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by Daniel M Karlsson

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It adds up 04:50
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about

Like sfourth-dpell-checked fevethrough itsr dreams deffscribing space faceless egections, the present moment is revealo haed tve beree reflen constructed only from what has p and rebeen. Spliced uarranged, standing and on dierent grou timends every recalled.

Daniel M Karlsson is a composer by day, gentleman jewel thief by night from Stockholm. Here's what he says about the work:

"When I was a kid I would sneak up at night to record Yo! MTV Raps. I had to be real quiet or else my pops would make me regret it. He was not having any of it. He was convinced that Hip hop was a terrible influence on me and something he could will out of existence by forbidding it in his house. Most likely that added to my already heightened interest in Hip hop. It felt like another world to me. This whole other type of expression. From the start I was always really floored by the added contextual dimension of this kind of listening where you know that the music contains found sounds. It is literally music made out of music. Shards broken off assembled into an entirely different surface, reflecting and shedding light in beautiful and immensely fascinating new ways.

I am pursuing making this particular music as a fan of Hip hop and someone who wants to connect with it's history.

That added layer of recontextualizing sound is interesting to me again now, here in the future. After a certain point you just could not make those kinds of records in the commercial sphere and I think something was lost artistically.

The myth of Electronic Music’s origin, as it was handed down to me, was always told through the perspective of the tape recorder being the unquestionable beginning of it all. Then later, the result of that historical perspective sees the tape recorder grow to the size of the studio, with it’s undeniable monumental prestige. If we adjust the point of departure to a more recent technological breakthrough, then the scope of our story changes dramatically. To use the MPC as the starting point for an alternative telling of history emerges as an opportunity. If we dare to follow this line of thinking further, we arrive at taking actions in the present, in order to create the kind of future we would most prefer.

The story we now construct has ramifications for where density occurs within the story. My preference is for density to occur closer to our time. Year Zero is no longer the end of WWII with that of the Americans “liberating” the tape recorder from the rubble of continental Europe. Instead, the year is 1988. Public Enemy burst into a popular culture running at break-neck-speed with their debut release It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. In the same year N.W.A released Straight Outta Compton.

Our origin story is no longer one of first meanderings of applying an alien technology inside of a void. Instead the very modus operandi is referentiality. The sampler and sampling, not the tape recorder and tape recordings of trains or doors and sighs.

As stated above the history of Electronic Music begins with the tape recorder and then explodes outward into the physical monument of the studio. Our new origin story is one of implosion. From the decisively physical 10,5 Kilos of the original MPC-60 to the weightlessness of software. Both stories originate from a single machine but constitutes wildly different points of departure.

I argue that sampler softwares, running inside of computers, are direct descendants of the MPC. As software they are now devoid of physical form. A computer can perform the task of any specialized machine like the tape recorder or the sampler. A general purpose computer is incorporeal. Purpose defined in software.

It wasn’t until much later that I realised that the “magical machine” that I had heard about when I was a kid listening over and over to tapes of Yo! MTV Raps was the MPC. I first heard the story when I was a kid listening to NWA, Public Enemy and De La Soul. Then finally when I was older from a friend who turned me on to J-Dilla’s Donuts. He told me the story of how the record got made as we were listening to the album together. The last celebrated experimental Hip hop record. It was also the last big record to run the numbers on getting all of those samples cleared, where the backers felt confident they would recoup their investment. Cultural industries.

Could sampling be seen as a radical act today? Sampling is something I'm certain we would be well served to readdress, in both thinking and practice. Maybe we could entertain the idea that there were possibilities presented to artists in the past, in the form of a very special brush, that for whatever reason have been insufficiently explored since their introduction. Paradoxically taking on the role of the old hat at the same time. FM certainly is like that. Additive Synthesis as well. These two examples can easily be thought of through a purely technical perspective. Since both FM and Additive Synthesis offer an apparent abundance in the parameter space, it becomes a problem of organizing efforts to explore them in powerful (abstracted) ways. We are left to our own devices here. We are not posing a threat to anyone noodling around inside of our belly buttons engaging with this work. On the other hand sampling isn’t comparatively as underexplored from a technical perspective. Might could be that there’s a case to be made about how sampling is underexplored from a referential and social perspective. This is largely due to how fraught with legal concerns sampling became. There was, I think, a panic that spread quickly. A scrambling then ensued to safeguard intellectual property belonging to large corporations."

This text contains excerpts taken from The MPC is Now a Lens section of Daniel's master thesis Mapping The Valleys of The Uncanny.
danielmkarlsson.com/map/

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released December 4, 2020

Words by Bob J. Levin

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