For Bandcamp Daily, George Grella collected some works from the pioneers of musique concrète including Pierre Schaeffer, Edgard Varèse, and Delia Derbyshire.
Musique concrète is an idea that falls under the acousmatic music umbrella, which is any music that’s made to be heard over speakers rather than played live in the presence of listeners. Schaeffer took the idea further while working at French national radio, using turntables as instruments and seeing what would happen if he played things at slower or faster speeds, or backward. With magnetic tape he realized he could record sounds—instruments but also any and every kind of sound—and use those in the same way as notes on staff paper, as material with which to build compositions. Sound became an object he could manipulate, something concrète.
Without musique concrète, there’d be no sampling and no Sampleface. Imagine that!