It is indicative of how much it has been absorbed into the general techniques of how popular music is made, that you hardly ever hear anyone refer to sampling as a separate thing. Yet quietly and without much fanfare lone individuals, probably in some home built studio constructed in their cellar, have continued to craft and hone there skills as sampling music makers. There are those who use it as just one tool among many that they construct a piece of music out of. Then there are the purists, who make music entirely from sampled elements off past recordings, the radio, the street. One of the above is Prefuse 73, aka - Scott Herren.
Precise 73 is just one of his many aliases, he's a prolific producer and has his skills involved in many musical groups and collectives. He's been producing music under Precise 73 since the early noughties. These earlier pieces are invariably jazzy, hip hop inspired, dance and beat arrangements. Though actually most would be very difficult to boogie to. For Herren music is about pushing that sonic envelope wide, and taking that adventure as far as it can go.
What brought me to his experimental sound assemblages was encountering one of his Failing Institute recordings on You Tube. These I just love. They are so beautifully composed you might be forgiven for not realising they're often entirely made from sampled sources. They strike out a very sophisticated, laid back lounge of an aural landscape. Its hard to really convey just what joy I find in listening to them. They hover tantalisingly between slow slinky jazz and the undulating flow of a hip hop inflected ambient music. They can both reward close attention and a soft meld into the background.
There are four Failing Institute recordings available through Bandcamp. Here are the links to them on Bandcamp - with my ratings in brackets.
The Failing Institute of the Sampled Source (******)
The Failing Institute of the Contras (***)
The Failing Institute of the Human Voice (****)
The Failing Institute of Drums and Percussion (*****)
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