Workshop Cut and Paste Culture at TU Berlin
Fortunately it is never too late to come up with a blog entry about an event quite some time ago — especially when it revives good memories. Georg Fischer’s (TU Berlin, Graduiertenkolleg “Innovation Society Today”) and Hannes Liechti’s (University of Bern, Graduate School of the Arts) sampling workshop “Cut and Paste Culture” on July 14th for instance. Breaking up the format of typical doctoral candidate workshops, this day was not only dedicated to abstract figurations of real life phenomenon, but to the real life itself. Thus as well the participants giving talks, as the talkative audience were composed of sampling researches and sampling artists.
In a short introduction Georg Fisher set the day’s main topic — sampling, of course — and focused the attention to three distinct aspects of discussing this cultural technique that is strongly connected to music practices: referentiality (“fifty shades of referentiality”), newness (original sampling?), sovereignty of copying (the politics behind sampling). These central ideas emerged regularly during the day.
Giuseppe Zevolli’s (King’s College London) talk about “Sampling between Politics and Poptimism” explored the identity in contemporary club music and questions of taste. Thereby he asked about a mainstream in sampling and a possible loss of meaning. Hannes Liechti further differentiated types of or approaches towards sampling (a technical approach, a semantic approach and a social approach) and proposed that in contrast to the hip hop culture EDM does not care too much about the recognition of a sample’s musical context (what the concrete sample refers to).
Following this Soraya Lutangu aka Bonaventure and Jan Hennig aka Kabuki gave highly interesting insights in their sample based work. Soraya took the audience on a tour through her electronic producing software. She showed the depth and the interconnectedness of the interwoven samples that construct her work. Besides she gave an impression of the variety of sound resources that qualify as sampling material for her. Sampling sounds of friends and family or her environment adds a perspective from where reference (and in a way with it significance) can arise from. Kabuki on the other hand made the process visible, how his crate digging works. Thereby he opened up the astonishing informative contexts the wrapping of a vinyl can give the informed sampling artist, probably leading to the discovery of the one sampling the artist was eventually looking for.
Before a round table wrapped up a day’s work, I (University of Duisburg-Essen) showed first impressions of my fieldwork concerning beatproducers trying and struggling with the effort of monetizing their creative work.
Thanks a lot for the great day two months ago, with great views from the 9th floor across Berlin, tasty food from somewhere close-by, and interesting people from all around the world — for even a Mexican composer was among the workshop’s participants.
