San Francisco, 1964. A Christian preacher called Brother
Walter is talking about Noah:
“He began to warn the people. He said: after a while, it’s gonna rain
after a while. For 40 days and for 40 nights, and the people din’ believe him.
And they begin to laugh at him, and they begin to mock him, and they begin to
say it aint gon’ rain.”
Anyone else might have ignored him, but Steve Reich was
interested enough to record it on two tape recorders he was carrying. He then took
a short section of the speech, and put it in a repeating loop. He set two loops
playing at once, and made one go gradually out of sync. This created a
fascinating and revolutionary piece of music; It’s Gonna Rain (1965).
The next year, he made Come
Out, using a recording from the police testimony of Daniel Hamm, who had
been involved in the 1964 Harlem Race Riots.
These pieces sealed Reich’s reputation as an innovative
composer, but he was not the first to use sampling. That honour falls to Pierre
Shaeffer. In 1948, he produced a series of pieces called Five Studies of
Noises. Here’s the first:
Another early figure was the Karlheinz Stockhausen, who
often used ‘found sounds’ in his compositions, or came up with other ways to
use non-musical noises, such as helicopter whirring.
These classical musicians’ experiments were all a bit weird,
and sampling took a while to catch on in other genres. No pop musicians used
sampling until John Kongos included a recording of African tribal drumming in
his 1971 hit He’s Gonna Step on you Again:
In 1981, two innovative albums made heavy use of sampling.
The Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Technodelic,
and David Byrne and Brian Eno’s superb My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Eno sampled recordings of an angry radio host,
an exorcist, a preacher, and Muslim chants, and Byrne added funky guitar
backing in the studio.
Nowadays people would rightly associate sampling with
hip-hop artists, who mostly sample other songs. A personal favourite is DJ
Shadow’s Endtroducing, the first
entirely sampled album.
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