Never really liked that style much, but it seems strange that it's died off.
Do you mean like Public Enemy etc?
I think it died off when lawyers got involved and sample clearance got too expensive.
Lawyers didn't stop all the mid-90s stuff like DJ Shadow, DJ Crush, etc (which was the nadir) and they haven't stopped the 2manyDJs neo-Jive Bunny thing, so I guess it just went out of fashion, musically. The development of music software that emulates live instruments (orchestras, keys) may have played a part.
Avalanches style? Does anyone make tunes this way anymore? Not in a Girl Talk/2manyDJs megamix way, just tunes that you don't have to actually know what the loops are to appreciate it.
Never really liked that style much, but it seems strange that it's died off.
Madlib's stuff is really sample-based. Check out "Loop Digger" under his Quasimoto alias. I think Jason Forrest/Donna Summer works mostly with samples as well -- his stuff is sort of silly and proggy, coming from a breakcore background.
Yeah, obviously hip hop producers are still using loops, I generally meant instrumental stuff. I hadn't heard much about Jason Forrest's stuff recently I suppose it's similar in spirit to Kid606's "Action Packed Mentalist..." LP.
But that's the distinction I'm making, there are a lot of campy mash-ups like Girl Talk's where you here pop songs or whatever get sonically mauled and combined in unexpected ways, (and I suppose this is true of certain sampling in the past) but I was thinking more about when the producers build a track up out of samples in a crate-digging DJ Shadow/Prince Paul style, and they are almost deliberately obscure for the most part.