#like we play other songs but sometimes we need a funk beat bro

[inplateaus]

it must be so depressing to live in a country where they dont play funk at parties

[ogovs]

The Beginning

Hello everyone and welcome to my latest creation. My name is Taylor. I am a 27-year-old from Michigan. I am currently a student studying environmental studies. I will be graduating in spring 2020 and will be the first in my family to earn a college degree! Anyways, the Original VS Sampled blog will be my 5th blog (omg). Is this too many blogs? I feel like this is too many blogs. So many topics, so little time.

My other blogs...

Observernumber5 – born under the bridge

thuglifetilidie – a mix of love

imiss2005

taylorsgreenthumbprint – Garden Oasis

I got interested in music before I even knew I was into music. My mom is crazy about music. She is around 60 years old, but every era of music, she had picked her favorites (a good and funny example of this would be her loving Future, especially when the song Mask Off was released). When I was younger, she would blast music from our living room’s surround system, even on school nights. There are albums she’d play over and over. I would never have put the CD in myself and listen to the artist myself, but when a song played on the radio, I knew all the words to the songs because of her lol! My dad also listened to some real oldies, that I’d grow accustomed to hearing. We’d have shopping trips to Circuit City every time a favorite artist’s CD came out. Once I began listening to my own tunes, I was able to get anybody’s CD I wanted. This was around the age of 10. I liked R&B and loved gangsta rap. My mom is actually the reason my love for Bone Thugs started. I was raiding my bro’s CD and Tape collection and listening to his music at this point too. There was a lot of Eminem, Devin the Dude, Outkast, 50 Cent, and even Mike Jones – before he blew up.

At 11, I joined my junior high’s band, played Alto Sax for a year then switched to Clarinet the next and stuck with that until I graduated High School. Also at 11, My dad had brought me a guitar for Christmas after noticing my interest in playing instruments. Here I started listening to rock. At this point I had 2003 rock and what came before. I learned the early 2000s songs and 90s. Around this time, music downloads on LimeWire had taken off, and I could get anything I wanted. Ahh… the early 2000s, I loved all the music during this time, hence the imiss2005 blog that I terribly neglected, I’m ashamed, lol. Maybe I’ll start to build it, who knows.

 Onto other things, it wasn’t until a couple years ago 2015 maybe? I began to hear a lot of songs, sampling old songs. Rap producers/ DJs did this a lot in the past, this is basically how hip hop originated. DJs would take old school records, especially funk, use the drums or entire beats and speed them up or slow them down to let rappers rap over the beat. Song sampling has become very noticeable within the last 10 years for me. During this time, I was (and still am) really heavy into playlist creation on iTunes (one of the very few things I like about Apple), and I had a brilliant idea! I need to comb through my entire music library and find out who has sampled who. I started with my favorite artists. I hear songs on the radio that are old songs that have been sampled and new songs on the radio that I recognize the samples. Samples are reused portions of original songs, or even movie audio, etc.,. A producer will take pieces, rhythms, melodies, drums, vocals, isolated sounds from original songs, and sometimes manipulate these portions to make their own creations. It’s awesome!

When I listen to music now, I always wonder, did they sample that? Then I run to the wonderful site Whosampled.com to see what they come up with. This has been my primary resource for discovering the original music of my favorite songs.

One of the first songs I realized that was sampled is Aretha Franklin’s “Call Me” that was is a featured single on her 1970s album This Girl’s in Love With You.

Franklin’s “Call me” piano melody was sampled by Slum Village in their song “Selfish,” coming from their 2004 album Detroit Deli (A Taste of Detroit). (Good old 2004, the early 2000s. Come back to me). “Selfish” features an awesome hook sang by John Legend and a phenomenal verse and production by Kanye West.

Both artists have significance to me since they both hail from and or got their start in my home town, the Dirty D. Detroit. We all should (and better) be familiar with the wonderful Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. She has influenced and contributed so much to the awesome R&B music we have today. Rest in Peace, Queen Aretha. As for Slum Village, I don’t think they are as popular as they should be, especially with this smooth song they have given us.

So, this is how it will be. I will try to do one of these posts everyday. I will post an original song, along with a few facts about it and the artists, followed by the song that has sampled the original song. I hope everyone enjoys this blog and also discovers some new music. 

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 5, Number 5

PUP

Home fi, gnawa-pop fusion, mariachi cowpunk, classically minded jazz, shout-y punk-pop and finger picked acoustic blues—as appropriate for spring, Dust lets a thousand flowers bloom.This edition of short, mostly positive reviews, draws contributions from Isaac Olson, Bill Meyer, Jennifer Kelly and Justin Cober-Lake. We hope you find something to blast from open windows on the first warm, sunny opportunity.  

Ahmed Ag Kaedy — Akaline Kidal (Sahel Sounds)

Akaline Kidal by Ahmed Ag Kaedy

This acoustic, solo release by Malian guitarist in exile Ahmed Ag Kaedy is a beaut. Like a lot of so-called desert blues, this is only chill out music until you read the lyrics, for example, “The Tuareg people must know/you can consider France an enemy/no better than Algeria who stands in our path.” Even if militant nationalism, no matter who’s calling for it, isn’t your thing, Ahmed Ag Kaedy’s weathered, throaty voice and plangent, monophonic guitar flights which are as evocative, bitter, and seemingly ephemeral as campfire smoke, make Akaline Kidal well worth hearing. And like campfire smoke, they’ll stick with you well into the next day.  

Isaac Olson

  Astralingua — Safe Passage (Midnight Lamp)

Safe Passage by Astralingua

Quietly, precisely odd, this elaborately instrumented, baroquely arranged folk experiment shrouds whispery threads of poetry in eerie landscapes of stringed instruments, pennywhistles and gently massed harmony. The music, mostly the work of composer Joseph Andrew Thompson but aided by singer Anne Rose Thompson, runs much in line with goth folk outfits like Gravenhurst and Boduf Songs, in the way that dread seeps up from the floorboards and beauty has a spectral, semi-transparent air; you could make a case for an Elliott Smith singing in front of Clogs comparison in a couple of the songs. Yet the music faces forward, not back into misty folklorics. “Space Blues” takes a turn towards proggy Pink Floyd-ish visions of interstellar travel on “Space Blues” and while “Poison Tree” heads off into to tremulous orchestral confessionalism, a la Sufjan Stevens. It is all very pretty and a little disturbing.

Jennifer Kelly

 Kaja Draksler / Petter Eldh / Christian Lillinger—Punkt.Vrt.Plastik (Intakt)

Punkt.Vrt.Plastik by Kaja Draksler, Petter Eldh, Christian Lillinger

This pan-Euopean combo rethinks one of the most cobweb-festooned configurations in jazz. To overcome the piano trio’s over-familiarity, they combine idiosyncratic personal techniques with a disciplined collective approach. Swedish bassist Petter Eldh and German drummer Christian Lillinger have forged their concord in a couple other groups; the former is assertively melodic and big-toned, the latter quick and ubiquitous. With so much happening in the engine room, they need a partner who values balance, and they have found one in Slovenian pianist Kaja Draksler. Her playing is fleet and articulate, and her ideas feel complete in themselves, but they also leave ample space between the root notes for her partners to exercise their formidable muscles without banging into any harmonic walls.

Bill Meyer

 Maxine Funke — Home Fi (Feeding Tube)

home fi by maxine funke

Keep your lo fi, hi fi, and wifi; Home Fi is where it’s at. Really, how come no one characterized their music thusly before? Maxine Funke’s songs flesh out the conceit with lyrical details that relate not just home life, but a state of at-homeness on the grounds around the house. “February” doles out images of late summer foliage (Funke lives in New Zealand) and foraged taste treats; “Waving the Tea Rose” finds spiritual riches in the neighbors’ trash. Funke’s accompanies her slightly sleepy croon with spare finger-picking, captured up close enough that you can hear a chair creak while a strategically dissonant organ or fiddle pipes up in the background. This record, which was originally sold as a tape on an Australian tour, lasts just 22 minutes, but it feels as complete as an afternoon nap.

Bill Meyer

  Houssam Gania — Mosawi Swiri (Hive Mind Records)

Mosawi Swiri by Houssam Gania

Houssam Gania, son of guimbri master Maalem Mahmoud Gania, opens Mosawi Swiri, his debut, with an act of cheerful patricidal aggression. Rather than launching into the traditional Gnawa music — solid and sparse as a mudbrick house, deep and dark as a well and groovy as ripples in a dune — that his father mastered, Gania’s traditional guimbri and qraqabs are joined on the first track, “Moulay Lhacham,” by a guitar/drums/keys band that sounds not unlike Brent Mydland-era Dead. It’s sunshiny, a little corny and perfectly delightful. Ok, ok, so Gania Sr. was no purist himself, having collaborated with, among others, Pharoah Sanders and Peter Brotzmann, but Gania Jr’s opening gambit is pure pop delight. Luckily for armchair ethnographers everywhere, the rest of Mosawi Swiri sticks to traditional Gnawa music, which in Gania’s capable hands, really is as hypnotic and potentially curative as both locals and marshmallow-eared world music fans claim. That first track is a hoot though, and while I’m not sure Gania could sustain a whole album of gnawa-pop fusion, I’d love to see him try.

Isaac Olson

 A.F. Jones — Bourdon du Kinzie (Unfathomless)

Bourdon du Kinzie by A.F. Jones

Sound ecologist, submarine acoustician, mastering engineer, musician; if it manifests within the ears, A.F. Jones is tuned into it. This CD echoes an order that David Thomas, a man who has never been shy about telling other people what to do, once barked. “Insist on more than the truth.” This album began with a field recording expedition to a disused bunker in Port Washington, WA. The space is simultaneously absorbent and reverberant, luring external sounds into its cavernous interior and transforming them with its long decay times. You could probably get some cool sounds by simply stamping your foot or dropping the change in your pockets and hearing what the space does to it. But sound collection is just the first step for Jones. He’s used audio analysis software to isolate and enhance the space’s dominant tones, and then further seasoned the reduction with dancing sine tones. The result is a sort of sonic centrifuge in which essences are extracted so that some sounds become more ephemeral and others more vivid. Give it a spin.  

Bill Meyer  

 Patio—Essentials (Fire Talk)

Essentials by Patio

All clanks and spikes and spatter, this Brooklyn-based trio constructs a jag-edged punk with lots of space. It jangles like a bag of rusty nails. The vocals—sung sometimes by bassist Loren DiBlasi and other times by Lindsey-Paige McCloy, the guitarist (but not by Alice Suh, the drummer) —are a soothing counterpoint, unless you listen to the words, which are sharp despite the cool, distanced delivery. The band mixes late-1980s post-punk jitter with intriguing intervals of chanted poetry and pop self-revelation. “Open,” the longest cut, threads an antic, literate narrative atop a bassline so crackling with electricity that you could get a shock. “Boy Scout,” the single, bounds ahead then collapses in a heap, surges and stops in sudden uncertainty. The music exactly mirrors the confusing, conflicting emotions sketched in lyrics like, “Never have the chance to choose, naturally I always lose, I went shopping the other day, this week I can afford to feel better.” Patio makes inward-facing music that jerks and spasms in an approximation of hedonism, but maintains its quiet, difficult core.

Jennifer Kelly

  PUP — Morbid Stuff (Little Dipper/Rise/BMG)

Morbid Stuff by PUP

It’s been a minute since shout-along punk rattled cages like this second outing from Toronto’s PUP. Here in 11 teeth-rattling blasts, the band radiates bratty intelligence and dashed hopes, amid slamming guitars and kit battering drums. The tension between nerdy, needy erudition and beer bro riffs is palpable. When singer Stefan Babcock confesses, “Just like the kids/I've been navigating my way through the mind-numbing reality of a godless existence/Which, at this point in my hollow and vapid life, has erased what little ambition I've got left,” at the beginning of the single “Kids” you kind of expect the guy to get beat up by his own song. Obvious references include the Hold Steady, Green Day, Japandroids, that is, pretty much any punk that smart kids can memorize and dumb kids can punch the air to without really understanding. The trick is to stomp with triumphant, hobnail-studded aggression all over the relentlessly depressing lyrical content. Pretty soon, we are all singing along that, “Just because you’re sad, doesn’t make you special.”

Jennifer Kelly

 Joshua Redman Quartet — Come What May (Nonesuch)

Saxophonist Joshua Redman has been one of the defining voices of mainstream jazz for a quarter century, his clear tone and lyrical sensibilities a steady source of pleasure in various configurations. For Come What May, Redman reassembles his quartet from the early 2000s (pianist Aaron Goldberg, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Gregory Hutchinson) for seven original compositions. The group stays locked in across a variety of sounds, with Goldberg particularly getting some time to shine. Bookending the album with meditative numbers “Circle of Life” and “Vast” makes for a nice closed structure to the disc, letting the livelier numbers pulse and swing. On “DGAF” the musicians' comfort with each other allows Hutchinson to guide a jerky momentum, one that works best when he reclaims it near the end of the song.

The ensemble doesn't push any obvious boundaries here, despite a few demanding interactions. Redman and his group are locked into standard sounds, with the challenge simply being how well they can do it. Not surprisingly, they're quite good at it, and the fact that Redman's conversations sound so easy shouldn't distract from the high level of play here. The quartet sticks to its tradition with clear sound, strong melodies and smart interplay, playing to its strengths for another expressive release.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Vandoliers—Forever (Bloodshot)

Forever by Vandoliers

Vandoliers, out of Dallas, make punk rock with country fiddles, hoarse-voiced stomp-alongs with Mexicali flourishes of trumpet. “Sixteen Years,” which commemorates how long these urban cowboys have been on the job, sports bruise-y r ‘n r defiance, with its chugging beat, its cigarette-and-whiskey-vocals, but leavens the mix with brash folkloric bursts of brass. A rougher “Troublemaker” amps up the one-two shuffle and slides the cow-punk meter over towards the punk side, while contemplative “Cigarettes in the Rain,” smoulders and smokes much like its subject matter, but with a noticeable twang. Forever reminds you that the Rolling Stones were, on occasion, a country band, and the Replacements once made songs like “Waitress in the Sky.” The line is permeable, the fence has a nice place to sit on, and the Vandoliers are neither punk nor country but both.

Jennifer Kelly

 Eli Winter — Time to Come (Blue Hole Recordings)

The Time To Come by Eli Winter

With The Time to Come, college student Eli Winter makes his entry into the solo guitar scene. Winter cites Jack Rose as a prominent influence, but he doesn't have the thickness or the pulse of Rose's sound. His sensibility, especially when playing acoustic, lies closer to Glenn Jones in his creation of atmosphere, brightness and storytelling. “Sunrise Over the Flood” starts with a simple, pretty pattern before turning dark, an evocative moment of lightness used to reveal something heavy. On the poppier side, “Oranges and Holly” builds around a riff close to the intro from “Here Comes the Sun,” but it never quite distinguishes itself. The title track unfurls over 15 minutes, Winter's structured thought allowing for linear but engaging progression. Winter's debut makes the case that we should be paying attention to him; he certainly has things to say and has the right vehicle for his expression. At the same time, it feels like a debut. Winter's restraint keeps everything in its right place, but it would be nice to see him challenge himself technically. Taking a few more risks would help him find his own niche the field, a spot he's likely to earn with a little more seasoning, given his smart songcraft and thoughtful aesthetics.  

Justin Cober-Lake

 Michael Zerang—THE SHUDDERING CHERUB (Pink Palace Records)

THE SHUDDERING CHERUB - for solo piano with vibrating elements by Michael Zerang

If you’re wondering how Chicago’s improvised music company made the march from the AACM’s rejection of commercial and racial marginalization in the 1960s to the current polymorphous scene, train your antennae on Michael Zerang. He’s one of the people who did the hard work of not just playing but organizing during the long dry 1980s. His polyvalence extends to his musicality; he’s played unamplified and electro-acoustic improvisation, ecstatic drone, indie rock, free jazz and pan-global percussion. It might seem a bit perverse that his first solo recording is on piano, but listen and your befuddlement will pass. Zerang spends precious little time on the keys. Instead he plunges into the instrument’s interior, liberally preparing its strings and then plucking, scraping and vibrating with sure hands and some trusty vibrators. The music morphs like a chameleon’s coloration, shifting from coarse texture to crystalline drizzle.

Bill Meyer