Grammys at 50: Samples Come Alive

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In the post-hip-hop era, one of the best things — which is to say, perhaps one of the few good things — about the Grammys is the opportunity to watch samples come alive. Tonight’s broadcast of the 50th annual ceremony was no exception. A glowing pyramid on stage in the background during Kanye West‘s performance of “Stronger,” off his Graduation album, opened to reveal the French electronica duo Daft Punk, dressed like desktop-support figures from Tron. West’s “Stronger” samples their “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” which dates from 2001. (This sort of “live sample” is, of course, the opposite of lip-synching, the human growth hormone of pop music, which was in full effect during several performances.)

Now, if only the Academy had gotten Mountain’s Leslie West (yeah, no relation) and Gil Scott-Heron together to back up Common for his nominated “The People” (off the Kanye West-produced Finding Forever), which samples songs by both of ’em.

Of course, the novelty of Daft Punk’s Grammy Awards appearance was somewhat diminished when their original “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” served as the evident blueprint for a Heineken ad that aired later during the broadcast.

Half-hour Robert Henke MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It may be my imagination, but it seems that with each new “Free Track of the Month” that Robert Henke posts at his website, his descriptive abilities get stronger, more precise, and more illuminating. The latest download is an uncut version of the track “Plankton,” which originally appeared, in shorter form, on his Floating.Point collection in 1997. The Floating.Point version was just under 10 minutes in length, while this take is three times that. Over the course of its half hour, the piece, an effort in abstract and often beatless techno, gets muddier and thicker; there’s a kind of glistening scintillate overlay early on, though by the end a certain inherent insistence has been revelead, and what sounded like aural fairy dust has become a kind of treble grind.

Here’s a bit of what Henke says of the track himself:

The toy which made this track possible was our Boss RSD-10 sampling delay, a small digital delay unit that made it possible to feed back its output to the input. Unlike in modern delays, the feedback was realized analog, so each repetition of the signal went thru the (cheap) analog digital converter, into the memory and back to the digital to analog converters. As a result, the delays get more and more deconstructed and noisier with each repetition. This effect can be clearly heard in the last 10 minutes of the take. The unit also allows to change the delay time by continuosly changing the sample rate, which also alters the pitch.

The two altering chords in the background sounds like being created with a Prophet VS. I must just have gotten it at that time, maybe even at exactly that day… The other sounds including the flickering and the alien-like backgrounds come from the SY 77, manipulated by Gerhard Behles, while I operated the Boss delay, the other effects, and the mixing desk.

There’s additional information, including technical specifications, at monolake.de. Henke posts free MP3s monthly, but with a strict stipulation that no one link directly to the file, only to the webpage itself.

One interesting note about attribution. The Floating.Point album was released as a Robert Henke album, not a Monolake album — back then, Monolake was a collaboration between Henke and Behles, the latter of whom went on to found the audio software company Ableton, where Henke also works. Despite that distinction between “Henke” music and “Monolake” music, apparenlty Behles also worked on this “Henke” track.

Early 1970s India Field-Recording MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The great wired-world guru Marshall McLuhan commented that artists are the antennae of the human race. That is perhaps nowhere as close to literally true as with artists who use radio and field recordings in their art, and the phrase will linger in your mind when listening to a recent pair of files made available at archive.org (MP3, MP3). Recorded by Jean-Louis Derche during travels in India back in 1971, the subjects include temple music and street sounds — the latter in particular putting a world distant in time, space, and culture just outside your window, and just inside your headphones. On occasion the recordings pause so that Derche can talk about his experience with Other Minds founder and out-radio personality Charles Amirkhanian.

MP3 of “Wordless Music” from Cepia

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A live half-hour Cepia set recorded at the Wordless Music Series in Manhattan back on November 28, 2007, is true to its name — not the “wordless” part, because in fact voices are heard low down in the mix, but the Cepia part. The track is deeply imbued with a sense of nostalgia, from the water-logged amusement-park melody with which it opens, to the funereal goth-pop through which it proceeds. Even as the performance builds a rhythm and, slowly, begins to speed up, it has a maudlin quality — a touch of echo, a feedback-enhanced drum beat, a minor-key melody — that connects the decaying audio with a concern for memory and reflection. (Speaking of reflection, those sublimated voices are, most likely, emanating from the audience.)

More on Cepia, aka Minneapolis-based Huntley Miller, at cepiamusic.com, and on the Wordless Music Series at wordlessmusic.org.