this is not memorex: sample culture revisited by Greg Smith - In familiarizing myself with this work over the past few weeks, I’ve felt an odd sense of nostalgia developing. These projects collectively highlight various facets of what we have dubbed sample culture, that is the continued evolution of the triumph of the fragment. There are dozens of threads that can be traced back to the 1980s and while I am personally indebted to the potent combination of Brian Eno and David Byrne, the perpetual litigation of Negativland, and the sonic collage of the Bomb Squad, I am going to instead direct my attention to another dusty artifact from collective memory.

A few years ago while perusing soulseek, I stumbled across a collection of recorded DJ mixes that had been aired on WJLB in Detroit in the late 1980s. These tapes documented a few choice moments in the mix from the storied career of The Wizard (aka Jeff Mills). Nestled amongst the flurry of tracks were the expected station IDs as well as a recorded message that repeatedly reminded me that “THIS IS NOT MEMOREX,” that is, the performance was not pre-taped. As I sat there post-listening, I found it very odd that the audience would need to be reassured that the editing and reconfiguring of largely sample based music was not itself sampled (read: studio constructed). More >>