The fundamental unit of electronic popular music is the loop. This puts it at odds with the Western art music tradition, which typically favors linear structures with a narrative arc. Repetition has mostly appeared in classical music at the macro level of phrases and sections. While shorter repetitive cells do appear in classical music, they are not always welcome. The term ostinato, from the Italian “obstinate,” does not connote approval. Popular music (and some minimalist classical) of the twentieth century has been significantly more repetitive, deriving its harmony from western Europe but its rhythms and circular loop-based structures from Africa and the Caribbean. The advent of synthesizers, drum machines and computers has strongly encouraged the trend toward cyclic repetition, since the default output of such devices is the endless loop.

Björk produced relatively conventional dance music early in her solo career, but her use of loops has become more sophisticated and complex over the course of her career. Her 2004 album Medúlla is comprised entirely from vocals, aside from the occasional synthesizer. Some of the songs are traditional songs and choral works, but most are built from vocals that have been heavily edited, sampled and looped in Pro Tools.

Malawey’s article analyzes three songs from Medúlla in depth: “Öll Birtan,” “Who Is It” and “Triumph of a Heart.” Malawey is primarily interested in the circularity of these songs’ chord progressions. She explains their two-chord or one-chord structures as creating a sense of oscillation or stasis, rather than the source-path-destination schema of western classical tradition. While Björk’s harmonies are colorful, they are hardly groundbreaking. What makes Malawey’s analysis valuable for my purposes is that her vocabulary for harmonic analysis is also applicable to the sonic and emotional quality of looped samples.

“Öll Birtan” is built from layers of Björk’s voice singing highly repetitive figures on a single mixolydian scale. There is no beat per se, but there is an implicit pulse. The piece is less a pop song, and more an art piece reminiscent of Steve Reich. “Who Is It” and “Triumph of a Heart” are closer to dance music convention in form, but they use sampled beatboxing and mouth sounds in place of drum machines and breakbeats. Similarly, sampled vocal tones fill the role of basslines and keyboards. These videos use different mixes than the ones on the album, but they’re so delightful you should watch them anyway.

Malaway’s central thesis is that harmonic stasis creates a feeling of timelessness. She quotes Kofi Agawu:

Repetition enables and stabilizes; it facilitates adventure while guaranteeing, not the outcomes as such, but the meaningfulness of adventure. If repetition of a harmonic progression seventy-five times can keep listeners and dancers interested, then there is a power to repetition that suggests not mindlessness or a false sense of security (as some critics have proposed) but a fascination with grounded musical adventures. Repetition, in short, is the lifeblood of music.

Despite the fact that Agawu is dealing primarily with repetition in African music, much of what he says in this passage applies directly to all kinds of music that are based in repetitive processes. Furthermore, his quote explains the appeal of the more literal sonic repetition of looped samples.

When you listen to repetitive music, time is progressing in its usual linear way, but the cyclic sounds evoke timelessness and eternity. Malawey describes harmonic ostinatos as having a feeling of alternating repose and tension. I’ve found this to be true of looped samples as well; the first and third repetitions will have a “call” feeling that is “answered” by repetitions two and four. The continuing reversal of call and response, of front and back halves of a phrase, can evoke other image schemas as well. Malawey lists swinging, fluttering, quivering, jiggling, hovering and flickering as appropriate image schemas for repetitive music.

In other songs not discussed by Malawey, the feeling of stasis brought on by sampled vocals is even more prominent. The atmospheric haze that dominates “Desired Constellation” was created from a sample of Björk singing the phrase “I’m not sure what to do with it” from “Hidden Place” on her previous album, Vespertine. The vocal loop that opens “Mouth’s Cradle” is so severely processed as to be unrecognizable as a voice; it sounds more like a synthesizer sequenced using MIDI, and the bass notes are pitch-shifted to an unearthly depth. Together with the animalistic backing vocals forming the “percussion,” the collective effect is otherworldly.

Malawey does point out the connection between Björk’s radically simple chord progressions and her unearthly timbres. “[N]on-teleological harmonic processes make room for the vocal textures to carry the music forward.” By building a predictable musical foundation under her sonic experiments, Björk leaves the listener with enough attentional bandwidth to absorb the complexities of her vocal manipulation and looping. The familiarity of the voice combined with the “future shock” of radical digital editing challenges the listener, but the repetition makes the challenge a surmountable one, eventually leading to deep musical gratification.

Update: this post is featured on Synthtopia’s Facebook wall, and there’s a lively discussion happening over there. Check it out!

While Girl Talk tracks have way too much information in them for my tastes, I could easily imagine having a rich musical life just unpacking their possibilities. Pop-oriented hip-hop over thrash metal! Gangsta rap over buttery piano ballads! Mixing prog and teeny bopper pop and classic rock! Teasing out the ideas suggested in these pairings could launch a thousand bands. In my own life as a musician, mashups have been the richest source of inspiration imaginable. Girl Talk lights the way with his fearless transgression of all boundaries of taste and style and copyright; it’s up to older and mellower musicians like me to pick up all the loose and tangled threads and knit them into something a little more coherent and structured.

Mashups by ethanhein

Why do some people like Girl Talk?

It’s on my mind because Dangerous Minds posted the isolated tracks, and they’re a lot of fun. It’s fascinating to hear the separated vocals, guitars, bass and drums. The Youtube videos containing the tracks were swiftly taken down by the Stones’ lawyers, of course, but as of this writing you can still download the stems in multitrack Ogg format. You can open and edit the Oggs in Audacity, and export pieces in other formats.

Whenever a guy like me hears “isolated tracks” I know it’s remix time. So here are some samples from “Gimme Shelter” along with various other sounds, enjoy.

Rock With Shelter

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson

mp3 download, ipod format download

Shelter Guitar

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson vs Glen Velez vs Britney Spears vs Charles Mingus

mp3 download, ipod format download

There’s such a business opportunity with these kinds of isolated tracks. I haven’t bought too many recordings lately, but I’d happily plunk down money for easily-remixable stems, especially if they came pre-sliced in Recycle format. I doubt the Stones would be interested in selling such a thing, since they have plenty of money already, but I could see this being a great revenue stream for younger, hungrier bands. A big part of the reason people like music-based video games is that they get you inside familiar songs in a new way — you’re focused on the guitar or bass in a way that casual listeners rarely do. I could see the Guitar Hero generation eagerly embracing a simplified version of Ableton Live or Reason.

Anyway, “Gimme Shelter.” The female vocalist on the track is Merry Clayton, and she kills it. Aside from this song, she’s had a colorful career. She’s sung on various movie soundtracks, and did backing vocals on songs as diverse as “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos. During her solo verse on “Gimme Shelter,” her voice cracks on the word “shot” from the last line, and then again on the word “murder.” That’s the kind of total emotional commitment that grabs the listener hard. On the isolated vocal you can clearly hear Mick give an appreciative “Yeah!”

The isolated tracks highlight how sloppy the Stones were even at their absolute best. The Dangerous Minds post describes Charlie Watts as sounding like “a human metronome here.” This is completely wrong. I put those drums on the grid and can assure you that Charlie Watts’ time is all over the place. So are the rest of the Stones. That’s the point. Sloppy chic runs directly counter to the musical sensibilities of the digital audio era. I sincerely doubt that any producer would permit such raggedy playing onto a commercial release in this day and age.

I’m no big lover of willful sloppiness. The Stones’ superficial casualness on their best stuff is underpinned by a very disciplined sense of groove and restraint. Later in their career, they got genuinely careless, and that’s when they started sucking. It’s a fine line between insouciant confidence and plain indifference. On “Gimme Shelter” the Stones walk that line perfectly.

Mick Jagger is amusing and everything, but Keith Richards is the Stones’ main point of musical interest for me. He plays simple, well-worn cliches, but he has a totally distinctive touch and approach that keeps his licks fresh all these decades later. Keef gets some of his signature sound from an unusual guitar tuning. He tunes to open G, which is common enough for slide players, but then he takes the low E string off, so he’s left with D G D B D. (On “Gimme Shelter” he has a capo on the second fret.) If you’re a guitarist, try it sometime, it’s fun. Here’s a detailed guide to Keef-style guitar.

Keef supports my assertion that songwriting is not about having original ideas; it’s about recombining existing ideas. When asked about his songwriting by Guitar World, here’s what he said:

Personally, I don’t consider that you create or write anything. The best way to think about it, for me anyway, is that you’re an antenna. I sit down at an instrument-guitar, piano, bass or whatever-and play somebody else’s songs. And usually within 20 minutes, more or less, suddenly something’s coming. And that’s when the antenna goes up. [He wets his finger and raises it in the air.] Incoming! So you get this sort of gift. You work it up a bit and then transmit it. The idea that “I wrote that,” or “I created that” is an overblown artistic sort of thing that people love to put on writing songs. It can screw you up. If you think that it’s all down to you, you’ve got another thing coming.

Words to live by. Too bad the Stones lawyers are so sampling-unfriendly. If Keef was a young up-and-comer right now I bet he would skip the imitation of his blues heroes and just sample them directly.

It’s hard for us now to imagine a time when recorded sound was a wondrous technological novelty.

Those gathered around the phonograph were experiencing music in ways unimaginable not so many years before. They were hearing performers they could not see and music they could not normally bring into their homes. They could listen to the same pieces over and again without change. And they ultimately decided what they were to hear, and when, where, and with whom.

Before the phonograph, music was an intrinsically social activity. The only way to hear it was to be in the physical presence of the performers, necessarily placing the experience into a strong social context. Recordings suddenly divorced the sounds from their original context. Now that recordings flit effortlessly to and fro on the web, the original context of their making is even further removed, and often not even recoverable. Katz gives the usual Walter Benjamin quote about how reproduction of art destroys its aura.

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art,” [Benjamin] maintained, “is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Reproductions, therefore, lack what Benjamin called the “aura” of the artwork. From Benjamin’s standpoint this absence is to be lamented. He speaks of the withering of the aura, the depreciation of the artwork, the loss of authenticity, and the shattering of tradition. Benjamin, however, missed half of the equation. True, mass-reproduced art does lack temporal and physical uniqueness, yet reproductions, no longer bound to the circumstances of their creation, may encourage new experiences and generate new traditions, wherever they happen to be… [W]hile recorded music is often decoupled from its origins in space and time, this “loss” begets a contextual promiscuity that allows music to accrue new, rich, and unexpected meanings.

All this freedom can be disorienting. It’s particularly weird to not be able to see the performers’ faces and bodies. Katz ascribes the popularity of music videos to our discomfort with the lack of visual emotional cues in recordings. The problem is that the videos have so little to do with actual music making that they usually contribute to the alienation. The found videos in Auto-tune The News have an authenticity to them that traditional music videos don’t. The Auto-tune on Antoine Dodson’s voice might be fake, but the anger in his face is very real.

When musicians record, their invisibility to listeners removes an important channel of communication, for performers express themselves not only through the sound of their voices or instruments but with their faces and bodies. In concert, these gestures color the audience’s understanding of the music. As Igor Stravinsky rightly explained, “The sight of the gestures and movements of the various parts of the body producing the music is fundamentally necessary if it is to be grasped in all its fullness.” The violinist Itzhak Perlman, for example, is effective in concert in part because his face registers and reinforces every expressive nuance in the music. Perlman himself once remarked that “people only half listen to you when you play—the other half is watching.”

Recording artists have also reacted to the fact that they cannot see their audiences. For many, the task of performing to unseen listeners, with recording equipment as their proxy, can be both daunting and depressing. In her memoirs, French soprano Régine Crespin registered her dismay at the artificiality of performing in the studio:

“Fear of an audience is healthy; it stimulates you. The people are there in front of you. With them there can be mutual lovefests. But how can you fall in love with a microphone? First of all, a microphone is ugly. It’s a cold, steel, impersonal thing, suspended above your head or resting on a pole just in front of your nose. And it defies you, like HAL the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, although at least he talked. No, the microphone waits, unpitying, insensitive and ultrasensitive at the same time, and when it speaks, it’s to repeat everything you’ve said word for word. The beast.”

Recordings have created the possibility that a musical experience can be exactly repeated.

Live performances are unique, while recordings are repeatable… [A]ny orchestra can play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony many times; each performance, however, will necessarily be different.

For listeners, repetition raises expectations. This is true in live performance; once we’ve heard Beethoven’s Fifth in concert, we assume it will start with the same famous four notes the next time we hear it. But with recordings, we can also come to expect features that are unique to a particular performance—that a certain note will be out of tune, say. With sufficient repetition, listeners may normalize interpretive features of a performance or even mistakes, regarding them as integral not only to the performance but to the music. In other words, listeners may come to think of an interpretation as the work itself.

The repeatability of recorded sound has affected listeners’ expectations on a much broader scope as well. When the phonograph was invented, the goal for any recording was to simulate a live performance, to approach reality as closely as possible. Over the decades, expectations have changed. For many—perhaps most—listeners, music is now primarily a technologically mediated experience. Concerts must therefore live up to recordings. Given that live music had for millennia been the only type of music, it is amazing to see how quickly it has been supplanted as model and ideal.

I’ve played in a lot of bands, and one of the biggest obstacles they all faced was that most of the time, people would prefer to hear recordings than to hear us play. I’ve backed some very good jazz singers, but why would you want to listen to them when you could hear Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald? Live music is an invaluable art experience but if you just want to dance or be entertained, DJs beat bands nine times out of ten.

A lot of musicians I know would read the previous paragraph and bitterly remark on the harm that recording has done to musical culture. Maybe they’re right, but recordings have given us a lot too. I think that the experience of repeat listening to recordings has made Western listeners more accepting of repetition as a feature of the music itself. Westerners have historically resisted the loop-based, chant-oriented forms in other world cultures. But American popular music has been getting more and more loop-based, especially in my lifetime. Tape loops and samplers have both created the tools to make loop-based recordings, and fueled the demand for them.

Recording has changed music education radically, putting improvisation and other non-notated forms on an equal scholarly footings with written scores.

With recordings, performers can study, emulate, or imitate performances in a way never before possible. In the early days of recording, this possibility was trumpeted as a gift to all musicians, who could learn from the world’s great masters by studying their discs. For performers of popular music, recordings have been especially valuable learning aids. The available scores do not always represent performances adequately, and they cannot easily indicate the timbres and sonic effects that musicians seek to develop.

Audio editing tools also make it possible to build recordings without an actual “performance” ever taking place.

Listen to most early-twentieth-century recordings and you will hear a performance in the traditional sense. That is, you are hearing a single and complete take, in which the beginning, middle, and end of the piece were recorded in that order on the same day, in the same place, and by the same performer or group. This was hardly out of a desire for authenticity; it was a product of necessity. However, since the introduction of magnetic tape (in the late 1940s) and digital recording (in the late 1970s), it has been possible to offer the illusion of a traditional performance as well as to create “performances” that could never have existed. With the ability to manipulate sound through such technology, musicians have been able to transcend time, space, and human limitations, and in the process have created wholly new sounds, works, genres, and performance traditions.

One of the most basic manipulations is splicing, in which passages recorded at different times are joined together. The Beatles’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967) provides a famous example. The Beatles did over two dozen takes of the song, none of which completely satisfied John Lennon. But he did like the first half of Take 7 and the second half of Take 26. So he asked George Martin, their producer, to put the two together. Unfortunately, they were in different keys and tempos. The two takes, however, were related in such a way that when one was sped up and the other slowed down so that the tempos matched, the pitches also matched. Thus the two takes could be joined, the splice occurring at about 0:59 on the word going in “Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields.” Although the splice is nearly undetectable, the slightly altered speed of Lennon’s voice helps give the song its distinctively dreamlike quality.

You can build recordings entirely from samples, synthesized and sequenced sounds and jamming. It’s common in pop, dance music and hip-hop to go into the studio with no prepared material at all, and come out with finished songs. Songwriting, improvising and recording have collapsed into a single act.

The job of assembling an electronically-oriented recording is a new form of musicianship unto itself.

It is important to realize that sound is manipulated in the studio not (or not typically) by performers, but by a variety of sound engineers and producers, sometimes referred to collectively as recordists. Recordists fall outside (or perhaps in between) the traditional triad of composer, performer, and listener. They might be thought of as sound shapers, artists in their own right who collaborate with performers and composers.

[T]he very possibility of manipulating sound after its creation—from splicing to digital pitch correction—forces us to reformulate our ideas about composition, performance, and the relationship between the two.

[R]ecording does more than influence the activities of composers, performers, and listeners. It affects the relationship among these actors and in fact challenges the stability, even the validity, of the triad. It is no longer necessary for listeners and performers, or for performers and composers, to work together in order to create music. Yet at the same time, listeners and composers have discovered a more intimate relationship, one that can bypass the mediation of performers, while performers can work in solitude, without the need to stand before listeners. Performances and works are no longer clearly distinct, for recordings can take on the function and meaning of both. Just as recordings can be heard as spontaneous interpretive acts, their repetition can transform them into compositions, works that can be analyzed, historicized, canonized, politicized, and problematized. Nor are production and reproduction so easily separated when preexisting sounds can be manipulated in real time.

A lot to think about. But not everything in the book is so serious. From the introduction:

Several years ago a friend asked me to explain the subject of this book, then in its early stages of development. Opting for a dramatic approach, I pulled a CD at random from a nearby shelf and brandished it in front of me. “This,” I declared, “has changed the way we listen to, perform, and compose music.” My friend squinted at the CD, gave me a quizzical look, and asked, “That did?” “Yes!” I answered with gusto. Seeming unconvinced, he clarified his question. “Van Halen changed the way we listen to, perform, and compose music?”

Yes, yes they did.

I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.

Recording to a single-track tape from a single mic was the only way to record music until 1955. In the single-track era, music was recorded more or less the same way it was performed for an audience. There was a single mic in the middle of the room, and everybody played into it simultaneously. The only “mixing” was done by placing quieter instruments closer to the mic and louder ones further away. Recording as an art form unto itself came into being with the invention of multitrack tape, which made it possible to record different sounds non-simultaneously.

Multitrack is an enormously big deal for recorded music. It enables you to capture ideal performances more easily, since you record each voice or instrument in isolation from the others. An error on one track can be fixed while leaving the others intact. Multitrack also opened the door for mixing, since you can manipulate the volume and tone of each sound independently of the others. This might not seem like such a big deal, but that’s because we’re all so used to spectacularly high-tech sculpting of sound. When I listen to old jazz records, the bass is a vague muffled presence buried in the murk of the low end. It took until the sixties for recording engineers to really figure out how to make the bass jump out of the speakers; now we take for granted that it’ll be as crisp and defined as any other sound.

Even with all the flexibility it offers, tape recording is still relatively unforgiving. I recorded a few songs on tape with my first band in college. Correcting mistakes was tedious and took considerable skill and timing on the engineer’s part.

Since 1997 or so, everything I’ve recorded has been on the computer. There are some pros and cons. The major con is sound quality. Tape is analog. The waveforms it captures are infinitely smooth and continuous. By converting the continuous electrical signal from the microphones or instruments into digital files, you necessarily sacrifice some signal quality.

So that’s the bad news. For me, and for most recording musicians at this point, the good news enormously outweighs the bad news. Digital recording is cheap and constantly getting cheaper. Good quality audio tape is expensive; hard drive space costs next to nothing. A computer costs a heck of a lot less than a decent tape recording console and you can use it for other purposes. But cost is only the tip of the iceberg. The really big deal with the computer is that it visualizes music, turning it into screen objects that you can drag, drop and otherwise manipulate the same way you’d manipulate words in a word processing document. For a visual thinker like me, this is a transformative and revelatory change. It’s radically easier to do complex edits on the computer screen than keeping track of a bunch of pieces of identical-looking tape.

The other big deal about digital audio is perfect copying fidelity and endless editing. Every time you copy a tape, the sound quality degrades a little. Also, as tape ages, it chemically degrades. Digital audio files are highly robust. They’re just long lists of numbers, so you can copy them flawlessly and endlessly across any data storage medium. You can edit digital audio non-destructively, so you can try out ideas to your heart’s content without ever harming or losing your original tracks. Digital audio is also nice and portable. You can lay down basic tracks in your basement, overdub more sounds in someone else’s bedroom and then mix and master in a million dollar studio. And while there’s no undo with tape overdubs, you can effectively undo anything you do on the computer.

Music is intellectually a lot easier than it looks. The big challenge for me, and for most would-be musicians I encounter, is anxiety. We have a crippling fear of being judged, and when we’re doing a recording, the panel of potential judges is enormous. Digital recording has done a lot to reduce my anxiety in front of the microphone. Knowing that nothing is carved in marble takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m much likelier to lay down a perfect take or a cool new idea if I’m feeling relaxed, and recording in my apartment on a computer is as relaxing as it gets.

I’ve been recording an acoustic singer-songwriter’s album for the past year. Aside from the vocals and guitar, everything on the album is fake: the bass, the drums, the percussion and keyboards. The vocals and guitar are processed using Auto-tune, digital EQ and reverb and compression, and various other tricks. The “performances” are stitched together from many different takes, with sections repeated and individual notes corrected for timing and volume and decay. None of these techniques are unusual in the age of computer recording. Some people feel that the computer is harming musicianship by making it so easy to sculpt a flawless performance. My feeling is that the computer just shifts the locus of creative work from the original performance to the editing process.

After doing enough of my own projects using the full digital toolkit, I started questioning the wisdom of recording instrumental performances at all, when it’s so much easier to use sampling and synthesis. The turning point came while working with a soul/R&B band called Love Child. The singer and I were writing and arranging songs using samples, drum machines and all the other hip-hop tools. We gave these tracks to the band to teach them the parts. I made charts too, but the tracks were better for conveying the vibe and nuance we were after. We had a bunch of ace musicians in the band, but they never sounded as good as our sample-based tracks. We’d meticulously sequence a bassline, and then the bassist wouldn’t play it exactly. He’d do variations and little improvs, the usual embellishments that musicians add almost unconsciously. The problem wasn’t his ideas, they were all good. The problem was that by straying away from the extremely sparse parts we were writing, he was deflating the tension, turning our hip-hop feel into a generic-sounding funk.

So it went with all the musicians. Also, it was a logistical nightmare getting everyone together, and it cost a fortune. Eventually we asked ourselves, why are we doing this? The songs sound better on the laptop, why don’t we just commit ourselves to life in electronic world? So we started doing gigs with just the laptop and singers, and it sounded terrific. I feel bad for contributing to the rapid drying up of gigs all musicians are facing in the computer era. But meanwhile, we were going for a sound, and the human beings weren’t giving it to us.

Samples and loops give you a lot of freedom. They also carry their own constraints. When you use, say, two bars of a Miles Davis tune in a particular scale with particular chords to a particular beat played on particular instruments, that forces you to fit the rest of your musical elements to fit. This constraint is a stupendously valuable songwriting tool. Repeating the loop identically is easy and varying it is hard. So by default, sample-based music uses a lot of repetition, and you have to justify each variation because it takes so much more effort than another copy and paste. You’d think this would be true with live musicians too, but it’s not. Getting a band to play a loop without variation is just about impossible. I’ve tried many times, everyone gets bored or feels the need to express themselves. We in the western musical tradition undervalue repetition, and having the computer encourage it has improved my writing and arranging enormously.

Sampling is such a useful framework for structuring musical ideas, now I take a sampling approach to live recordings of instruments whenever I can. If I’m doing a rock track with Barbara Singer, we’ll record a take of her flailing freely away at the guitar over a beat, and then find the best bar or two and loop them. If we need a variation or another section, we’ll use the second-best bar or two, and maybe the third. The less material we use, the better it sounds.

In the future I would wish for a more porous barrier between the recording artist and the listener. It’s been a bottomless source of pleasure for me to remix and mash up other people’s recordings. With all due respect to my fellow musicians, I know what I like better than they do. For the vast majority of recordings I have, I’d rather hear the key musical ideas repeated identically in groups of four or eight over hip-hop beats. If recording artists don’t want to oblige me by structuring stuff that way, I can just edit their music to suit myself. It would be a lot easier to do this if I had access to the individual tracks. A few, very few, artists release tracks with the stems separated out. I wish for the day when it’s standard practice.

Update: for hilarious insight into the process of making a top ten hit in 1988, don’t miss the KLF’s Manual.

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

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Part five:

Part six:

Steve Albini says that sampling is cheap and easy. He’s right about that. Anyone with a computer and a few pieces of inexpensive software can do it. Mr Albini also thinks people should be “embarrassed by sampling, like a bad dance move.” It’s a funny analogy, because while I like the albums he’s produced for the most part, they aren’t dance friendly. Pick any song that you’ve danced socially to in the past thirty years and the odds are high that it was produced electronically.

Anyway, in response to the charge that sampling is cheap and easy, why is that a bad thing? George Clinton points out that rock and roll was originally all about cheap and easy: three chords, repetitive beats and structures, singable choruses. Now, rock music is expensive and difficult, and thanks to people like Radiohead, every bit as technically inaccessible as jazz or classical. This is why rock has mostly become every bit as lame as jazz or classical. Making an art form expensive and inaccessible makes it elitist and conservative. The big artistic risks are mostly being taken by the electronic musicians, not the guitar tribe.

The documentary makes the intriguing analogy between DJs and photographers. DJs are to traditional instrumentalists as photographers are to painters. You can’t make blanket statements about the validity of the entire medium; you need to go on a case-by-case basis. DJs and photographers have a lower barrier to entry than cellists or painters but the path to mastery is every bit as long.

We’ve become accustomed to lavish production values in our recorded music, and that comes at a steep price tag if you want live instruments and analog tape. The expensiveness of lavish, dense live recordings forces conservative choices. The effortlessness of sampling leads to more risk taking, more experimentation, more innovation. Also more amateurish nonsense, but that’s the nature of the beast. A low penalty for failure is a necessary precondition for success.

Even if money is no object, there are still some strong artistic arguments in favor of sample-based music. The loop is different from a human playing a phrase over and over. I used to play in an R&B group. The singer and I wrote the songs with samples and loops and then taught them to the band. We had a Miles Davis sample that the trumpet player was supposed to use for his part. He played it pretty accurately, but never with the exact phrasing, tape compression and ambiance of the original loop, and it never quite sounded as good. It was cool that he could riff and improvise, but it gave us a looser, jazzier sound than we were going for. The identical repetition effects you to hypnotic effect. Check out the squealing trumpet sample under Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe The Hype” – even James Brown couldn’t have that disciplined a horn player, not with all that insane noise swirling around. Humans get bored and distracted, they have opinions. Computers don’t. What if James Brown and band had been necessary to appear in person in order to create “Fight The Power”, and they had refused? What a loss.

The entertainment lawyer in the movie equates my sampling your song to me coming into your house, helping myself to the food in your fridge. Sampling might recontextualize old recordings in ways their creators find offensive, but very often sampled works add something of benefit to old recordings’ cultural standing. I’m thinking of all those classic seventies funk and disco songs with incredible beats but outdated lyrics and arrangements. George Clinton is outspokenly grateful to hip-hop producers for putting him back on the map, culturally and then commercially.

Meanwhile, the law is a serious obstacle. Clearing all samples in advance is crushing to the creative process, which depends on immediacy and spontaneity. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to get a license to perform or record a full cover of a song than it is to get the rights to a three second sample. Some copyright holders are laid back or indifferent, but some charge extortionate license fees. Erick Sermon had to pay Marvin Gaye’s estate a hundred thousand dollars for a sample clearance. Unless you’re a major pop star with serious backing, this is prohibitive, and we’re back to the conservatism imposed by high costs that plagues instrumental music.

Clyde Stubblefield’s reaction on first hearing how widely he was sampled: “Cool!” But he’s bitter about not getting credited. He’s not as upset about not getting royalties, maybe because he wasn’t getting those before sampling either – James Brown owns all the copyrights to “The Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat” and so on. Public Enemy explains they have to be secretive about their sources to not get sued. A healthier sampling culture would make it easy to use samples and encourage attribution and reasonable payments.

Sampling artists like to use the phrase “fair game” – I’ve used it myself to describe the contents of my iTunes library, and some of the musicians in Copyright Criminals use it too. What’s fair game? Depends. The Beatles are notoriously litigious copyright holders, but they themselves use unauthorized samples in “Revolution 9″, “I Am The Walrus” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” I’m hopeful that as sampling moves from the fringe into the mainstream, the law will eventually catch up and the absurdities will iron themselves out.

Update: this post and another of mine are quoted in a Brands Plus Music post about the impact computers are having on music making. It’s a good one, thought-provoking, worth a read.

DJ Earworm does a yearly mashup combining the entire Billboard Top 25 songs of that year. Here’s his, and America’s, offering for 2009. I like it.

Full sampling/remixing post in the works. (Update: here it is.) Until then, meditating on these. Kevin Kelly says in a New York Times article about video mashups:

[T]he habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases.

I find this to be equally true of music-making, not just of the electronic kind, but of any kind.

Iceland

Björk famously is from Iceland. She did for her homeland what the Beatles did for Liverpool — she put her country on the hipster map forever. Anna and I were lucky enough to get to go, and we’re looking forward to hopefully going back. It’s an easy place to be an American tourist. Almost everyone speaks English with a BBC inflection, except one guy who did a flawless California surfer dude. The accent is a little otherworldly — all the r’s are rolled, even the ones in the middle of words.

Icelandic shares a common ancestor with English in the not very distant past. Two languages are alike in a few weirdly specific ways. Icelandic and English are unusual for both using the th sound. Icelandic has two different letters of the alphabet devoted to it: one voiced, as in that, the other unvoiced, as in thing. Tolkien’s Elvish is partially based on Icelandic, thus mithrandir and mithril and way Sir Ian McKellan rolled the r’s in Sauron and Mordor. Mirkwood comes from mirk, the Icelandic word for forest. So outside Reykjavik is Thorsmirk, Thor’s Forest. I was in nerd heaven with the road signs.

They wanted to shoot Lord Of The Rings in Iceland but it was going to be too expensive. It would be a perfect spot to shoot science fiction if money were no object. Iceland has volcanos and glaciers and black cliffs looming over black sand beaches with puffins circling over them. There are places where superheated steam just shoots out of the ground with jet engine force. There are earthquakes and landslides and occasional catastrophic eruptions. We went by a restaurant that bakes bread by burying it three feet underground and leaving it there for a few hours. The middle of the country is like Yellowstone if it was on the moon.

Björk and sampling

Björk has access to the same popular culture as any European with a music background, but she’s viewing it through this peculiar cultural lens. Nobody interprets the computer music they play in clubs and at raves quite like Björk does. She comes from classical training, so she mostly writes on the keyboard. But she uses samples too, or at least her producers and collaborators do. They choose their samples well. Here’s one of her first big hits, “Human Behavior,” produced by Nellee Hooper.

Here’s a mashup I did of the Quincy Jones/Ray Brown tune, every version of “Human Behaviour” I have, and a hip-hop track by Heiroglyphics:

Human Behaviour Megamix by ethanhein

Samplers and remixers love Björk. Here’s my favorite usage of a Björk sample, in the remix of “Hit ‘Em Wit Da Hee” by Missy Elliot and Timbaland. At the end it uses the cello part from “Jóga.”

Here’s a diagram of all of Björk’s samples and quotations. Click to see it bigger.

Björk and remixing

Almost every Björk tune is a remix of a remix right out of the box. The tracks she releases are wildly different from what she works out on the keyboard or on paper. She and her producers use Pro Tools to merge composition, notation, performance and recording together, the way Brian Eno does with tape recorders.

Once everything is all gridded out in the audio editor, it’s easy to do alternate mixes and versions. You can toss chunks of audio in and out of the grid effortlessly, so you can do radical remixing just by muting and unmuting a few tracks. Björk has released quite a lot of these alternative versions officially. Every single she puts out is backed by three or four remixes. She’s put out entire albums and compilations of them, like Telegram, which is mostly remixes of the tracks on Post.

Björk naturally takes a relaxed attitude toward unauthorized remixes, and has managed to convince her label and management to be cool about them too. As a result, the internet is loaded with Björk fan music. There are web sites like bjorkremixes.com and the bjork remix web archive. “Army Of Me” in particular seems to inspire a lot of new interpretations.

Maybe this is due to its hybrid nature, since the song itself includes drums from “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin and “Get Thy Bearings” by Donovan. Björk releaseda charity album comprised entirely of “Army Of Me” remixes and covers. The standout is the unhinged Morris dancing version by Dr Syntax ‘n’ CB Turbo vs Rivethead. There’s also a bluegrass version, a metal version and a lot of terrifying experimental techno.

Björk’s singing and songwriting

And how could we not talk about her voice? Björk’s unearthly, chameleon-like sound gives her music some of the same pleasures as Michael Jackson’s, who she quotes explicitly in “I Go Humble.” The first paragraph of this quote of Thomas Bartlett’s Salon article could just as easily refer to MJ.

‘Childlike’, ‘feral’, ‘alien’: All three words have been used repeatedly in describing her pipes, and their apparent incompatibility alone gives some sense of just how unusual the sound is. Billie Holiday’s voice famously combined childishness with world-weary wisdom. Björk has pushed the paradox a little further, combining childishness with ferocity and unbridled sexuality.

She is the only major songwriter in recent memory for whom the apparently inescapable influence of Bob Dylan is irrelevant. Her lyrics stand out for a simple reason: They don’t rhyme. Other songwriters have experimented with non-rhyming lyrics, of course, notably Lou Reed and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, but it remains an unusual technique.

David Byrne is another great user of nonrhyming lyrics. Björk’s vocal melodies and lyrics remind me of ee cummings, whose peoms she has set to music a couple of times.

Her phrases are anything but regular; rather than a series of four-bar phrases, she might have one of three followed by two of five, finished with one of four.

Even more singular, her melodic phrases often display little or no connection to the beats beneath them. The melodies themselves are often developed through motifs, with short phrases repeated and elaborated, in a manner more similar to Brahms than to other popular songwriters. Björk’s ten years of conservatory training show here — the influence of the composers she despised is clearly in evidence. Listen to the opening of “Hidden Place” from Vespertine: The verse melody is a four-note motif, resolved differently each time. It repeats more frequently as it becomes more agitated, never matching up comfortably with the beat beneath it. Finally, it snowballs into the chorus.

Because of these irregular melodic phrases and unrhymed lyrics, it always takes a moment to adjust to Björk’s songs. They can sound clumsy at first, strangely forced, unfocused or simply incomprehensible. The end result, though, is that her music has a freshness, an air of the unexpected, that is unusual. In most pop songs, an attentive listener can pick up the basic structure almost immediately. Consciously or not, he or she anticipates the rhymes, the call and response of the phrases. Björk’s songs keep even the most exacting listeners a little off balance. There are no rhymes to guess at, no way of predicting what will come next. They force you to listen intensely.

As a songwriter, Björk is less of a pop musician and more like an avant-gardist with enough personal charisma to have attracted a pop-scale audience. She’s the only contemporary songwriter I can think of who will set a whole tune in diminished scale, as in “An Echo, A Stain.” She uses melodic minor and lydian on “Possibly Maybe” and lydian dominant on “Pluto.” Even when she writes in plain-vanilla major scale, her angular phrasing can make it sound awkward and dissonant, as on “Anchor Song.”

Björk and jazz

The harmonic and rhythmic complexity of her music makes Björk irresistible to jazz musicians. What’s a jazz arrangement but an analog remix? Every jazz group I’ve ever been in has done her tunes. Travis Sullivan’s Björkestra is a seventeen-piece big band based in NYC that plays nothing but tunes by or associated with her. Their arrangements are a little too fuzak for me, but it’s such a cool idea. I think NYC could do with some more all-Björk jazz bands. This city at one point had two different rock bands who only played songs about hockey. Surely we can support more Björkestras. Björk herself did a jazz album called Gling-Glö with an Icelandic trio, which was a good idea but sadly is nothing too special in its execution. I’d like to hear her do more jazz, but maybe not with Icelandic musicians, who, and I say this with all due respect, play extremely white.

Björk’s sonic palette

Sonically, Björk’s palate is as diverse as anyone who’s ever recorded. She seems to be one of the only high-profile white musicians who understands that rock and roll is over. There’s almost no guitar in any of her work. There’s a sample of distorted electric guitar on “Human Behavior,” nylon-string guitar on “So Broken,” pedal steel on live versions of “Possibly Maybe” — I think that’s about it. Her stringed instrument accompaniment of choice is the harp.

Like the hip-hop artists she admires, Björk contrasts her vocal asymmetry with the posthuman perfection of electronic beats. Most of her tunes rest on four-four grids, using drum loops and MIDI patterns in groups of two and four and eight and sixteen. Björk brings out the best in her tech-savvy collaborators. Nellee Hooper’s work with Massive Attack can sound too much like the lobby of a high-end hotel, but behind Post he’s brilliant. Matmos albums are so experimental as to be unlistenable, but on Vespertine, they’re heartbreaking. More from Thomas Bartlett:

Her wholehearted embrace of electronics, combined with her unquestioned dominance of them, makes her our most optimistic musician, blasting the matrix apart.

It’s ironic that this guy should describe Björk as such an optimist, because from what I can tell, she’s also a high-functioning clinical depressive with social phobia.

Björk and depression

I’ve noticed that Björk’s lyrics make several references to suicidal ideation and self-harm. From “Hyperballad:”

Every morning I walk towards the edge
and throw little things off
like car parts, bottles and cutlery
I imagine what my body would sound like
slamming against those rocks
and when I land, will my eyes be closed or open?

From “All Neon Like:”

Don’t get angry with yourself
I’ll heal you
with a razor blade
I’ll cut a slit open

The video for “Pagan Poetry” includes graphic closeups of Björk’s flesh being pierced with large needles. Some of my friends think she might be kidding. She isn’t. Her body language in interviews and onstage indicates to me that she’s as serious as a heart attack.

This is music’s greatest optimist? In a way, yes. Björk’s affect may be bleak at times, but it doesn’t keep her from being a fearless sonic adventurer. The coolest and weirdest track on Telegram is “My Spine,” a duet between Björk and the deaf Scottish classical percussion sensation Evelyn Glennie playing a set of tuned exhaust pipes. You have to be confident to be a deaf drummer. You have to be confident to be an Icelandic person singing in English. You have to be confident to play very far outside the standard western tuning system on a weird instrument. And you have to be confident to stick this song in the middle of a bunch of remixes of your previous album.

Live electronica

All electronic musicians face a challenge when it comes time to play live. Standing onstage and pressing “play” on your DAT machine or laptop is pretty lame. Björk’s solution is an ingenious one. She has a DAT of the basic tracks, the drums and crucial synths. Then she can layer whatever live sounds on top that she wants. So, like, she can tour with a tabla player, harpist and pedal steel, or a symphonic string section, a choir and two laptop guys, or ten horn players, a drummer and a reactive touch surface controller. Because the beats are sequenced, her onstage drummers are free to play outside of grid mode. Hear Björk and Konono No 1 live in concert, courtesy of NPR.

Björk did MTV Unplugged early in her solo career and took the opportunity to do analog remixes of her first album right down to the foundations. “Human Behavior” is just voice and harpsichord, and then “One Day” has like thirty-five percussionists. Happening!

Here are a couple of my Björk remixes. As she says in “Enjoy:” enjoy.

Human Nature And Behaviour by ethanhein

Follows a blog post about the MJ song.

Lil Wayne Is Oh So Quiet

See blog posts about Lil Wayne and Björk.

Me vs Alex Torovic vs VOCE vs the Wu-Tang Clan vs Aphex Twin vs Björk

mp3 download, ipod format download

India

Me vs John Coltrane ft Eric Dolphy vs Aphex Twin vs Beyoncé vs Björk

mp3 download, ipod format download

Let’s say you’d never heard of the Beatles, and I played you “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” “Within You Without You,” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.” You wouldn’t have any reason to think they were written and recorded by the same people. They weren’t. The three songs are effectively solo John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney tunes, respectively. It’s wonderful to imagine that a single group of humans working together could have produced such wildly disparate sounds, and it was a royal bummer for me to find out that during long stretches of the Sgt Pepper’s sessions, the Beatles weren’t even talking to each other.

I think the late Beatles are still so relevant because they remind people my age and younger of our divorced parents. Their albums are extremely well-made art produced by a group of people in a failed and dysfunctional relationship. Yet the product bears a collective name, creating the illusion of a unified creative team. For legal reasons, the songwriting credits are mostly Lennon/McCartney, even after the two stopped writing and recording in the same room. It’s like how my mom retains my dad’s last name decades after their divorce and remarriage to other people. The mental process of trying to resolve the jagged stylistic contradictions in Sgt Pepper is familiar to me, it’s like squaring the conflicting values and loyalties of my parents and stepparents. Late Beatles albums are more like mixtapes than albums by a band.

I was always was more of a Beatles guy than a Stones guy. Like me, the Beatles didn’t remotely hate their parents. Not the way rock stars usually do; not the way the Stones did. The Beatles revered their parents. They wrote songs for and about them. It’s mostly McCartney doing these songs, but my favorite John Lennon song ever is about his mother Julia. The Beatles were kid-friendly, too. Could you imagine the Stones writing “Yellow Submarine” or “Octopus’ Garden”?

Most rock musicians turn their angst into hedonistic defiance or anger. The Beatles turned most of their angst into wistfulness. Even when their music pushed boundaries, it mostly did so in a relatively polite, restrained way. Maybe the band kept so much composure in their later years because instead of playing in rowdy bars, they were performing for George Martin and the BBC engineers in their coats and ties. These straightlaced British civil servants were the only listeners present for most of the band’s live music-making after 1965, along with Yoko Ono. The Beatles’ poker face is uptight by rock standards, but it makes perfect sense for professionals in a high-tech work setting.

The advances in recording technology that gave the late Beatles albums so much of their imaginative sweep also contributed to their feeling of alienation. In the early years, the band recorded by getting together in a room and playing live to single-track tape. By the end, Paul McCartney could use multitracking to play every instrument on “Back In The USSR” and “Birthday”, as if he was Prince recording “When Doves Cry.” The tape collage stuff like “Revolution 9″ and the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever” is more like Aphex Twin than Chuck Berry. And the instrumentation moved steadily into synth and sampler territory. The flutes at the beginning of “Strawberry Fields” aren’t real, they’re tape samples in a Mellotron. Here’s a video about this early sampling keyboard – thanks, Nick Seaver.

The famous medley that ends Abbey Road is a sixteen-minute DJ mix of leftovers from the White Album and Let It Be. It was carefully edited into a seamless suite by McCartney and George Martin. The medley can’t exist outside of the recording medium. The Beatles never played it live, and to my knowledge no one else has either. How would you even approach it? I learned the first chunk on the guitar and it was a whole music education unto itself, but my rendition is not going to make you forget the original.

Given how electronic their sound was, it’s a shame that the Beatles have never allowed anyone to sample them. If they had been born twenty years later, they might well have tried their hand at loops and breakbeats. Their early songs are collages of Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins and Buddy Holly. The later, more ambitious songs feel more “original” only because the source material for the collaged is more diverse. Wikipedia says:

According to Lennon, “Because” was inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven‘s “Moonlight Sonata“. “Yoko was playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano … I said, ‘Can you play those chords backwards?’, and wrote ‘Because’ around them.

Another Beatles classical remix is “Blackbird.” It includes a fragment of Bach‘s Bourrée in E minor. It’s the ascending G major part, a loop that runs through the song. These guys are a narural fit for sample culture.

Not like people are waiting for permission to sample the Beatles. The white half of Gnarls Barkley, Danger Mouse, made his first big splash by combining Jay-Z‘s Black Album with the White Album into his breathtakingly copyright-infringing Grey Album. While no one is officially allowed to sample the Fab Four, some people have been allowed to use pieces of cover versions.

Common’s song “Forever Begins”, produced by Kanye West, samples a cover of “She’s Leaving Home” by Syreeta. The line “Father snores as his wife gets into…” loops under the verses. The sample cuts off “her dressing gown.” It’s a strange thing to rap over, but it works. (The track also uses another perfect sample, Steve Gadd’s snare drum intro to “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” by Paul Simon.)

Here’s a screen shot of Beatles Rock Band – click through to see the fascinating vocal notation more clearly. It’s a combination of MIDI and standard music notation.

So what do you say, Beatles copyright holders? How about loosening up the restrictions a little? People are remixing the tunes anyway. Why not get in front of the situation and put the stems on iTunes or Amazon? Nothing can ever replace those albums, but why should the story end there? “Forever Begins” doesn’t take anything away from “She’s Leaving Home” any more than “Because” takes away from the Moonlight Sonata. We the fans have been remixing the songs in our heads for years anyway. Why not let us do it with computers too?

Here’s a remix/cover/mashup of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” combined with “Galang” by M.I.A. and “Slide” by Missy Elliot. Vocals by Babsy Singer, production and game controller synth by me.

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

Another method to get lively yet polished recordings is to use ferocious discipline to create the illusion of spontaneity. Michael Jackson was able to give his performances on Thriller so much polish by recording take after take after take, all at the same level of manic intensity, with his grunts and screams arrayed precisely and intentionally. I can admire the focus he was able to bring to bear over long hours of tedious studio labor, but the psyche that produced his work ethic isn’t something I’d wish on myself or anyone else.

The digital audio workstation offers a third way out. Compositing and splicing different performances together in Pro Tools isn’t any harder than copying and pasting paragraphs in a word processor. If you work in grid mode, you can effortlessly set a particular section to run on a loop, automatically recording each pass as a separate take. The performer can take as many tries as they want, with no need to stop and rewind in between each one. Because hard disk space is essentially free, there’s no cost barrier to running the loop endlessly, trying out different ideas until the right one pops out.

Loop recording was originally conceived as a way to help performers nail especially tricky passages. As with so much music technology, though, it’s taken on a broader creative function, in this case helping people write songs during the recording process. Hip-hop continues the jazz tradition of composing through improvisation. Where jazz musicians might write down a particularly tasty lick to turn it into a song on paper, hip-hop artists more often use the recording medium itself as the composition tool. With loop recording it becomes possible to give playfully tossed-off lines all the perfection and precision you could want. The standard hip-hop and R&B writing method is to put together a more or less complete instrumental track, and then improvise vocals on top. The best ideas get edited, looped, doubled, harmonized and layered into the finished product. As pop music gets more hip-hop oriented, more songwriting is taking the form of improvising in loop mode. The backing tracks themselves are also usually written in loop mode, though usually with sequencers rather than audio recording.

Ironically, having the freedom to effortlessly record and comp together unlimited takes can results in your not needing to. If you’re not under pressure to get things right in a certain number of takes first time, it can put you in the relaxed frame of mind that helps you get things right the first time. Cee-Lo Green’s arresting lead vocal in Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” was famously recorded in one take.

Just for fun and visual inspiration, here are some of my Flickr images related to the concept of loop recording.