I’ve been working for most of the last year on a record with a friend. It’s hip-hop if hip-hop is an abstract machine, an operation — sampling, collage, the grid. We’ve done just what everyone else has done — performed that operation to the music we love, and shaped it around his fantastic lyrics. I talk about it like its a silly just-for-fun project, but I’m secretly as proud and excited about it as can be.
I like working with samples because they never quite fit. When I’m writing music at the page, its easy to make a phrase fit the meter, peak where it should, interact harmonically the way I want etc. It’s extra trouble not to. Working with samples is the opposite. They never behave exactly like I want them to, and so they demand solutions that stretch me. My job isn’t to Express Myself; it is to make compromises, compute optima, lots of slight-of-hand. I like that much better.
It’s of course naive of me to say writing at the page is easy. But it’s only hard (and only good) insofar as I work with the same attitude: first, freely welcome irreconcilable elements, and then struggle for an acceptable solution. Irreconcilables are the bootstraps by which we transcend.
Sampling
August 3, 2007I’ve been working for most of the last year on a record with a friend. It’s hip-hop if hip-hop is an abstract machine, an operation — sampling, collage, the grid. We’ve done just what everyone else has done — performed that operation to the music we love, and shaped it around his fantastic lyrics. I talk about it like its a silly just-for-fun project, but I’m secretly as proud and excited about it as can be.
I like working with samples because they never quite fit. When I’m writing music at the page, its easy to make a phrase fit the meter, peak where it should, interact harmonically the way I want etc. It’s extra trouble not to. Working with samples is the opposite. They never behave exactly like I want them to, and so they demand solutions that stretch me. My job isn’t to Express Myself; it is to make compromises, compute optima, lots of slight-of-hand. I like that much better.
It’s of course naive of me to say writing at the page is easy. But it’s only hard (and only good) insofar as I work with the same attitude: first, freely welcome irreconcilable elements, and then struggle for an acceptable solution. Irreconcilables are the bootstraps by which we transcend.