We have a special guest editorial from Point Blank Electronic Music School and it’s all about sampling. Sampling is the use of someone else’s recording within your own to create something new. It can range from lifting sections of drums or other isolated instruments to entire musical ideas and right down to milliseconds of material. It’s such a common technique that we’ve developed instruments to…
Norwegian duo Fredfades & Ivan Ave dropped their EP, entitled Breathe, in February and we’re only just getting round to hearing it. Better late than never… Oslo, home to over 600,000 people, Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream and a pair of the dopest hip hop artists you’ll find this side of the North Sea. Their names are Fredfades and Ivan Ave and back in…
Ashton James Brown opens our new feature, “The Sampleface Museum”, with an examination of the influential E-mu SP-1200. Welcome to The Sampleface Museum, a new series of articles where we take a look at various iconic samplers, synthesisers and drum machines. We discuss their functions, the role they’ve played in shaping the sound of hip hop and other genres, their cultural impact and how they…
Preservation’s Barry White-inspired SePtember 1200 is a treat and a free download. It was Barry White’s birthday yesterday. The man with the unmistakeable voice would have been 68 and as a tribute to the late velvet vocalist, Mos Def’s DJ and producer Preservation released a free instrumental album called SePtember 1200. Now, the title is something of a double entendre – the capital S and…
Boora’s The Art Of 10 Seconds (Part Two) is now available for streaming on Soundcloud. Blunted Astronaut Records’ Boora has returned bearing gifts. Well, the second part of his The Art Of 10 Seconds project and his theme has remained the same: exploring Soviet jazz from the ’60s and ’70s. It starts with some Russians talking and laughing before excavating the weird and wonderful world…
Russian producer Boora has released The Art Of 10 Seconds, the first part of a free beat compilation made up of 70s Soviet jazz. Boora’s new beat tape is entrenched in nostalgia. For a start, he decided to make the entire compilation solely on his SP-1200, which instantly gets our vote and then there’s the choice of samples: 70s jazz from the Soviet Union, movie…
Gensu Dean & Planet Asia show their Faces On The Dollar for their new video. There’s still life in the old dog yet when it comes to samplers. The Grand Imperial Gensu Dean flexed his SP-1200 muscle for Planet Asia on their joint album Abrasions. A trip to Fresno provided the perfect video opportunity for the pair in Faces On The Dollar. Starting at a…
Blunted Astronaut Records and MPadrums present a hard-hitting remix of T.R.A.C.’s “Sea Of Tranquility”. There’s something so good about a jazz sample played through a SP-1200. You can instantly recognise the 12-bit quality and know where it came from. Spanish producer MPadrums put those skills to good use when he remixed T.R.A.C.’s “Sea Of Tranquility”. The banging drums, classic filter and intermittent horns give the…
DXA get all jazzy with their new video for Ice’s Jazz. Ah, jazz. Where would we be without it? It has inspired millions and provided rich content for sampling purposes, not only in hip hop but electronic music, rock, funk and so on. Ice’s Jazz is one of those tunes influenced heavily by the genre and it comes from DXA, a hip hop group from…
