What's This All About?

Sampling, Remixing and Improvising With Records
Owen Chapman
Montreal, Oct 28th 2009

This website is about sharing and remixing recorded sound. It is also about generating, sharing and remixing discussion. It was created as a (partial) solution to challenges I am facing right now, in attempting to self-publish some of the audio compositions I have built and used in performance, video, intermedia and sound installation contexts over the past 2.5 years.

There are deep interconnections between the concepts of "time" and "music". The relationship draws many people to comment on it--especially when discussing related concepts such as "improvisation", "performance", "recording", "sampling," "programming," "copyright" etc. Such large-scale keywords are hard to define. The longer I research these topics, the more I have found Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of "family resemblances" to apply:

"[W]e see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail. [67] I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities that "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way....[T]he strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres". [Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell 2nd edition, p. 33]

In my mind, playing with other people's records is a form of improvisation, and therefore performance. This is not so much a performance with the original artists recorded as it is an improvised, exploratory performance with a record itself.

This mindset offers a prescription for a way to sample "ethically" -- not the "if you use it, pay for it!" model, but one that should still hopefully come across as fairly obvious. If one is going to sample other peoples' records, one should provide a list of all sources used in order to avoid accusations of thievery. I myself have only just started keeping track while sampling in a way that will allow me to retrace my own steps easily. This is not at all common practice within sample-based musical communities, for a variety of reasons, including fear of legal recrimination. It seems to me that, on the other hand, detailed citation practices should ideally be the norm, in the same way that we expect academics, journalists, non-fiction writers and high school students to provide sources for all points of view used when crafting their own written opinions.

June 11th: I was sitting with audio mastering engineer Harris Newman (Greymarket Mastering, Montreal html://greymarketmastering.com) and we were listening to the works assembled on this album. Every track with the exception of 2 out of 18 feature samples from other people's records, to a greater or lesser extent. I had engaged Harris to "master" the album before releasing these works as a collected whole. I have done this in the past on two other occasions with Harris.

Upon getting midway through the first track Harris turned to me and said something like:

"You know that you might have a hard time finding a place to duplicate this?"

What he was referring to-->even for an independent initiative like releasing 250 CDs of my own sample-based work, I (and any other artist who uses uncleared samples) will run into trouble when trying to contract someone to make copies of such CDs, especially if any "glass master" CD is created in the process that lingers on file. One has to sign a document stating that one has cleared all copyrighted material used on an audio CD, or that all material is original, before any outfit will make multiple physical copies. In the past I have simply signed such documents, assuming that no one was actually going to listen to my music during the pressing and copying process. I was never contacted, and picked up my pressed and shrink wrapped CDs within 2 weeks of dropping off my "master" copy, rife with sampling violations.

Harris knew about all this, of course, but what he added was that clients of his were now finding that staff at CD duplication places were increasingly listening to CDs before making copies and refusing to move ahead with anything obviously sample-based.

So that's what this is all about…. In releasing all this material through the web, being open about my sources and asking for 0$ what I'm offering is a series of earnest musical compliments to the artists I have sampled; compositions built through improvising with their fabulous records.

Bio:
Owen Chapman is an electronic artist who's work ranges from intermedia performance (incorporating original music, video projection and live scratch DJing) to studio-based composition. He is an Assistant Professor in Sound Production and Scholarship in the department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. His written works (incorporating audio and video elements whenever possible) have appeared in such publications as Organised Sound, M/C Journal, and The Canadian Journal of Communication. He recently acted as guest editor of a special "Active Radio" edition of Wi: Journal of Mobile Media (April 2009). His creative work has been commissioned internationally for radio, video, contemporary dance, solo performance and site-specific installation. His research and production projects have been funded by the Canada Council and the Quebec Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC). Chapman's PhD dissertation was the first research-creation project to be successfully defended in his domain in Canada (2007) and was completed through Concordia, UQAM and UdM's Joint PhD Program in Communication. He is a founding member of the Mobile Media Gallery (http://mobilemediagallery.org), based out of the Montreal Mobile Media Lab. Current research topics include the early electronic musical instrument "Les Ondes Martenot," a series of interactive cell phone based audio performances (“Bluetooth Beats”) as well as a sound installation and performance piece featuring amplified icicles ("The Icebreaker").

http://www.opositive.ca