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INTO THE SHADOWS
SINCE WE LAST SPOKE
THE VINYL FRONTIER
2006 marked the 10th Anniversary of DJ Shadow’s ominous genre-defining debut Endtroducing.
Producer extraordinaire RJD2 sat down with Lo-Fi to talk about his upcoming sophomore release.
Joe Allen takes an in-depth look at the current state of sampling, vinyl culture and DJing.
PREMIER ISSUE #1
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Publisher Jordan Lloyd Editorial Director Jordan Lloyd Creative Director Jordan Lloyd Editor-in-Chief Jordan Lloyd Managing Editor Jordan Lloyd Senior Editor Jordan Lloyd Technology Editor Jordan Lloyd Art Director Jordan Lloyd Photography Director Jordan Photo Assistant Jordan Lloyd Illustrator Jordan Lloyd Advertising Sales Jordan Lloyd Retail Sales Manager Jordan Production Director Jordan Lloyd President Jordan Lloyd Chief Financial Officer Jordan LO-FI (ISSN-1548-2421) is published six times a year by CashMoney Publications Ltd. All material is copywrite 2006 JLD. 24-26 Romfield Drive Toronto, ON CANADA K0K 3E0 Email: info@lofimag.com www.lofimagazine.com
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BY: ELIOT WILDER
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FEATURE hen it was released in 1996, Endtroducing... sounded like nothing before or since – an album of beats, beauty and chaos, a sound that cuts to the very blue flame of the heart. Looking back, no other popular record, to my mind, better summarizes the end of the last century. Josh Davis, alias DJ Shadow, took elements of hip-hop, funk, rock, ambient, psychedelia as well as found sounds, oddball spoken word clips and cut-out bin nuggets – a literal sweep of sounds that exist on planet earth – and then wrote the ultimate lesson. All this from a suburban kid who grew up in Davis, California a small, out of the way aggie college town. But josh was a suburban kid with a passion – and obsession, really for vinyl. Davis has spent a good chunk of his life scavenging through what most dismiss as ephemera: the records that reside in those musty and dark used record stores. To many of us, they are less than meaningless. But to josh Davis, they are lost souls. And, as their rescuer, he has done them an honor. Because these lost souls have a home on Endtroducing… It is an album that sits with you and lingers. It’s an album you can re-
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turn to and discover whole new areas you hadn’t been aware of like finding a room in your house you never knew was there. Or like the time you pulled The Catcher in Rye off the shelf and, after reading it, thinking, I didn’t know it was about that. But what draws me to it time and again – and what drew me to writing this book is that Endtroducing... never fails to deliver emotionally on so many levels. “If I were to find one word that resonates more than anything within Endtroducing… it would be ‘hope,’ ” Josh told me when I interviewed him for this book. I like that. I know that when all that is terrifying and depressing about this world has consumed me, all I have to do is put on
“Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It’s about drawing from what’s around you, and subverting it and decontextualizing it” Endtroducing... and I am...transported. Sounds like hope to me. Since Endtroducing..., DJ Shadow has produced other remarkable music; his
second album, 2002’s The Private Press expands upon everything that was compelling and unique about Endtroducing.… And it’s likely that the disc he’s currently working on will surpass what has come before. But there is something about Endtroducing... that always brings me back. There is something about a record that questions, “What does your soul look like?” There’s something about a record that, although it provides no answers, still acts as a balm. Growing up, life in the Wilder household wasn’t that much different from the other families living their quietly desperate lives in Fletcher Hills, a small, grit-free prefab community east of San Diego. We ate our tin foiled TV dinners, loved our Lucy and ducked and covered when the air raid siren sounded every Monday at noon, just like everyone else. Perhaps it could be said we were too much like everyone else, a paper-thin sheet of lath and plaster separating one chockablock tract household from another. For me, the only respite from my vague sense of middleclass suburban dislocation and the only thing that truly got through to me was what got played on a local AM radio station, KDEO. It was a standard Top 40 format, which
in the mid to late-60s meant you could hear everything from the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon” to the Four Tops’ “Standing in the Shadow of Love” to the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” to Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” to Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” to Ennio Morricone’s theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” to Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park.” You could also pull in tunes by Claudine Longer, the Animals, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, Johnny Rivers, Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Leaves, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, the Jefferson Airplane, Bobbie Gentry, Sly & the Family Stone, the Hollies, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan. And, of course, the Beatles. It was the sublime and the ridiculous, all mashed together. It was the kind of mixed-up non-format that is currently being employed by artists like Kid Loco, Four Tet and Nightmares on Wax for the Back to Mine, AnotherLateNight and LateNightTales compilation series. Take a listen to Saint Etienne’s ultra cool The Trip, which includes songs by the Supremes, the Mamas & the Papas, Dusty Springfield, the Left Banke, the Originals and, my personal fave, the Poppy Family. Eclectic, to put it mildly. That was the stuff I heard in my youth. There were other numbers on the dial, but because KDEO’s signal was the strongest the station was located just a few blocks from where I lived it was pretty much all I listened to. And just about every minute that I wasn’t in school or asleep, I listened in. Ether in the kitchen on the clock radio or in my, bedroom on my transistor, which, when you think about it, was in its own way a precursor to the iPods of today without such niceties as attenuation, equalization, treble, bass and stereo imaging. It was low fi, before the expression was hip. But who knew from technology back then?
Inspired by what I heard, I began to collect singles, which I purchased from the local Rexall. Up until that point I had only my two sisters’ records to choose from “Cindy’s Birthday” by Johnny Crawford, “Palisades Park” by Freddy Cannon and “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-La’s. Not bad stuff, but most of it was on the teen idol side, and not what I was really into. I believe the first 45 I owned was “live” by the
and shout, “Turn that malarkey down!” Dad just didn’t “get” music. Talk to him about the Stones or Otis Redding or Stan Getz, and he’d go blank in the face like a TV when the plug is suddenly pulled. It didn’t matter what I had on. It could’ve been the Monkees, Mancini or Mahier. To Dad, it was all malarkey. Which was a drag, because Dad made it difficult for me to simply enjoy music.
Endtroducing… is a lucid fantasia, culling several decades worth of forgotten beats, radio signals and unclaimed melodies Merry-Go-Round, followed by the Royal Guardsmen’s “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” the Starter Brothers’ “Flowers on the Wall” and “Dang Me” by Roger Miller. I finally graduated to LPs when, for my eleventh birthday I was given the Beatles’ Yesterday ...and Today. It was all I had that was truly mine, and I played it to death. It’s tough to describe what it was like to have and to hold your first record, with its new record smell. You had a whole 12-inch jacket to gaze at, to scribble on, to use as a lunch tray. There was the inner sleeve, which usually featured the covers of other artists on the label. There was something about touching and smudging and scratching, which was inevitable – the vinyl. You would watch it spin, see the lathe-like needle scrape along the dusty grooves. And so what if my Webcor phonograph, which was just a little larger than a shoebox and about as durable, sounded no better than tinny (for the high end) and muffled (for the low end). On eBay nowadays they call record players like that “vintage.” Back then it was a serious piece of crap. But it was my piece of crap. Alas, whenever I played the feeble little thing a notch above a whisper, my dad would burst into my room
My buddy Scooter’s father was the first on the block to own a component stereo system up until then the most sophisticated home listening device I had experienced was our Magnavox TV and stereo combination unit, which looked like a credenza and, mysteriously, only played one side of the stereo spectrum. I didn’t quite understand why when I played Sgt. Pepperi certain sounds like, say, the animals galloping along at the end of “Good Morning, Good Morning” would suddenly fade away, or why the singing was unusually prominent on “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” or why the drums were barely audible on “Fixing a Hole.” It wasn’t until I heard the record on Scooter’s dad’s system that I understood stereo. It was like watching a movie in three strip Technicolor after having only seen sepia-toned silents. It was around this time that I attempted what I thought was a Brian Jones inspired pudding bowl haircut. Mom would laugh at me and say, “You look just like little Lord Fauntleroy.” Which wasn’t exactly the effect I was after. But what did I care? I liked the idea of long hair almost as much as I liked wearing it long. It was not so much a fashion statement but a sensibility. It was a way of life. It was rock ‘n’ roll. Of course, Dad hated it ‘You don’t
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fool me with all your damn malarkey,” he would scoff. When Dad told me that I had to cut it off or I couldn’t buy the Love’s Forever Changes, I cried quietly while I was shorn. But it was worth it. I mean, it was Forever Changes, for Chrissakes. Despite my parents’ animosity toward music, my enjoyment of it was undeterred. I was a fan in the truest sense: I was a fanatic, an obsessive If I heard it on the radio, I had to know what it was and who was singing it. And because there were few, magazines around devoted to music other than Tiger Beat, all I had to turn to were the likes of Fred Kiemel, Robin Scott, Buzz Baxter and the rest of the jocks at KDEO. Through them and the music they spun, I began to identify with and feel connected to something bigger than what was around me. A world of sounds, ideas and sensations opened up to me then a world that still exists for me now. Because having an aesthetic was of little use or importance to my parents, because we were not particularly religious, because I was not good at sports like the all the other kids on my street and because I seemed to experience the world, well, differently than everyone I knew, I felt lost. I felt like I didn’t know how to be. I had no plan, no map, no guide. But the morel got into music,
the more I understood what it is about and what it offers, the more I felt comfortable in my own skin. Not that I hold anything against my father, but teaching me about what goes on out there was not his strong suit. Frankly, I learned much of what I needed to know from John Lennon. It was not just his voice although hearing him tear it up on “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” still tears me up it was also his look, his intelligence, his cool and his wit. As for many kids in the 60s, seeing A Hard Day’s Night was a revelation. I wanted to be in a band. I wanted to get excited, to make a noise. In a small way, that would happen later for me. But in the late 80s, it was enough to feel that I was in the middle of something – a revolution in sight and sound. Each song that would come through my radio was a fresh happening. Yes, there was a shitload of junk to dig through. But those turds only heightened the good stuff: “I Got You” by James Brown, “I Hear a Symphony” by the Supremes, “My Girl Has Gone” by the Miracles, “Make Me Your Baby” by Barbara Lewis, “Make It Easy on Yourself ” by the Walker Brothers, “Lies” by the Knickerbockers, “Over and Over” by the Dave Clark Five, “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel, “Rescue Me” by Fontella Bass, “Get Off My Cloud” by the Rolling Stones, “Waterloo
“We felt like we were doing things that nobody else was doing. As it turned out, that’s largely true, I still have yet to meet people from the States that were buying the kind of music that we were buying back then, Sunset” by the Kinks. all were essential chapters in my sentimental education. As the 60s drew to a close and radio continued to evolve, and as FM became more prevalent, a new movement called “underground radio” began to peek its head up. By the early 70s, KDEO had pretty much abandoned whatever semblance of format they had as risky then for an AM station as it is now and, at nights at least, they adopted an approach that was freeform and, in some rare instances, blatantly non-commercial. I recall hearing tracks from Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, Ummagumma by Pink Floyd, Music from Big Pink by the Band and even Captain Beelbeart’s Trout Mask Replica. There was one DJ, George Manning, who played the most intriguing sets.
Avlon, Tony & the Belairs “Sexy Coffee Pot”
Endtroducing is a 60 minute instrumental opus, which was created entirely out of collaged sonic snippets. No conventional instruments were recorded for the album, but rather dozens and dozens of small samples came together to create each and every track. Here is a look at the some of the samples which went into making just a single track on the album, track 3, The Number Song.
B.Y. & the Turnettes (Micron) “Who Got the Number” Chrystal Illusion (Soul Kitchen 1972) “Corruption is the Thing” Liquid Liquid (Nine Nine 1982) “Optimo” Mangione, Chuck Together: (Mercury 1973) “Hill Where the Lord Hides”
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He truly broadened my palate: Flying Burrito Brothers, Spirit, Nell Young, Fairport Convention, the Stooges, Joni Mitchell, Funkadeic, Little Feat. One night I screwed up my courage and made my way over to the station, a tiny ranch-style cottage next to the Speedee Mart and just up from the Coronet Five & Dime on Fletcher Parkway. I pounded on the back door for almost an hour until a hirsute young man dressed all in black appeared and asked me what I wanted. “To see what’s inside.” George led me through a musty-smelling labyrinth of funky old records and brought
fueled by a scene in the movie Help! in which the Beatles arrive at what appear to be four separate residences in a modest London suburb. They emerge on the inside into one extravagant apartment, where together john, Paul, George and Ringo share their music and their lives. Four into one. The Marxist concept that individuals can come together and create something greater than the sum of their parts reached an apogee of sorts in the 1960s, when the utopian spirit of cooperation and communal living seemed within reach. The Beatles certainly set the bar by
is often forgotten the Beatles demonstrated that if you stick with your hand of brothers (or sisters), you could create something infinitely superior to what you could do on your own. As separate musicians the Beatles were, with the exception of Paul McCartnev, no virtuosos, and each had foibles that were subsumed by an overriding vision. As an example, a song like “Honey Pie” is a spoonful of saccharine that only gets its tang by being placed in the context of the 1968 classic The Beatles, otherwise known as the “White Album.” On his own, McCartney’s tendency for
“Endtroducing… is like every record that I make, in that there’s a sense of you starting on a journey. You experience things and you come back to the end, full circle hopefully, having learned something, or having gained some sort of something out of the experience” me to the control room, like that scene with Wolfman Jack in American Graffiti, it took me aback to see the face behind the voice. He was much smaller and slighter than I imagined, but he looked familiar when he spoke into the mic. I would return frequently, and he would let me comb the archives and select whatever record I fancied to be played on the air. He even allowed me to put on the entirety of Skip Spence’s Oar – can’t picture what the listening audience made of that. At this point, more than anything I dreamed of being in a band, a dreamed
which most bands have since striven to measure up. The group’s freewheeling and experimental approach contributed profoundly to music, ideology and culture, stretching the limits of what had been thought possible. Because they were mainstream, the Beatles managed to be perhaps unwittingly subversive whatever they said or did was sacrosanct. The fact is, unlike many of today’s pop idols, the Fab Four actually had something to say about life and the way one could live it, and their impact was undeniable. Mostly and this is something I believe
Smith, Jimmy Unfinished Business: (Mercury 1978) “8 Counts for Rita” Byrds (Columbia 1970) The Ballad of Easy Rider soundtrack: “Fido” Metallica Master of Puppets: (Elektra 1984) “Orion” Pink Floyd Pink Floyd at Pompeii “On the Run” (Live)
twee has remained with rare exception unchecked, and his’ solo work has consistently suffered. The post-Beatles recordings, although not entirely without merit, miss the magic that they created as a unit. So, late in high school when it happened that I became friends with some likeminded musicians, I helped to form a band. Mutt was our name, and we were together in one form or another for more than a decade. We played schools and clubs throughout San Diego. We got a song, “Mission Bay” on Homegrown Five, an album
Santana Amigos: (Columbia 1976) “Let Me” Sapo Sapo: (Bell 1974) “Been Had” DJ Grand Wizard Theodore Wild Style soundtrack: (Animal/Chrysalis 1983) “Fantastic Freaks at the Dixie” Pearly Queen “Quit Jivin’”
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sampler put out by local station KGB. In the late 70s, we changed our name to Catch 22 and migrated to Los Angeles where we made little if no mark at all. I took my life in music as far as I could. We cut some decent tracks, we fought, we played Madame Wong’s at 1 AM on a Tuesday to five drunks. We also met our share of peculiar characters: Norman Ratner, the man behind the Leaves’ “Hey Joe,” produced us for an album’s worth of material that ultimately went unreleased. What we wanted was someone to bring fresh energy and insight to the band. What we got was this dude who wore flowery shirts, gold chains and heavy cologne, and who spent most of the time in the studio beating his poor dog Buddy when he wouldn’t perform tricks on command. All can say is, beware of the man who carries around his own monogrammed pillow. But, he overall we had a rockin’ great
its parts. Mostly, I learned how to be. then, its very “whiteness” belied someThat’s what listening to all these great thing bleak and crepuscular. Intended records and being in a band did for or not, irony had suddenly become a me – it gave me a plan, a map, a guide. component of pop music. These ideals formed who I I bought my copy at a store am. They were my ultimate called Discount Records in “I used lessons. All I had to do was San Diego. I believe it went to walk put on the “White Album,” for something like eleven around with a bucks (hugely expensive at and I understood. It’s such a tape recorder the time), and I paid for it fulsome, unwieldy and ambiguous work, a true work everywhere mostly in dimes and pennies, of art and inspiration to much to the chagrin of the I went and everyone from Joan Didion clerk at the register. When I record family got it home and pulled out to Charles Manson. It’s like what Katie’s mother told her conversations, the giant poster with the lyrabout the Bard in A Tree family argu- ics on the back, I felt overCrows in Brooklyn: “Shakements, sound whelmed by the sheer heft speare is a great book. I have of it. Thirty songs that coveffects” heard tell that all the wonered the gamut: music hall, der of life is in that book; all Beach Boys-inspired harmothat man has learned of beauty, all that nies, reggae, musique concrete, country he may know of wisdom and learning and western, folk, heavy metal, nursery are on those pages.” rhyme twaddle, British blues and, of OK, the Beatles ain’t Shakespeare, course, dirty-ass rock ‘n’ roll. There’s
Talking Tech: The equipment that helped construct Entroducing. . . I started out on a cassette 4-track and two belt-drive turntables because that’s all I could afford. Fortunately, it taught me to make the most out of what I had to work with and to be patient with my limitations. In 1992, I was working with a rapper named Paris and the opportunity arose for me to invest my earnings into a real sampler. $3000 is a lot of money by anyone’s standards, but working minimum wage at a pizza restaurant, as I was at the time, it was almost inconceivable! I felt I needed to buy not only what could get the job done adequately, but something brand new that would keep my sound contemporary for a long time to come. That’s why I chose the brand new Akai MPC 60 instead of the tried and true Emu SP-1200. It’s one of the best moves I ever made, and I got lucky because it ended up being a popular sampler for years to come...
time. It wasn’t A Hard Day’s Night, but it wasn’t as much of a drag as Let It Be either. I learned a bit about singing, writing and performing. I learned what it was like to dream something up out of nothing, how to put seemingly disparate pieces together into something that made sense, how sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of
but the “White Album” remains a personal lynchpin. With its faux-laminate blank sleeve design and simple embossed lettering, which contrasted starkly with the multicolored psychedelic movement of the year before, the record effectively announced the end of one era and the beginning of another. wAlthough it was not wholly apparent
nonsense, there’s intelligence. There’s equivocation, there’s vehemence. There’s folly, there’s genius. Of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” the late Ian MacDonald, in Revolution in the Head, wrote: While rationally it may not hang together, at packs a considerable punch, working on an emotionally allusive level few songwriters have been aware of let Story continued on pg 12
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ADVERTISING
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IT'S THE THREE LETTER, ONE NUMBER COMBO POPPING UP EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK: RJD2. AS IF RELEASING A DEBUT ALBUM THAT KNOCKED YOU ON YOUR ASS WASN'T ENOUGH, THE PHILADELPHIA BASED PRODUCER SPENT THE LAST FEW YEARS KEEPING YOU FLOORED WITH PRODUCTION AND REMIXES. AND HE'S ABOUT TO DO IT all AGAIN WITH AN INTENSELY ORIGINAL NEW ALBUM, SINCE WE LAST SPOKE, PUTTING HIMSELF ON A NEW CREATIVE PATH AND PUTTING YOU BACK ON THE FLOOR. LO-FI GETS THE LOW-DOWN FROM ONE OF DEFINITIVE JUX'S MOST CREATIVE BEAT ASSASSINS.
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Photo & Illustration: Jordan Lloyd
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LO-FI: So how are you feeling about the record? RJD2: Definitely nervous. I mean, I’m happy with the record, but I don’t know if it’s gonna piss people off, or if they’re really gonna like it. (laughs) Why would it piss people off? I don’t know if you’ve heard it or not.... I heard “Clean Living” off of Definitive Jux Presents: Volume III, but I haven’t heard the rest of it. Well, there’s singing on it. No rapping at all. It’s more melodic. People in Europe say it doesn’t sound anything like hip-hop. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s some weirdo art-guy shit, but.... Both: (laughs) You know how they have that series Music For Dummies? Yeah. I feel like Dead Ringer was Instrumental Hip-Hop For Dummies. Both: (laugh) Seriously. I feel like a lot of the approach that went into it was me trying
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to make an instrumental hip-hop record that would appeal to your average rap fan. And this record is not that at all. It’s more straight-up composing? Like, you’re just trying to make some music, and not a specific kind of music? Yeah. I was more concerned with melodies, songs, instrumentation... shit like that. I feel like it’s light years beyond Dead Ringer. It’s shorter, more to the point. It doesn’t have skits that you don’t need. It doesn’t have a bunch of bullshit. It doesn’t have rap songs that are no good. Personally, I feel good about it. But I also think it’s gonna polarize people. They’re either gonna love it or hate it. This is the first time I made a record without worrying about how it was going to be perceived. I wasn’t attempting to fit into or defy any particular classification. Was it a natural progression for you to bring in singers and such? Ummm... (laughs) I’m not going to talk about the instrumentation too much if you haven’t heard it. It’s hard
"A lot of times I find that producing is like problem solving. It's very similar to chess, or problem solving video games" to describe. In terms of the recording process, though, I did do two songs with MCs. I recorded 20 songs for this record, and there were only a few things I was setting out to do with it. One is, I wanted to record as much as possible, then can some of the material to figure out what worked best as an album. The other thing I set out to do was... well, there was this period where I was picking up things like The Strokes and The White Stripes, when there was talk about how this “revival of rock” was going on. I liked those records, but none of them were exactly what I expected. A few of them ended up being close, but I was expecting the second coming of Led Zeppelin, you know? Music with balls that was melodic and had good instrumentation, but didn’t sound candy-ass. And nothing was doing that. So, in the back of my head, I was like, “Maybe I’ll just make a record that sounds like what I want these rock records to sound like.” So that was in the back of my head for a minute. And, to a point, it was a relief. It got my mind off of, “Oh, am I
gonna just make another Dead Ringer?” But then, to a point, I’d done four or five songs that had this rocky feel to them, and that’s when I realized it was becoming more of a limitation. So, that’s when I started recording for fun. When people hear it, and you maybe don’t get the reaction you were expecting, do you feel like you need to show them all that goes into it? Like, the technical process, and how much of you goes into it? Sometimes. Sometimes I’ll see reviews that were like, “Dead Ringer is just an album full of beats. There are just 15 beats on this record.” And I start to feel like, “Oh, man. I mean, I know it’s not your typical verse-chorus-verse song, but it’s more than just a beat.” I don’t get too bent out of shape about it. Do you feel like it’d be something worth showing people somehow? In a way, and in a way not. If some-
by De La Soul. It’s a really obvious example. Most people aren’t going to mistake that for a fluke. They can hear the amount of time and energy that went into making that record. Yeah. I think it’s more interesting for the process to be ambiguous. That’s how I feel about my favorite recordings. Of course there’s a part of me that wants to know everything about the process, you know? Like, how it was engineered, what kind of drum machine they used, blah, blah, blah. But in my experience, the more you find out about, the less interesting it becomes. There’s something about demystifying a recording that bugs me. I don’t want a picture of my studio on a record. It kills the mystique for me when I see a picture of my favorite producer’s studio. Yeah. I just asked because the more I listen to Dead Ringer, the more complex it seems to me. I feel like so much
part of me gets frustrated when they don’t feel the same about it. I want to be like, “Dude, do you understand what went into this? Do you understand how complex this shit is?” Thanks, man. I always wonder about that from your perspective as a musician. I wonder if you ever want to grab people and be like, “Yo, motherfucker! Do you understand how much work I put into this?” (laughs) No, no. I’d never want to do that. I could understand how some people might feel that way, but I’d rather have respect from a smaller group of people. For instance, (laughs) if you listen to someone like Timbaland or Lil’ John, and how they filter their bass frequencies, it’s really hard to figure out. But it’s a thing that will fly over the head of your average club-going listener. If you listen to a record through headphones a few times – like “Cry Me A River”, for example – you pick up on a
went into it. But when I play it for people who might not be into hip-hop, or who might not ever have heard of you,
lot of things that went into that recording. And I would rather have a small number of people who respect what I do
"the more you find out about a recording, the less interesting it becomes. There's something about Demystifying a recording that bugs me" thing is a pretty exceptional feat production-wise, I feel like people pick it up. Let’s take 3 Feet High and Rising
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So, are you gonna tour for the record? Yeah. Are you gonna try and bring along some of the people who sung on the record? Actually, the record is all me, except one song where I had someone sing one of the parts. Other than that, I did all of the instrumentation.
We’ve gone over and over this downloading thing because, for instance, in England, people don’t listen to the record if it’s got a promo copy voice-over on it. That’s really hard on us. We’re sending the mail outs for the album, and a lot of those people are saying, “I’m not even going to listen to this.” So, we’re dealing with this issue where, to get the proper press response you need there,
could probably guess that downloading helps sales rather than hurts them. Do you think it helps people like you, who might not be Eminem or the Neptunes, even more so? Of course. And even if you sell less records, what about your live shows? People who downloaded the record are coming to the shows. Yeah.
"The biggest danger of downloading, for me, is that I think it's going to change the way music is sold and formatted. I think that the concept of an album might be a potential victim" www.flickr.com
That’s cool. Who knows. You might hate it. (laughs) Nah. When I got Definitive Jux III and heard “Clean Living”, I put it on loop. That tune is so fucking catchy. I’m fired up to hear the whole record. If you’re really curious to hear it, you could probably get a downloaded copy of it. How do you feel about downloading? Honestly, the only thing I’m really feeling about downloading right now is I’m jealous of people like the Neptunes and Eminem, who are at such a huge level that they can afford not to send their records to press, so their albums don’t get leaked until five days before they’re released. It’s not a money thing.
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you have to send out clean copies of the album. We’re still two months away from the release date. And we’re having problems because, if it gets leaked once over there, then a clean copy is out. It doesn’t matter where it gets leaked from – – because it winds up everywhere. Yeah. So, when I was in Europe, this is one of the things I was doing – having meetings with people, orchestrating how this thing was gonna get rolled out over there. Ultimately, when it comes down to it, if nobody’s downloading the record, then nobody’s buying the record. And if a lot of people are downloading the record, at least in most examples, the record is also being purchased. Now, you don’t know who’s doing what, but if you had to make an educated guess, you
Really, the only bummer for me is, on an artistic level, it’s completely obliterated the experience of a release date. Back in the day, nobody would hear the record until it came out. And that day, it was like – BOOM! – everyone would get it. And you’d hear it while seeing the artwork. If you’re really into it, you’re gonna read the liner notes. These are all things I do with records. It’s just a general appreciation. I think you have a better chance of enjoying it as a piece of art when you can see the cover, read the liner notes, and hear the whole thing without a fuckin’ voice-over. I’ll download certain things. But if I know I’m gonna get the record, I don’t want to hear any of it. I’m the same way. I bought the Kanye West record because I was like, “Well,
I’m probably gonna like this record. And even if the record sucks, I know he put a lot of work into it, and I’ll be able to appreciate it on a technical level.” It was a risk I was willing to take. The biggest danger of downloading, for me, is that I think it’s going to change the way music is sold and formatted. I think that the concept of an album might be a potential victim. I mean, let’s say, hy-
that I’ve done that are more typical, normal, 95 BPM. I’m not opposed to using those on a project, but it’s hard for me to get excited to work within those confines now. In terms of doing things for other people, my inspirations right now are things like The Black Mob Group, Avery Johnson, and Daft Punk. Yeah? Stuff that’s extreme. Or kind of like
That’s cool, man. That was a cool thing to do. I got to have my fun with it and do what I wanted, but I was still working at a tempo that a rapper could get away with. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make that kind of music anymore. What about another Soul Position record? Oh, yeah! I want to do another Soul Position record. We could make it work.
Jordan Lloyd
pothetically, five or ten years down the line, they’ve managed to stamp out all the peer-to-peer networking things. Everything’s loosely based on an iTunes type of retail store, where you buy a song for a dollar. Basically, bands are going to race to record hit songs, as opposed to good albums. Right on. So, when you recorded Since We Last Spoke, you said you were just trying to make good music, and not another Dead Ringer. Yeah. When you make beats for people now, do you find yourself doing a similar thing – just making the music how you want it to be, instead of a cut-and-dry, defined hip-hop track? To be honest with you, I don’t know if I can go back to that. There are things
what Timbaland was when he first came out. When you first heard him, it was a rarity. It wasn’t like anything that was going on in rap. And that’s really what I get out of Daft Punk right now. It has a hip-hop aesthetic – at least the album Discovery does – in the way that samples are used on the album. But if anything, it’s masquerading as a disco album. And, to me, that’s cool. I’d rather be doing something different like that. Well, I think the stuff you do for other people, like the beats you did for Diverse on One A.M.; that stuff stands out. When you hear it, it’s just so different. Like “Explosive”... when I first heard that, I about jumped out of my skin. For real, dude. It was like Public Enemy!
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He did a double-time song for my album, and it came out incredible. We wouldn’t go in thinking about making it a record that would be, essentially – not that you’d shoot for this – but the idiot’s journalistic description of it: “An album somewhere between Bonecrusher and Jungle Brothers.” Both: (laughs) It’d either be really slow, or really fast. There would never be any mid-tempo. From a production standpoint, that would be a fun project. With the new album done, and this music you have in your head that you want to make, is there anyone you want to work on a project with? Yeah. I mean, I’ve been sending pieces to some people. I don’t want to name any names at this point in case it doesn’t Story continued on pg 12
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Story by Joe Allen
Illustrations by Jordan Lloyd
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FEATURE The legitimacy of sampling in music production has been questioned and debated since the early days of Hip-Hop. Sampling’s originality and legality has defined this cultural war. For some time now, the practice of sampling has become “common in the recording of all forms of music,” and in recent years, sampling has gained widespread acceptance. Yet the artistic merits of sampling are at best taken for granted and at worst left misunderstood and under-appreciated. A recent album review in Rock & Rap Confidential displays the limits of most considerations of sampling. The reviewer of Tribe Vibes, Volume 2, the second unauthorized collection of songs Tribe Called Quest has sampled, states, “Listening to this vinyl-only double album will leave you shaking your head in wonder at the vision and creativity it takes to sample skillfully, to hear a bass line, drum part, or keyboard fill in an obscure record and know just where to place it among other elements to create a new work of art.” However, the discussion of sampling often ends precisely here—we should be amazed that some invisible producer spliced together a few sublime samples to create a classic Hip-Hop track, but we are left shaking our collective heads because of the enigmatic connection between the musical creativity and the end result. The uninitiated who feel sampling is a technique quickly and effortlessly employed by the lazy, un-
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skilled musician will not be convinced by such vague sentiments because many questions, both technical and aesthetic, are left mysteriously unanswered. How do the producers know which parts of which records to sample? How do they find these records? Who has and who must have the knowledge of previously sampled records? How is this information disseminated? Since I believe the whole economy of samples begins with the record collector; a re-examination of sampling from the perspective of the record collector as well as the record itself is therefore necessary. The Hip-Hop DJ who morphed into the Hip-Hop producer transformed the record collector into an artist. This tradition has spawned a plethora of independent labels, producers, and more and more record collectors. Any day of the week, one can find young beat-heads (people who collect breakbeats and samples) and established Hip-Hop producers sorting through rare funk, soul, and jazz albums, the European sound libraries and obscure soundtracks, and all the other miscel-
contain beats and loops, at the Sound Library or A-1 Records in Manhattan’s East Village. At these shops, one can not only unearth the grooves of today that will become the tracks of tomorrow but also trace the sources of the tracks already in circulation—as both producers and collectors search for unsampled sounds and original source material. The Breakbeat Brotherhood I. This search and retrieval impulse essentially created Hip-Hop music. In the mid-1970s, the archetypal Hip-Hop DJ, Kool Herc, started isolating the percussion breaks in the records he was playing at block parties in the Bronx. With two copies of the same record, Herc could extend a single percussion break indefinitely (what would be soon known as breakbeats), all the while whipping the dancers into a near frenzy. The key component in the evolution of breakbeat music was the breaks themselves and, of course, the records that contained them. Excavating the funkiest break became the DJ’s raison d’etre. DJs located many of the breaks by inspecting thousands of records looking for a wide band that was blacker than the rest of the vinyl. Such wide black bands contain less dense instrumentation which the DJs hoped would include a bare extended funky drum break. Initially, the DJs were the anthologists of the rare breakbeat records, and intent on keeping their archival work secret. To avoid competition from other crews, some DJs would soak the labels off their records to guard their knowledge. Lenny Roberts of Beat Street Records, though, decided to make the information public and the breakbeats easily available with the release of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats series, a series which now numbers twenty-five volumes. Each volume collects seven or eight often obscure tracks containing breakbeats. Robert’s decision, based on the economy of supplying DJ demand, signaled, for some, the end of the original breakbeat culture and the beginning of the economic con-
siderations that surround Hip-Hop to this day. Several old school DJs recently discussed their lingering disagreements over the ramifications of collecting and freely distributing the rare gems of their collections. Their commentary identifies the opposing viewpoints in this debate. Grandmixer D.ST. laments the loss of the DJ’s secret codes and records:
logical skills to research the breaks and then locate at least two clean copies of the break. Musicologist David Toop contests the Ultimate Breaks and Beats series: “The serious record collectors regarded this unmasking of the underworld as a gift to the lazy, a betrayal of the DJs detective abilities.” Only someone with the capacity to uncover and collect original breaks, someone savvy
The whole art form of the DJ is seeking for beats, and the love and respect for the records that you find and the respect for the other DJ who has the same ability The whole art form of the DJ is seeking for beats, and the love and respect for the records that you find and the respect for the other DJ who has the same ability…. But we made one terrible mistake, and all due respect to Lenny, that was our undoing. Because we did not understand what he was doing at the time…. He knew all of us, and he would come to all of us and say, “What record was that?” But what he did was networked between all of us, so he ultimately ended up with everything. We wasn’t thinking about making money like that, our love was just for the art form itself and being recognized in the community and on the street…. It wasn’t selfishness, it was the fact that if you wanted to go to a Bambaataa party and hear certain records, he had his crowd who wanted to hear those certain records…. Each DJ had his own [repertoire]. We had the generic records that became generic once everybody in our circle had ‘em. The whole thing was the obscure records. Everybody always came up at their next party with the next new obscure record. And that cycle would go for at least two or three parties before the next DJ got that record. During this formative era, the DJs had control over the dissemination of their knowledge. To be a skilled DJ meant much more than mastery of the everevolving techniques of turntable and mixer manipulation; the position necessitated someone with the anthropo-
enough to amass a significant record collection, would be deemed authentic. Interestingly, Af rika Bambaataa viewed Roberts’s circumvention of DJ culture as a way to share the raw material of Hip-Hop culture with the rest of the world. (Besides, like any true DJ, he had far more beats than he was willing to share): Well, me and Lenny worked close together, so it didn’t bother me—’cause whatever I’d give him, he’d wait to release. I always had many more where they came from anyways. It didn’t bother me, it was those DJs that didn’t really have no big selections that it bothered. When I first gave the list out in England at the time when nobody would say the names, the whole England went crazy trying to find those grooves. It was good, ‘cause I felt it was time for all these other DJs to have things to help them. You see, I had vision. A lot of other people were selfish and wanted to hold stuff to theyselves. I had vision to try to make this a whole-world phenomenon and movement. My vision was to try to get Hip-Hop across the world as much as possible. And everything fell into place the way we did it. Indeed it did, Hip-Hop has long been a global phenomena. Ultimate Breaks and Beats inspired many to search out Hip-Hop’s source material while others used the beats as they were reissued. Peanut Butter Wolf, West Coast producer and owner of the indie la
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bel Stones Throw, accurately sums up the significance of the series: “When Ultimate Breaks and Beats first came out, it gave me a starting point. A lot of great Hip-Hop records were made from that collection.” Still, today’s Hip-Hop tracks are made using the beats compiled on the Ultimate Breaks and Beats series. Furthermore, Bambaataa was correct in his assertion that there were, in the words of Leroy Hutson, “more where that came from.” In the 1990s, Hip-Hop DJs and pro-
sources has developed into a profitable industry. Before a track on Gangstarr’s 1998 album Moment of Truth, DJ Premier, widely acknowledged as one of the best Hip-Hop producers, declares: What’s the deal with all you break record cats putting out all the original records that we sample from and snitching by putting us on the back of it saying we used stuff. You know how that goes. Stop doing that. You are violating. You don’t know what Hip-Hop is all about. Premier’s choice of the word “snitch-
chops up a guitar lick from a common soul record that, according to Rob Carrigan of the Sound Library, “We all had been looking at for years”, Joe Simon’s “Drowning in the Sea of Love.” Even though the sample is uncredited, the re-conceived melody is so instantly memorable that the hunt for the source begins as soon as the song hits the airwaves. Within weeks, Premier’s work is unmasked, the knowledge quickly circulated, and all the cheap Joe Simon records have disappeared. Since there
Discarded albums have a life of their own in the hands of a producer. Tracks composed entirely of samples retransmit and reinvigorate out-of-circulation sound data that can evoke distant cultural memory in the listener or imprint new memories ducers have mined more beats, loops and grooves than even the originators would have thought possible. Other breakbeat and sample collections, some legitimate but many bootlegs, continue to be released at a rapid rate—collecting the latest rare grooves and often documenting who sampled what and when. Of course, like D.ST., the release of these collections still rankles those who first used the grooves. “Jackin’ sounds from records” II. Betraying a Hip-Hop producer’s
ing” is appropriate. Most samples and even more beats, today, are not officially cleared. Skilled producers such as Premier know who they can sample from and who they shouldn’t. Usually, samples are then reworked—sped up, slowed down, chopped, faded, flanged, chopped and/or rewired—so that they barely resemble the original. A useful example of this process can be found on Gangstarr’s Moment of Truth with the track “You Know My Steeze.” To provide the melody, Premier masterfully
are not enough copies of “Drowning in the Sea of Love” to satisfy the demand of collectors, the song quickly finds its way onto on a number of bootleg compilations that clearly advertise Premier’s jacking of the track. By this time, Premier should indeed be concerned about being sued. Ironically, according to the legendary beatminer Soulman, “Hip-Hop is [and has always been] about jackin’ sounds from records.” In the late 1980s, the advent of digital samplers significantly impacted the
Hip-Hop records speak of other records, and now sampled records speak of Hip-Hop records. Collectors trace the signification back to its original source and then allow the original to spin multiple narratives
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For a true collector, the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia
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manner in which Hip-Hop tracks were constructed and, in the process, altered the role of the DJ, the original sampler. Digital samplers isolated cropped fragments of sound with ease, and then the fragments could be looped, layered, or both in as dense or sparse a fashion as desired. As the classic break records became rarer, pricier, and overused, several artists including Public Enemy, Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and the Beastie Boys took sampling in fresh directions by raiding extensive archives of records with a variety of startling, innovative techniques. DJ Shadow, the latest sampling savant, explains: “Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It’s about drawing from what’s around you, and subverting it and decontextualizing it.”11 His first full length album Endtroducing…. was composed entirely with countless vinylbased samples which, as his liner notes suggest, “reflect a lifetime of vinyl culture.” Influenced by the beat chopping methodology of Premier, Pete Rock, and Large Professor, Shadow found creative ways to loop a chopped beat with his sampler of choice, the Akai MPC60, and make it sound as natural as a preexisting loop. He explains his reason for sampling the soundless air space off a record: So let’s say you’ve sampled little pieces of a loop, and you don’t want to make it sound choppy. You don’t want to hear the decay cut off on the snare or whatever, or no ambiance on the kick. So I like to give it ambiance if it’s not already there. Sometimes I’ll just sample air off the record and lay that in. That’s where the fade comes in…. It creates a softness that blends in, and essentially there isn’t ever any empty space. Sometimes, though, an unexpected sound can bleed into the chops. For “The Number Song,” Shadow sampled a breakbeat that had a vocalist singing “huh, yeah, come on.” He chopped the beat into 16 parts and only sampled the drum sounds where the vocalist wasn’t
singing. The resulting track, though, didn’t entirely omit his voice, as Shadow explains: “If you listen carefully, you can hear the reverb of the guy talking, but you can’t hear what he’s saying. So it gives the break a kind of eerie heaviness, a tone.” Shadow also identifies other found techniques such as time-extending (accomplished by repeating a certain note of a sample) and time-stretching (chopping a sample and then fading in/ fading out each chop to morph the sample at a different tempo). Astonishingly, a more recent DJ Shadow track, “High Noon,” was composed with almost 100 drum chops! The Record Collector’s Labyrinth III. Jorge Luis Borges’s representation of the infinite library in his story “The Library of Babel” provides an apt metaphor for the endless recombinant potential inherent in digitally sampling records. His mysterious labyrinth contains all combinations of all words and letters; “For every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences.” Borges’s choice of musical description evokes a library of sounds, much like the worldwide supply of records. The texts, and the records, silently wait for someone to unlock their mystery. Borges’s official searchers, known as library “inquisitors,” struggle mightily to make any sense of the library or its catalogs. Few inquisitors uncover something useful while endlessly perusing room after room of books. Yet only then, possible patterns or theories emerge. The hours spent searching for records and then searching each and every record groove by groove, regardless of genre, artist, or cover, would rival the work of Borges’s inquisitors. Likewise, only a handful of expert producers out of the multitudes can continuously locate samples, loops, and beats, and then artistically stitch them together to form a dope track. Of course, Borges’s library was generously sampled by Umberto Eco in The Continued on page 59