I felt a real craving for beat-making today. After practicing some bluegrass rolls on banjo and fingerpicking on acoustic guitar (because some of the existing/new song ideas will need it), and after playing the latest Westside Gunn (Supreme Clientele, 2018) and Evidence (Weather Or Not, 2018) albums—both receiving best hip-hop albums of the year nods by various rap tastemakers—I guess I felt somewhat (too?) drawn into the experiences of the mini records I’m making and a tad removed from my hip-hop M.O.
I understand this is necessary. There are discernible benefits to becoming fully immersed in a style/form/era of music. Listening to it almost exclusively for a period of time, picking up the relevant instruments and engaging in record-making, pursuing the auralities and the recording processes each music form requires does result in pretty convincing results: little sound worlds. But, at the same time, this ‘immersion’ can make you precious about the content, carrying you away into production objectives that go beyond the crafting of effective content for subsequent sampling. I guess the acoustic folk phase I have been in, today, felt like the opposite of the hip-hop signatures I am into. At times like these, I do a short review of all the recorded content, which ranges from Blues, to Soul, Funk, Dub, Rock and Americana, to remind myself of the forest, as opposed to the individual ‘song-trees’. And I am aware I’ve started using the term ‘songs’ for some of the samples. As some of the older multitracks are sounding rather complete and multilayered, it is time to consider the production of vocal elements for some of the samples. In order for vocals to be meaningful, though, I require concepts (rather than just ‘yeahs’ and ‘oohs’) and this has led me to some more complete songwriting recently. It is at this point I need to balance how far I go with the completion (production) of these songs, as this is not the end objective (and it is rather time consuming). I am consciously reminding myself that I can stop when I think I have some convincing sections. As ever, one way to establish whether the content is working in context, is to create some context, via my parallel beat-layering approach. A few observations from the last few days:
Songwriting for sound
Picking up from above, it hit me that what I have been doing is, creating music in order to create sound. The recent ‘songs’ made this clear. I’ve always felt that the issue was never one of borrowing (and chopping up) motifs/phrases that gives sample-based Hip Hop its unique signature/aesthetic. Or, I should say it is not solely a musical argument. Much of the literature has dealt with ‘musical borrowing’. But this would not explain why samplists go for records, rather than just recordings. My pursuit throughout this journey has been to understand the sonic variables that explain this differentiation. My process, it seems, has focused on creating musical excuses, so to speak, in order to be able to make mini records, or phonographic moments. I’ve been creating riffs, jams, overdubs, even songs, as musical seeds that allow me to then create, capture and manipulate the sound that carries these musical ideas. I have been creating musical moments in order to sonify them and, in turn, produce them as small record statements. I could actually picture sound travelling in this home studio where I have spent so much time recording and, looking back at all the instruments laid down at the end of these long sessions, I see sonifying tools which needed musical ideas, musical context in order to produce meaningful sounds that could then be captured and made phonographic.
The phonographic ‘other’
The full immersion into these moments has given the resulting sonic objects a musical, stylistic and—importantly—sonic coherency that makes them feel as separate entities even when they are/become part of a new beat. There are plenty of telling examples in hip-hop discography that illustrate this, but—to leave the context of my content for a moment—I will pick a track from Westside Gunn’s recent album, Stefflon Don*: the separation of new versus sampled (previously recorded) elements is highly magnified/accentuated on this track. Westside Gunn’s voice carries markers of contemporary recording and production techniques: close-mic recording, EQ presence and air, compression, all of which differentiate it clearly from the vocal samples included in the looped phonographic sample (can’t find what it is, but it is very haunting). Whether the sample is old, sampled from vinyl or another format resulting in a fuzzier, muddier quality (or even produced to sound old and other-wordly), the combination of tremolo/delayed guitar and haunting vocal vowels that it consists of (it all sounds pitch-shifted to a lower key as well, which adds to the less pronounced top end in the spectral content) feels decidedly ‘other’ to the rap, and kick-snare-hats-sub/boom that comprise the new elements. The two ‘streams’, so to speak, (old and new) become clear at 0’43”-44” where the sample drops out.
I have stayed away from talking about ‘phonographic otherness’ up to now, to avoid coining a fuzzy term that veils the sonic variables that contribute to the phenomenon. But I think it will be useful to introduce it and define it after all, if anything, in order to drive an explanation that deals with the sonic aspects of the phenomenon. I think Stefflon Don illustrates this to an extreme extent. From a mix perspective, beyond the spectral differences between the new (present, defined) and sampled (warmer, featuring less clarity, mids and top end) elements, and any format/media-based distortions on the sample, there are also differences on the depth axis and the speed of sounds (dynamics, envelopes, transients): the sample feels quite three-dimensional, full of spatial resonances (particularly on the modulated guitar, but also around the vocals). The whole sonic ‘bubble’ is held together by its harmonic distortion, the colouration from the master medium (and the recording signal flows in its making) and any playback devices used (e.g. record player). Of course, the whole sonic ‘world’ of the sample has been manipulated in terms of pitch, which accentuates its character by dragging both pitch (frequency content) and time down, in the context of the new beat. Little effort seems spent on ‘gluing’ the samples with the new elements (this seems intentional, part of a lo-fi statement), apart from one heavy-handed but effective strategy: the heavy compression over the whole beat (new and old elements combined), which makes it ‘pump’ in a fashion where the featured sample expands and contracts in terms of volume, in response to the sub-and-drums, interacting with them, at times drowning the kick drum and at others allowing the hi-hat to jump out of their combined balance. This is extreme but feels intentional, paying dues to lo-fi references (such as RZA’s production and also all kinds of Glitch Hop), but also rhythmically and dynamically ‘marrying’ the two streams in the production. The ‘featured’ entity of the beat is treated as such: pumped, cut twice, kept separate, kept ‘other’ whilst integrated at the same time through the heavy compression approach. The surrounding ambience around the sample (elements) expands and contracts in tandem creating a dynamic spatial effect (reverb pumping), which is not a frequent feature/choice of a more traditional mix.
This belonging together of the elements that comprise the sample, this retainment of the sonic world of the sample whilst featuring it within a new beat, and the simultaneous celebration (in terms of production choices) of its ‘otherness’ whilst integrating it into the new musical context (e.g. chopping, pumping with the beat) is a defining sonic characteristic of sample-based Hip Hop; I would go as far as to say it is the sonic signature of Boom Bap. Sample-based Hip Hop borrows, features and manipulates not elements, but full masters, expanding and reshaping complete mix ‘staging’ that had already been committed to a master. As a form of not just music-making but also music mixing, sample-based Hip Hop is defined by the sound of the coming together of full mix ‘stages’ against manipulation typically deployed in sample-based processes. We are actually hearing both new programming and new mixing interacting with previously committed mix stages. So, it is not just the sound of ‘re-imagined’ sequences or phrases, but also the sound of creative ways of integrating phonographic sonic objects (mix worlds) into meta phonographic processes.
* A lot of this also applies to Evidence’s To Make a Long Story Longer (feat. Jonwayne, 2018) containing (very warped) samples from Spanky Wilson’s Love Is Like an Old Old Man (1969). Westside Gunn’s Ric Martel (feat. Roc Marciano, 2018) is another striking example.
TBC…
