Sonic
Occupancy
A Brief Walk Through Sampling, Sensation
& Space
published
in Ojeblikket, Vol.10 No.3, Coppenhagen, 2000
reprinted
in Red No.1, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne,
2001
There
may have once been a time when musical instruments sounded
like they came from somewhere. They would have peculiarly
reverberated in space, accruing their sonic identity from
the way their mechanics forced sound throughout and within
that space. You could have sat there and said: yes, that
piano over there does sound like a piano indeed.
But
who listens to pianos these days? In fact, who has really
heard one? And more importantly: what is there to be gained
by identifying a piano anyway? Inasmuch as sound can never
be separated from space - from that specific phenomenological
acousmonium which provides the frame and realm within which
we identify sounds and soundings - all recordings of sound
ultimately document the space of those occurrences. Put
simply, whenever you hear a recording of an instrument -
a lingering piano chord in a hall, a snare rim shot close-miced,
a muted trumpet diffused from a stage, a fender guitar through
a Marshall stack - the recording is defined by the characteristics
of the space in which the instrument was performed, and
the means by which the instrument was recorded. The materiality
of this phonology is obvious enough in any age of mechanical
reproduction, but what is of deeper interest is how sampling
culture - particularly in the eclectic and global hybridization
which streams and beams forth from the sonic satellites
of Hip Hop and Techno - has affected ways of hearing space
while identifying sounds.
Constantly
slipping and skidding between the hyper-regimentation of
Techno's lap-tops, plug-ins and down-loads, and the meta-abstraction
of Hip Hop's turntablism, sampledelia and ethnocentricity,
the employment of recorded/encoded sound in sample culture
has all but decimated whatever mimeticism and mimicry was
left in the illusion of recorded instruments. Fragments
of music over the last decade have become documents of unrecognizable
sources, mystified occurrences, sono-musical collapses.
From early 90s Bleep to mid-90s Lo-Noise to late 90s Glitch
(note those names), this active disrecognization of sound
and music has been intuitively waged against the omni-present
scourge of 'factory pre-sets': pre-designed samples of clean
recognizable instruments for samplers, designed for the
composer/performer to instantly recall and conduct. In opposition
to the refined purity of those sono-musical archetypes (the
'definitive' grand piano sample, the 'classic' 12 string
guitar, the 'ultimate' Chinese gong, etc.) sampling culture
enacts and invokes all form and manner of disfiguration.
In doing so, it has upheld the ideal of modernism: to totally
destroy its 'self' through any and all means of reproduction.
In recorded pop/folk musics, this has encapsulated the distortion
of 50s rockabilly snares; the fuzz-wah of 60s acid rock
and soul; the turn-it-up-to-11 of 70s hard rock & metal;
the pursuit of unadulterated white noise in punk, post-punk
and numerous industrial permutations; and the overload of
bass drums, kick-clicks and drum machine pulses in just
about every subgenre of dance music over the last 20 years.
Any 'sound' that typifies all these musical mutations and
apparitions is characterized more by its recording process
than by any particular instrument, and those attendant recording
processes are aimed at destroying something about the instrument's
aural identity in order to make a new noise.
This
in itself is a remarkable demonstration of the postmodern
being curdled by the resilience of modernism's destructive
energy - that sampling has re-instated tactility and physicality
via digital and non-linear operations. In fact there is
so much historical contradiction and ideological conflict
in the most rudimentary approaches to sampling that one
feels our extant ways of perceiving sampled sound (and discursively
writing of its effects) are woefully inadequate and imprecise.
For sampling can neither solely nor simply be the quotation
of the uttered, the appropriation of the authored or the
recall of the represented. Such dumbly labelled referencing
does not even start to account for the history of phonology
and the mysteries of psycho-acoustics. Most startling, the
pale rhetoric of postmodern assertion is alien to the base
materiality of any sonic experience - in precisely the same
way that the mere identification of a sound is but a flaky
epidermis to the sono-musical corpus of the sound itself.
This
precipice which abuts the referential to the tactile, the
identified to the experienced, is materially and textually
exemplified by the millisecond at which the sampled/recorded
sound stops. We are potentially more aware of sound's palpability
as its ensuing silence impresses us with the absence of
its 'self'. An economy of eventfulness thus determines much
about sound 'as it happens', as we can only really talk
about sound 'as it happened'. Composers of all persuasion
and background have used the halting moment of non-performed
silence for drama, definition and distillation; recording
engineers, session producers, electro-acoustic realizers,
turntable DJs and computer users similarly extrapolate the
signal-to-noise ratio of recorded media into a schizophrenic
schism where the silence after an edit/cut/break/pop/gate/trigger
contains and boxes the sound, trapping it into a ruthless
binary of on/off, now/then, happening/happened.
Many
early musique concrete compositions employ the sonar warping
of the tape splice as the raison d'etre for their musical
architecture and spatial orchestration. Moving on from the
early radiophonic 78rpm turntable experiments of Pierre
Schaeffer, the rigour of later academic compositions harness
the brute force of the tape splice and channel it into granular
fields of gesture and furrows of rhythmic detail. Ilhan
Imaroglu's THE TOMB OF EDGAR ALAN POE (1964) - composed
solely of a voice reading a Mallarme poem in French - is
a concise investigation of what happens when the recorded
voice is not only halted, but also constricted, contorted
and controlled by a series of extemporizations, incisions,
buttresses and ruptures. The piece deploys the classic 50s
electro-acoustic effect of recording a voice in a reverberant
space, then editing out the moments when the voice is talking
so as to leave only the reverberation of the voice in that
space. Extolling a beautiful morbidity so typical of postwar
techno-driven modernism, THE TOMB OF EDGAR ALAN POE is a
paean to those spaces which the voice haunts. Its voice
is but a ghostly trace whose sensation is figuratively and
technologically entombed in its space.
The
surrealistic gymnastics of vocal violence and oral orgasm
are deployed and displayed in countless electro-acoustic
compositions from the early 50s well into the 80s. Clearly
the naked voice - moist in its presence and pregnant with
energy - is a prime target for the rank destructiveness
of modernism, yet it must not be forgotten that such high
art compositions are no different from the more prosaic
and perfunctory recordings of the human voice in popular
song. Consider even something like a record of Vera Lynne
singing THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER: a vocal stream beaten
into a tin-foil transmissive of a drastically narrowed frequency
range, bathed in the acoustic patina of vinyl crackling.
Her voice becomes an oral constellation wavering amid a
nebula of scratches and hisses, rising in wisps from the
spinning disc. Her space - with no intention toward such
sonic abstraction - is neither neutral nor natural. Her
voice lives in the soundfield of recorded technology, a
realm of mediation and modulation where no sound can exist
without its occupancy in a space defined by microphonic
boundaries. That cloud of white noise is her non-human breath
in her post-vocal atmosphere.
The
celebration of scratchy recordings became de rigeur in Hip
Hop's second golden age with a clutch of seminal LPs: The
45 King's MASTER OF THE GAME (1988), Royal House's CAN YOU
PARTY (1988), Jungle Brothers' STRAIGHT OUT THE JUNGLE (1988)
and De La Soul's THEE FOOT HIGH AND RISING (1989). Amid
sprayed and splayed fields of vinyl corruption, these albums
collectively bend one's preconceptions of recorded environments
and phonographic space, and wholly question the existence
of silence in the face of unmitigated surface noise. The
production and mixing by (respectively) Mark Davis, Todd
Terry, the JBs and Prince Paul not only mapped a series
of templates which enabled Hip Hop to contour a myriad of
sonic fault lines throughout the 90s, but they also pinpointed
the transitional interzone between turntablism and sampling.
The looped sample of a vinyl scratch or passage did far
more than rhythmatize : it achitectured a form which pushed
the breathing space of the original recording into a re-articulation
of that space. Simply, the quality of the recordings, the
microphones originally used, the specific acoustics of their
studio environments converged to 'timbrelly spatialize'
the new sample-construction. Songs from this point on would
be built upon the raspy hypermaterial sediment of other
rooms, other locations, other spaces. The scratchophonic
texture of these self-reflexive meta-recordings aided in
the redefinition of Hip Hop as a music which always came
from somewhere else: it leaked across, impinged upon, spilt
into, encroached and generally re-territorialized the very
status of its 'self'.
Hip
Hop through the 90s thus explored the grain of space possibly
more than any other period in the history of phonology.
This is an important distinction to make when so much is
presumed and expected of the rhythmic impulse to pulsate
in Hip Hop. Taking a different view, it could be argued
that the throb of Hip Hop is its breath, while its sonics
constitute the air it breathes. This is not as gratuitously
poetic as it sounds. After the inital celebration of the
scratch as both surfacial and rhythmic disruption, the base
ontological self-reflexivity of deliberately making a record
out of other records became less de rigeur and more an a
priori means of simply making music. Hip Hop producers soon
enough focussed their attention not on the vinyl grooves
and surface crackles, but more on the abstracted sensation
of space suggested by the extenuation of sampled and looped
fragments of other recordings. Shades of spatial 'noise'
in 90s Hip Hop tended to aerate many key tracks - initially
via the turntablism of DJs like Terminator X, Eric B and
AfriKa BabyBam, then in later Illbient and Trip Hop waves
on labels like Submeta, Word Sound, MoWax, Ninja Tune and
Pussyfoot. Textures like raspy sax breaths from 50s Jazz
records, ride cymbals from 60s soul records and gritty amplified
ambience from 70s funk records all were layered not for
their events but for the grain of space they conjured in
the listener's mind. Another distinctive trope of modernism
is recalled here, in that just as most of the so-called
Pop artists were in fact hyper formalists dealing with the
abstraction of iconography, Hip Hop producers became engaged
in 'abstrakt' phonography, creating granular landscapes
of pre-recorded and re-assembled materials.
In
early manifestations of Techno from the mid to late 80s,
surface noise and spatial importation was of less concern
than the regimentation, alignment and positioning of fragments
of sound. If Hip Hop is a rendered environment, Techno is
its CAD walk-through: rather than savouring the psycho-acoustic
sensation of place, one is guided through Techno's potential
space. The obsession with the rigorous patterning of fascistic
on-screen sequencing programmes like CuBase and Cakewalk
allowed the marshalling of rhythms to conceptually and musically
dominate and dictate much of Techno's compositional ethos.
Yet just as Hip Hop eventually revealed itself to be a growth
from and beyond the metronomic and the syncopated, Techno
generated complex fractal, molecular and structural intricacies
out of the networking of MIDI quantizing and triggering.
Techno
has specifically pursued this along its own distinctive
lines of abstraction. Whereas Hip Hop suggests the presence
of an idiosyncratic space by importing you into its granular
existence, Techno disorients you with the displacement of
those same sensations. The best way of describing this is
to liken 90's Techno to the sound of music coming from another
room. An acoustic imbalance is struck by certain frequencies
appearing louder or softer than they would in any presumed
norms: the kick is too loud and booming, the snare reduced
to a powdery puff of white noise, the bass riff swallowed
up in a mire of ground swells, melodies composed of distorted
sheets of pitched ambience, and so on. This sensation of
ungainly contorted sono-musical elements recreates the common
effect of identifying the sound of music but disrecognizing
its precise characteristics due to its remove from your
ideal listening perspective. The prime aim of Techno's digital
deconstruction of every facet of the compositional process
is to engulf you with a sonic experience wherein the music
remains elsewhere. This effect can be traced from early
explorations of electronic realignment by Paperclip People,
Ilsa Gold, Luke Slater, Kenny Larkin and Aphex Twin through
to the landmark 'decompositions' of Maurizio, Ryoji Ikeda,
Oval, Montage, Pole and a plethora of artists fleeting between
the glitched borders of the production of dance music and
the realization of electro-acoustic music.
In
the swirling sonar transmissions of shimmering peeled skins
of studio recordings and episodic matrices of the percussive
detritus from drum machines, the elastic morphing between
Hip Hop and Techno has little place for the active recognition
of instruments. Like the hysterical use of factory samples
of arpeggiated grand pianos which hysterically gushed forth
from Milan, Rome and London in mid-80s House, the piano
- one the meta-instrument for the inscription of musical
composition - has truly been reduced to a visual ornament:
baroque in its design and gaudy in its evocation. When it
and other 'real instruments' appear in sample culture, they
yield little in essence, but exude much in presence. The
'real' now exists nowhere in particular. A sample essentially
declares that something happened somewhere else, thus constituting
the sonic nano-machine to generate music less about the
sound of action and more about the sensation of space which
encapsulates that action.
