"cluttered with regurgitations"

A piece by Chal Ravens at DJ mag asks "what is the future of sampling"?

The first half  is more about the present (the craze for edits on the dance scene and bootleg tracks that rip from well-known pop songs) and even more so about the past of sampling. Indeed it's a bit of a samplescape itself, with loads of quotes (including one from Kieran!) and some fairly familiar history (stuff about the Akai MPC, court cases in the early '90s).

Gets really interesting in the second half when it looks at the artistic potential and cultural implications of AI.

Like the STEMS technology that enables producers and deejays to cleanly separate the instruments within a sampled stretch of music. (Similar AI demixing technology enabled the remixing of Beatles albums where the four-track technology of the era had meant that tracks had been bounced down, smushing together instrumental parts inseparably - until now)

Then there's software that can "generate entire songs based on text descriptions" like Riffusion . "Through text prompts, the model can find the midpoint between otherwise unrelated sounds — what’s between, say, Goa trance and Don Cherry’s trumpet? Ask Riffusion and it’ll spit out a sample that imagines exactly that, despite the impossibility of making the “real” thing.". 

Then there's deepfake raps, where a producer can generate a convincing simulacrum of a guest feature by a star artist - not quoting an existing performance and redeploying (as with jungle borrowing bits of dancehall and gangsta rap) but creating an all-new performance in another's style. 

I wondered though - do either of those really count as sampling? Aren't they more like AI-assisted pastiche, or AI-assisted impersonation, or AI-assisted identity-theft? 

The text-to-audio stuff seems like it's outsourcing the kind of zany hybridization that supergroup initiators like Bill Laswell liked to do. Or wackily eclectic genre-colliders like. I don't know, Primus, that kind of band. The creativity reduces to thinking up the goofy idea;  the craft of implementing it is left to the technology.  But as Jaron Lanier says piquantly in the piece, the struggle to realise an unlikely or adventurously preposterous idea is the point:  “Would you want robots to have sex for you so you don’t have to? I mean, what is life for?”  

Likewise the things that Holly Herndon have done with training a vocal entity by feeding it human singing seem so far removed in process, intent and outcome from sampling as audio-quote that it doesn't really make sense to think of Spawn et al in the same breath as mash-ups and collages. 

Ditto patten's deployment of " text-to-audio AI samples from Riffusion, a model based on a database of sonograms" on Mirage FM. This feels more like a convoluted form of synthesis than a citational mode in the tradition of Pop Art / Appropriation Art. A couple of steps beyond Todd Edwards's sample choir into effectively sourceless ethereality. 

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One thing worth noting is that until recently - the rash of interpolations and quotes in pop songs, driven by publishing companies looking to exploit assets to the utmost - overt sampling had become rather rare in mainstream pop. It was particularly noticeable with hip hop during the 2000s and 2010s: the whole historical branch of it based around the deejay-as-crate-digger became a niche underground aesthetic (Dilla being the most visible exponent). Probably the only major mainstream rap auteur still basing his thing around recognisable sample quotes during this period was Kanye. Whereas trap, for instance, hardly ever featured samples. When it did - Future's "Mask Off" with the use of an obscure soundtrack song, Migos clumsily deploying "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" -  it was striking, had a pronounced throwback feel. For the most part trap - and mainstream rap generally - in the 21st Century wasn't about breaks and loops;  it  involved programming beats, synths and keybs, and other elements assembled and organized within digital audio workstations. Beat-makers might still sometimes call themselves "DJ", but what they did had little relation to the deejay skill set. 

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Harvest Festival edition - Elizabeth Parker, The Stone Tape, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology Vol. 2

Trunk Records recently put out a very nice compendium of short spooky works by long-term local resident Elizabeth Parker, who'll be familiar to many parishioners from her volunteer work for the Radiophonic Workshop.  The vinyl long-player is called Future Perfect. And what an attractive cover! 

This piece in particular struck me as Caretaker-adjacent in theme and vibe if not texture and method

Release rationale 

Elizabeth Parker is a composer you may not have heard of until now. Well here she is, in all her musical glory, having worked for decades at the front line of British electronics, radiophonics, soundracks and more. This is an album full of musical ideas ahead of the curve, with contemporary technology that was to go on and very much shape the future of sound we know now. From classic tape loop techniques to modern sampling concepts you will find dark ambience, drones, beer adverts and drifts into space. This is the first ever Elizabeth Parker LP and represents (with 26 tracks) a very small retrospective of her extraordinarily prolific and commercial output. Not to be missed.

Ms. Parker back in the day being interviewed about soundtracking The Living Planet

An Electronic Sound interview with Parker, in which she talks about being "the last" Radiophonic composer and also her encounters with Delia Derbyshire. 

A Sound on Sound interview about Parker's post-Workshop career 

Underscores and FX that aren't on the Trunk comp 

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Something else BBC-vibed... 

Release rationale via Bandcamp:

Christmas Day 2022 marked 50 years since the original broadcast of the ground-breaking BBC supernatural thriller, 'The Stone Tape', written by Nigel Kneale.

In early 2023 Hidden Britain commissioned a group of UK based musicians to produce a new piece of work inspired by this extraordinary 1972 TV film.

The result is a 16 track tape compilation which blends reimagined theme tunes and Radiophonic incidental motifs with dark ambience and hauntological synth explorations.

The artists involved in this release come from some of the finest electronic and experimental labels currently operating in the UK, such as Wayside & Woodland, Clay Pipe, Castles in Space & Spun Out Of Control.

Out in late October, in an edition of 50. 

Limited edition C90 transparent cassette tape with foldout artwork inlay and exclusive sleeve notes by writer and comedian Stewart Lee. Also ships with an exclusive A3 Risograph print on 270gsm Colourset paper.

Tracklist

1. The British Stereo Collective - Written In Stone

2.The Hardy Tree - Chuffy

3.The Heartwood Institute - Taskerlands

4.The Night Monitor - It's In The Computer 02:57

5. Mike Dickinson - Brock's Prayer

6. SWLLWS - There Are Words

7. The Lost Past Society - We're Getting Data All The Time

8. Charles Vaughan - The Summoning

9. Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - Comparing The Properties Of Stone, Brick And Concrete 03:52

10. Drew Mulholland - The Strange Beyond

11. E.L. Heath - Whiston

12. The Soulless Party - Vigilamus

13. The Metamorph - The Uncertainty Principle

14. The Toy Library - Lethbridge

15. Nicholas Bullen - When They Return

16. The Twelve Hour Foundation - Time's Patina

Now one doesn't want to be a wet blanket - but isn't this kind of thing a teensy bit on the late side? 

Still, perhaps to expect hauntology to be timely, or to evolve, is to misunderstand the genre... ... it wouldn't shuffle off the scene punctually... it would malinger on, fixated on the same totems and  talismans... 

This appears to be Hidden Britain's first audio release - they are a company that sells "handmade signs and print from British Folk Horror and unsettling TV. Film and literature" [sic]. Again, can't help  wondering, looking over their product range, how such a settled canon could still unsettle... 

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One of the contributors to The Stone Tape  - Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan -  had a new record out last month, Building a New Town, on Castles in Space.

Release rationale:

"Recently found during the closure of New Town House, Warrington, these tapes formed part of the advertising by the Development Corporation in the early 1970s. Showcasing a more pastoral, rural idyll than the architecture might imply, this represented an opportunity for people from smoke grimed cities to escape into a greener, healthier setting."

The new towns claimed the perfect suburban life in a green paradise with spacious parks and tree-lined boulevards. This chimed with post-hippy ideals of returning to nature and living The Good Life. The music filters through period inspirations such as Pentangle, Mike Oldfield and early Tangerine Dream."

There was also this from earlier in the summer

Artwork for the previous releases:

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A last minute addition to the newsletter  - the announcement of Vol. 2 of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology! It's out on October 6th.

Check it out here

Release rationale: 

Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology Vol. 2 – Raidió na hEorpa

This is the second volume of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology, which is a music compilation anthology attempting to preserve the fictional history of a small composer community based in rural Ireland existing from the late 60’s until the late 80’s. The project is written by the Irish composer and artist Neil Quigley.

This second volume in the series is released as a compact disc and  an accompanying 50-page booklet contextualising the organisation and each of the selected tracks in probably too much detail. It is released on the record label Miúin.

Volume 2 of the anthology was influenced by a variety of Irish news stories and cultural ephemera, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, Garry Shandling, and post-war electronic music of the U.S., U.K and Europe.

 

No videos as yet for the new compilation but here's some reminders of Vol. 1

Good Citations (a syndrome identified)

 

 

I believe this singles review of Chapterhouse, from September 8th 1990, is when I more or less formulate the idea of "record collection rock". There had been earlier intimations I should imagine, when pondering Creation Records and Primal Scream, or when confronted with a Lenny Kravitz single in the heap each time it was my turn to do the Singles Page. But here I'm identifying it as a syndrome and an affliction that's a hallmark of the age. Records that are just "good bits" from an individual's vinyl archive. (Typo alert - "funny wah wah riffs" should be "funky wah wah riffs", although I quite like the idea of "funny wah wah riffs" now I think about it).

Then right below it I take issue with another kind of bittiness - sampling when it's just a patchwork as opposed to an uncanny entity.  The postmodern emptiness of good bits that don't add up to more-than-the-sum, let alone something new-under-the-sun. 

Norman Cook would go on to build a career on teetering to one side or other of this divide between collage-as-bits-and-pieces versus collage-as-new-thing-in-itself.

Beyond Retro

 

Retroland

 

A book whose title caught my eye while in the UK last week -  understandably!.

Presumably a play on Betjeman's Metroland.

Publisher's blurb:

 Over the past fifty years, fiction in English has never looked more various. Books bulkier than Victorian three-deckers appear alongside works of minimalist brevity, and experiments with form have produced everything from verse novels to Twitter-thread narratives. This is truly a golden age.   But what unites this kaleidoscopic array of genres and styles?   Celebrated writer and critic Peter Kemp shows how modern writers are obsessed with the past. In a series of engaging and illuminating chapters, Retroland traces this novelistic preoccupation with history, from the imperial and the political to the personal and the literary.   Featuring famous names from across the United Kingdom, United States, and the wider Anglophone world, ranging from Salman Rushdie to Sarah Waters, Toni Morrison to Hilary Mantel, this is a work of remarkable synthesis and clarity—a wonderfully readable and enjoyably opinionated guide to our current literary landscape.

The Telegraph says: 

Peter Kemp has written a history of the English novel since 1970. (Retroland describes itself as a ­history of fiction in English, but doesn’t refer to short fiction, and hardly touches on North American, Australian, or even Scottish or Irish writing.)....  Another history might have con­sidered the impact on fiction of debates about cultural appropriation, and certainly the internet and social media.

Kemp’s overall analysis is that ­fiction in English has been driven by an obsession with the past. In particular, he says that historical fic­tion is now at the centre of ­fiction’s achievements. His second con­tention is that fiction in ­English started to be written by subjects of the old empire with invigorating effect.

....This might have been a contribution to the debate if it had been written when it was first conceived of. As it is, it bears all the marks of a manuscript tinkered with over ­decades, the mind and opinions of its author never shifting from those far-off days or paying attention to major developments. A history of contemporary fiction from a book reviewer who, fundamentally, is rather scared of new things. 

The Guardian also quite caustic: 

 a pell-mell survey of the past half-century of British fiction...  it sets out to argue that modern novels are overwhelmingly preoccupied by the past; a thesis that’s persuasive enough, and one that possibly goes some way to explaining why, come Booker time, writers who buck the trend by staying in the here and now – Gwendoline Riley, Sarah Moss, Ross Raisin – seldom get a look in.

Kemp’s tantalising introduction sketches the extent of what his subtitle dubs the “dazzling diversity” of fiction in the period at hand, taking in “a novel that uses only the 483 words spoken by Ophelia in Hamlet” (Let Me Tell You by Paul Griffiths), another “narrated by the first edition of Joseph Roth’s 1924 novel Rebellion” (Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages), and another “that excludes the verb ‘to have’” (Next by Christine Brooke-Rose). Yet you won’t find any of them in Retroland proper, home, instead, to discussions of Midnight’s Children, Atonement, Possession, et al – not so much off the beaten track as stuck on the M25.....

But no matter; you read on eagerly, keen to know Kemp’s explanation for the patterns he justly identifies: the “pervasive[ness of] the dual-narrative, double time-scheme novel which juxtaposes a contemporary story with one set in an earlier era” (yes! What’s with that?); the ubiquity of the “trauma plot” (ditto); and the enduring 90s revival of historical fiction, which the late Helen Dunmore attributed to pre-millennial anxiety about what lay ahead in “the blank, silent sheet of years around the corner”.

.... Despite the setup, Retroland is really a pretext for a whistlestop tour of dozens of novels loosely bunched into four groups –novels of empire, novels of “buried trauma”, novels about history and novels built on older novels (such as Smith’s On Beauty, pegged to EM Forster’s Howards End, or Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein), all of which rush by in a largely contextless blizzard of titles, names and plots, with next to nothing by way of logical signposting.... 

About his subject, Kemp knows all there is to know – that’s clear – yet as a tour guide he left me muttering at the back of the group, itching to sneak away to the dodgier locales we’re warned off....

Sometimes Retroland reads less like a literary-critical survey than the minutes of a 50-year colloquy between every author who ever put pen to paper: ... When Kemp segues from Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch to The Little Stranger to The Paying Guests to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair, or from John Lanchester to Zadie Smith and Sathnam Sanghera, or from Francis Spufford to Carys Davies and George Saunders, he’s just pasting his old Sunday Times reviews right in. Those examples account for about 10% of the text and there’s a lot more where they came from – he’s been reviewing for 40 years....

Did Kemp think no one would notice that Retroland is substantially an elaborate patchwork of self-plagiarism? Or does it not matter?...   Did Kemp (or his editor) even figure out who Retroland was for? Either way, it’s a runaway train – and the carriages are full of recycled plot summary.

Irish Times is kinder

"Kemp's loose thesis – the past is a present country – leads us to some good writing (his own included)"