most inventive use of a sample?

The 'connections' are complex - Black Atlantic, sonic (techno/replicant) re-configuration of 'blackness' post Middle Passage ("livin' in my headphones"), the lost motherland (Maxine- quaye) - the postcolonial 'Aftermath'... etc.

There's a lot to be said and has been written about this moment (Penman, Reynolds, Eshun). Probably one of the most significant in pop music I'd argue - simply for been able to tie in together so many strands/concepts so tightly. More PoCo than most theory - pure genius.

for some reason i just thought of that public enemy song that samples 'rebel base' (bass) from a star wars movie... that was public enemy right

I was particularly shocked when I was watching The Matrix again a couple of weeks ago and the love interest says to Neo re Morpheous, "Let me give you a piece of advice: be honest. He knows more than you can imagine" - which is the basis of MRI's stunningly solemn microhouse track "To Be Honest", in which it just seems to refer to something much bigger and broader and more meaningful.... It never occured to me that it would just be a sampled piece of dialogue from a sci-fi film.

Damn! I've been planning to sample that. The Tomita Debussey record is one of the the best Tomita (or 70's synth bloke) records evah. Fucking brilliant record ...

That said, I like the use of Philip Glass and Vangelis on the last, uncredited track on "The Cold Vein".

Mac Dre's "Bonus Track" has a pretty great Joni Mitchell sample going on ("acid booze and ass, needles guns and grass... there is a song for you"). I love it when an unlikely sample works this well in a song.

actually, same man sampled an ice-cream truck. while kind of grating, it's really fun.

As for actual recognizable parts of other people's work, I love the way Orbital used "It's a Fine Day" for "Halcyon".

But the most inventive use of a sample was when Boris Blank of Yello threw a snowball against a window and used the manipulated result to create the drums in "Drive/Driven".

peanut butter wolf used a quincy jones sample for rasco's 'run the line,' that had already been used on a black moon track, but pbw looped it on the offbeat. kinda clever. i think dilla's used the same trick. more of an inventive technique, rather that an inventive re-contextualizing.

rather than

yeah yello - belch breaks, sneezes and such aswell as snowballs.

babyalive, where do I hear this Mac Dre "Bonus Track"?

the jay z song where they cut up the rick james song beyond recognition.

that jay z song is 'kingdom come'

http://youtube.com/watch?v=RSOh-6-rxmE

It really blew my mind when my brother played it for me the first time. How they could get something so exciting out of such a shopworn sample is amazing.

you hear it on The Genie of the Lamp

Disco Inferno? Timbaland using a revving motorbike in that Petey Pablo track?

Timbaland's usage of teh guitar hook from Devo's "Girluwant" in Tweet's "Oops, Oh My".

Geoff Barrows pressing his own demos onto vinyl so that he could scratch them, record and sample the scratches and then integrate these into the same track.

Gotta go for "Between Empathy And Sympathy Is Time (Apartheid)" by Terre Thaemlitz, in which he samples a political speech to go along the melody of Minnie Riperton's "Loving You", with the original backing track used only as a faint echo on the background. That's an incredible piece of sound editing.

sounds similar to a mix i heard years back with MLK's 'I Have A Dream' speech over 'An Ever-Growing Brain...'

Timbaland's usage of teh guitar hook from Devo's "Girluwant" in Tweet's "Oops, Oh My".

-- Alex in NYC, Tuesday, 26 February 2008 13:53 (30 minutes ago) Link

Really? Never thought about this. Could be.

I haven't heard that one, but the genius of the Thamelitz tune is that he makes the speech itself to follow the melody of "Loving You", so it sounds like the speaker is semi-singing, semi-speaking to the tune of the song. I don't know much about sound editing, but that must not be a an easy trick to pull of successively.

(x-post)

Madonna's "hung up" ? ok, sorry...

Most of the Field album, especially the one that uses the Lionel Richie sample.

Herbert Eimert, Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama

That crooner singing about Hookers and Gin at the end of Portishead's Western Eyes is pretty ace.

Tuomas otm. Whenever i tell anyone about that track it sounds so pseudy, but it still wows me every time I hear it.

SFA sampling "Show Biz Kids" to death and turning it into a huge protest anthem.

I don't think ripping a couple of bars out of a song and looping them is very interesting nowadays. I prefer little chopped up samples often only one or two notes each, fucked about with and woven into a track: the way Art of Noise of Todd Edwards did it. A good recent example of this being Jackson and his Computer Band. Simply slinging The Funky Drummer in there just doesn't do for me anymore, sorry.

oh come on when was the last time someone sampled Funky Drummer

I prefer little chopped up samples often only one or two notes each, fucked about with and woven into a track

see this stuff is pretty boring to me, because it completely obliterates any interesting recontextualization of the original. Rather than making the music an interesting dialogue between the present and the past, or reconfiguring something familiar in a new way, it just reduces sample sources to a meaningless series of disconnected noises. the sounds may as well have been generated randomly or with a traditional instrument. the unique thing about sampling is its use of context - if you remove the context you just reduce everything back to an abstracted series of notes.

I mean computers can now generate any audible sound known to man, there's nothing particularly "interesting" about individual sounds anymore. you made something weird sounding = whoopdedoo, no big deal. what computers can't generate is meaning.

Nah...

You can still hear a little flicker of the original song. The timbre, the original production technique, etc...

Also: Unless you're sampling something else, there's no "meaning" to it? Does that mean the song you're sampling had no meaning until you used it in your own tune?

"the sounds may as well have been generated randomly or with a traditional instrument"

Try "randomly" generating sounds on a computer, just sounds like synths.

And if you think Todd Edwards or Art of Noise sound like music played live on "traditional instruments" U CRAZY. Big, looped sample stuff like The Avalanches sounds way closer to a live band. Albeit a very large, eclectic one.

I was just distinguishing between sampling a song and sampling a particular sound (like Geir's "snowball hitting the window" Yello sample ref'd upthread). A song has all kinds of meanings built into it. A snowball hitting a window's going to be fairly unidentifiable and the sound will be devoid of context (unless you happen to read somewhere about the story behind the sample).

x-post

"Ridin' Spinners," when 3-6 chop up the "he once was a thug from around the way" intro from "Eazy-Duz-It."

I agree with Bodrick. I chop up samples into new songs all the time, and the source material is always identifiable if put together in a completly new way. You can tell its the Beatles on the grey album even if the drums and bass and guitar aren't in 4 second loops.

identifiability is the key, that's all I'm sayin

I'm distinguishing between "OMG I know that song" and getting the strange sensation from sounds from different eras and genres sliced and diced together each retaining some character from the original source without being too obvious.

xxxpost

I think you are both right.

I mean I think that some samples work by being culturally resonant while other work by basically being texture or instrumental (or taking the place of instrumentation.) And both can be inventive and interesting in their own ways. Public Enemy doesn't have more of a monopoly on that than Todd Edwards does.

That "Kingdom Come" flip is excellent, and I still can't tell where "PYT" is in Kanye's "The Good Life." Serge Gainsbourg's "Bonnie and Clyde" in a song on Kylie Minogue's new album was pretty cool.

"I mean I think that some samples work by being culturally resonant while other work by basically being texture or instrumental (or taking the place of instrumentation.) And both can be inventive and interesting in their own ways. Public Enemy doesn't have more of a monopoly on that than Todd Edwards does.

-- Alex in SF"

some can be both at the same time!

i think the best sampler masterpiece thus far has been Dilla's Donuts, though there are obviously quite a large number of great sample uses. i agree that recognizability should rank high in determining this, otherwise it could be anything.

I'm still getting over the last minute of "The Grass is Always Greener".

oh and the might answer might be john oswald either with plunderphonics or his layering of a million grateful dead guitar solos.

I'm still getting over the last minute of "The Grass is Always Greener".

was just gonna say this, the pitched down bob ross bits as well. stunning piece of music.

I don't think I can take the time to read this whole thread but I hope that Edan's Beauty and the Beat is mentioned somewhere.

no

the multi part sample bridge that formed the chorus for Age of Chances Take It! still sounds ace in my world.
the fact that the samples hang together so well makes it all the more delicious, it wasn't until Geoff from the band told me as until then, I never even realised that the chorus was built from samples despite knowing each individual component.

i think the best sampler masterpiece thus far has been Dilla's Donuts, though there are obviously quite a large number of great sample uses. i agree that recognizability should rank high in determining this, otherwise it could be anything.

-- pipecock, Tuesday, February 26, 2008 6:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

cult

matmos deserve props on this thread but that'll just the definition of sampling on this thread even further

*just confuse

3rd Bass sampled Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" for their "Pop Goes the Weasel" and used it as an audio pun to slyly suggest that the song was a slam against MC Hammer.

amazingly there has not been one mention of de le soul on this thread.

ok.
dug out details of the aforementioned take it! sample based chorus.

"The ‘Why doncha take it’ parts are from ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ from David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ album.
The guitar-chord is from Tommy Gun by The Clash.
The bit just prior to that is a synth sample from Van Halen's 'Why can't This be Love?' The spoken-word ‘Take It’ phrases are what most people mistook to be Ronald Reagan’s voice.
In fact they’re from a spoken word album that once, belonged to Steve’s dad, called ‘Cashing Objections’.

The album was basically a recorded lecture on sales-techniques.
We sampled from that on numerous occasions, notably to introduce each of the four tracks we did on our first John Peel radio session."

naturally, i reckon this still sounds excellent.

Morrissey - Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils (Shostakovich's 5th Symphony (Op. 47) 1st Movement)

this is pretty nice