where this is no longer cool and becomes appropriative, but i'm trying to figure out how to acknowledge that in the work while also committing to a music making that refuses to ignore the impact hip hop has had on popular music and culture, too many conversations in "academia" or "underground music" still treat hip hop, and pop music more broadly, as cute and refuse to consider that it might actually teach them something, that both hip hop and pop music could radically influence and reimagine their own practice. It seems really important to reckon with that as a music maker in our contemporary moment. But with regard to sampling, again, it's a careful area to negotiate: at what point does this tip over into Kenneth Goldsmith plundering the Michael Brown autopsy, and when does my approach ultimately represent a culture of entitlement where the whole world is there for white dudes to use? I suppose i'm aware that when discussing the inherent politics of sampling i also need to acknowledge that my use of it is also inherently political.

I did just want to quickly mention the microsampler, with it being a sampler we both use. One thing that i realised when thinking about my use of it was the fluidity with which the more "conceptual" ideas intersect and swirl around the thoughts regarding the hands-on practicalities of using the instrument. So when i slow down a loop it might be a practical performance thing - ie moving that one sample onto a different key because i already have a sample looping on there and want to be able to play them both at the same time - but in that same moment i am acutely aware of the effect (affect) slowing down/pitching down the sample has: the way it extends the length of drum hits to make snares (for example) sound bigger, or the sense of dreamy hauntological nostalgia it seems to evoke, particularly on voice. Maybe that's not the best example actually. But, all those thoughts are happening at the same time in (what seems like) the same part of the brain. I just feel that is something important to point out, as those practical concerns and conceptual/artistic ideas are usefully separated and discussed independently of each other. I think there's more to be said about what is going on when you slow down/pitch down a sample too and i'd actually be really interested in hearing your thoughts on it?

I'm in the middle of some recording now and one thing i always struggle with is mastering, what's your "process" when it comes to that?

Btw i'm writing all of this while travelling on trains and metros and feel like i'm channeling so much of you.

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GT: I want to tell you about four records that I bought the other day, why I wanted them and how I sampled them. Jesmond Oxfam is a draw, has been ever since I moved. Not sure why it’s so good; sometimes during the summer months a bunch of books that I’d have recommended in lectures turns up, or, even better, books on subjects I’ve taught but not yet acquired or read – that’s how I got my copy of Jay-Z Decoded, complete with its fancy sachet-packaging; I’ve not read it yet.

Yeah, so the section for pop music books often has really good stuff in it, so that tends to be where I head straight away. I’m really interested in recent mainstream pop star biogs at the moment – I’m not even sure why, to be honest; it started out with me searching for Nicki Minaj biographies, but recently I’ve bought one on Tiny Tempah (marketed for a pre-teen readership, I’d guess) and one on Lady Gaga which looks quite good, actually, written by a journalist (Helia Phoenix) whose chief interests are ‘experimental electronica [and] Kevin Smith movies’ according to the fly-leaf bio-note.

I almost never bother with vinyls these, however, although I still predominantly sample from them, usually sourcing from the records I have to hand (I’ve got a few hundred in the house that I acquired for nothing since the rest were carted to Wales for the Armstrong refurb upheaval). Occasionally, though, when the bookshelves have nothing new on them, I do idly flick through whatever is in the ‘New Stock’ section. The other day I did that and I found a handful of LPs by Soul/R&B singers from the ’80s, a period I loosely/lazily refer to as Boogie and Electro Soul. ‘Boogie’ is definitely a term that has become standard of late, maybe always was for people in the know. I absolutely love that moment in African American pop, the period where Hip Hop was rapidly becoming the dominant force and a market evolved for musicians and audiences who still wanted songs (rather than beats & rhymes), but also felt the need not to be left behind in that now-hackneyed post-Disco soundworld of high-cost studio productions replete with large orchestras directed by industry vets. Boogie was also responding to the rise of synth pop, so much of its sound was made up of futuristic arrangements with terse, angular synth-bass lines. I’d love to spend some time trying to investigate how and why the snare drum suddenly became such a preoccupation during this time. I treated myself to Def Leppard’s Hysteria the other day and the same thought occurred to me: those heavily gated, sometimes monster-reverbed snare hits became a synecdoche for ‘80s production’ per se, forever dating the music, yet clearly there was something about them at the time that really turned people on…

Anyway, I actually love this music to listen to for itself, but it’s also currently my favourite source for sampling beats to use in either my solo stuff, or, increasingly in YEAH YOU. When we started out in 2013, our first few weeks’ worth of sessions were extended jams with me on the Microsampler and Elvin (the Ekasilicon) on either a Casio or the Microkorg. Those recordings are insane and, even though they totally didn’t satisfy our needs at the time, they do now have a retrospective charm for all their unbridled chaos. Point is that after a few weeks we settled on the Monotribe + FX formula that has sustained us for most of the time since. Except recently, when we were being asked to play for a full 60 minutes at Borealis, I took the Microsampler on tour to Norway with us so that we’d have a source of material to leap into suddenly should the momentum decrease with the Monotribe/Kaoscillator set-up. It turned out to be a brilliant way of completely altering the vibe mid-set, even mid-song, while opening up the possibility of reference (sometimes ironic) such as the slowed down Calvin Harris/Rihanna ‘We Found Love’ sample we used for Counterflows, which went down well, and the Michael Jackson ‘Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough’ loop with Hip Hop scratches that dominated the Sensational art shop set.

My approach at the moment is very straightforward and is driven simply by the vinyls I happen to have to hand at the moment, namely those Boogie/Electro-Soul records plus a whole bunch of contemporary classical stuff (Classical Avant Garde) mostly by relatively unknown composers from the 70s and 80s who were funded and released either by academic institutions or Arts Council-style state funding; finally, some kind of vocal sample, either my own or from a folk record or something:

• sample a couple of loops from a given song (to provide punctuation, modulation or contrast); these will usually be on adjacent keys, for obvious reasons • on the next couple of keys I’ll bring in something from either the modern classical stuff or voice – the idea being that neither have a groove defined rhythm to interfere with whatever the other loop is

It’s not like it’s even a good method, just a lazy habit born out of having to rush or simple convenience.

All of which as lead-up to actually discussing the samples themselves. I want to tell you about four different grooves, and what kinds of resonance they have with me alongside a historical, contextual continuum that I’ve been a part of as a listener and player since whenever I started.

The first LP I sampled from was this thing by Madleen Kane, Don’t Wanna Lose You (Chalet, 1981). I went for this straight away probably for two reasons: the close-up portrait on the cover was of a white artist – everything else I bought was by black artists, significance being, I guess, that there’d be something slightly over-reaching or off-kilter about a project that tries to pitch a white artist into a very competitive field otherwise dominated by blacks because their audience was either predominantly black or the dance floor; secondly, the name ‘Madleen’ gives you a jolt of Europeanism – European dance music in a black vernacular is always a treat, from a semi-ironic perspective, I’m thinking Black Box, Technotronic, Milli Vanilli, Leila K etc.

So it turns out Madleen Kane was a Swedish model, 5’11” and blonde, who’d been fairly successful in the 1970s and had made the switch to music/Disco quite early on, her first three albums issued on US majors, thus getting industry backing which I guess didn’t pay off too well since her name is nowadays unknown and… her fourth record, this one, was clearly a bid to keep trying but now on an independent label, Chalet (based in California, their 22-release catalogue is almost all Madleen, 1980-82) and produced by a Giorgio Moroder who I guess by this stage was losing momentum?