version

Well-known member
Over the years I've noticed I've frequently found snippets and fragments of tunes more endearing and lasting than the full things: radio rips, sections of old sets, certain elements and sounds. It applies to books, films and so on too. I guess it's partly down to the inability to recall something in its entirety and having to accumulate reference points, markers and so on in order to retain it but there's also something I find appealing about the idea of fragments themselves, perhaps it's the imperfections and the potential and negative space around them, having to consciously or unconsciously project the whole and piece it together rather than having it all there on a plate.

A rip of an old tune with MC snippets and static is always gonna beat the studio version; maybe it's an extension of barty's contention that the best music's brimming with culture. It's lived in, it's real.

 
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version

Well-known member
There's something odd about the fragment having a richer context than the whole. You take a studio tune and it's suspended in space, take a section of it from radio and it's got a life of its own, an appendage severed from the body developing into an organism in its own right.

 
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version

Well-known member
There are tunes that don't sound right to me without whatever the MC was saying over them at the time. The full thing sounds lifeless in comparison.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
we seem to hear a lot of stuff similarly. for me it's almost two different ideas here (even though they're connected). the idea of fragments often being more compelling than the full tunes they come from, and the unintended textures and sounds that become part of a tune once its "lived in" (there's probably a better way of saying that).


maybe this is related http://www.dissensus.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=367220
looking at what barty was saying on the first page I don't see why you couldn't just take it to its natural conclusion and say that there's always one fleeting moment in a song thats better than everything else (which is obviously true, at least in pop music), so why not just cut out the rest and leave those 20 seconds. songs are a valueless medium, samples are better.
imo that's the genius of eccojams. and of tunes like this:

 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
for me it's almost two different ideas here (even though they're connected).
where it comes together was arguably discussed here http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=14463

feel kind of dumb quoting myself again but
maybe it's just a property of sampling in general that as a listener you can infer a lot of information in an extremely short duration of time, and then instantly hear it change completely. (not just the space, but also sometimes the performer, era, genre etc.) good example of how working with existing recordings lets you create "impossible" experiences musically.
 
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version

Well-known member
Yeah, there's definitely more than one idea here and it could probably have been multiple threads.
 

version

Well-known member
The other thing I was thinking was the trend of breaking things down into increasingly smaller chunks - events into highlights, albums into shorter and shorter individual tracks, stories from films to series - has to be a response to the scale of awareness the internet's afforded us. When something's too big to process or deal with, you break it up and focus on certain pieces of it.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
I guess it's partly down to the inability to recall something in its entirety and having to accumulate reference points

I've wondered if this is slightly a generational thing. my dad doesn't consider himself musically inclined at all but he can remember very longwinded melodies that I wouldn't be able to hold in my head without deliberate effort. whereas he probably wouldn't pay much attention to the "snippets and static" aspect of recorded music.

maybe you can see this in the evolution of popular music. pop songs from the first 2/3s of the 20th century tend to have very winding, lyrical melodies. but by the time of 90s rap you just get sampled fragments of earlier songs. electronic music obviously favors short ostinati. by contrast there seems to be increasing sensitivity to the quality of the recording itself with stuff like "lo fi" in indie rock in the 90s and more recently chillwave.
 
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version

Well-known member
I think your dad might be an outlier as I get the impression the majority of people mostly remember snippets. They remember certain lines and scenes from films and books, certain sections of tunes.
 

version

Well-known member
Something like this is interesting as it's technically a full tune, but it's just a repeated fragment so it never really feels like one.

 
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version

Well-known member

This is weird. I was just listening to an old Burial & Kode9 mix and it had this tune in it. It's like barty going on about rooms becoming caves earlier then I watched that Iain Sinclair thing and he described his room as a cave.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
I think your dad might be an outlier as I get the impression the majority of people mostly remember snippets. They remember certain lines and scenes from films and books, certain sections of tunes.

well now he is but I do think that used to be the norm. in "how the beatles destroyed rock and roll" there's some discussion of how in the old days rather than knowing a song was popular from hearing the main recording of it everywhere, you'd know from hearing people whistling it, playing it on a different instrument, etc.
 

version

Well-known member
An interesting one is when you hear the tune which samples something before you hear where it was sampled from; cause and effect flipped, the fragment becomes the sampler's rather than the sampled's.
 

version

Well-known member
To anyone who heard this before Lady in Red, the latter is the Nobody Here tune.

 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
An interesting one is when you hear the tune which samples something before you hear where it was sampled from; cause and effect flipped, the fragment becomes the sampler's rather than the sampled's.

I love when that happens!

one of my favorite examples was hearing this:

and then much later when listening to random 80s hip hop hearing:

in the original the sample ("the king of the beats gonna rock the place") is just a throwaway line. but hearing if after hearing the black dog song gives it a mysterious importance. in fact I don't think I figured out until much later why that line stood out to me.
 

version

Well-known member
That's just created a bunch of fragments of its own. The opening of that Black Dog tune is Wild Wild West to me, I knew it must have been a sample and it's a Stevie Wonder thing, but to me it's Wild Wild West.

 
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version

Well-known member
This is weird. I was just listening to an old Burial & Kode9 mix and it had this tune in it. It's like barty going on about rooms becoming caves earlier then I watched that Iain Sinclair thing and he described his room as a cave.
Another one was blissblog saying he was writing about the changing notion of the neighbourhood earlier:
actually writing something at the moment about the changing notion of the neighbourhood, how your neighbours are determined by taste, sensibility, interests, politics etc, and they're not living next door, they're living... well, somewhere like this
The other day I was reading an old interview with David Lynch where he repeatedly stressed the importance of the neighbourhood in his work, how Dune was such a departure for him because of the scale and how that meant that Blue Velvet had to be a neighbourhood film.

It's that Burroughs thing at play again.

Walters: Well, let’s put it like this. I was in a pub in Charlotte Street, of all places, in Soho, and a mate of mine had read Nova Express—this was ‘64, ‘65—was talking about this, “You must buy this book,” and started to try and explain to me his interpretation of cut-up and fold-in techniques, which he probably got wrong. And I couldn’t remember the name of the book when I got outside, and then an Express Dairy van from the Express Dairies came by, and I thought, “Express, Nova Express!” And I thought, “That’s what he’s trying to tell us. Random events can have a hidden meaning. We can get messages.” But I don’t think that’s what you see in it, is it?

Burroughs: Oh, exactly. Exactly what I see in it. These juxtapositions between what you’re thinking, if you’re walking down the street, and what you see, that was exactly what I was introducing. You see, life is a cut-up. Every time you walk down the street or look out the window, your consciousness is cut by random factors, and then you begin to realize that they’re not so random, that this is saying something to you.
 
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luka

Well-known member
In poetry fragments are a modernist device, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins" although you get strange precursors like Holderlin, or, for different reasons, Sappho.

One thing artists do nowadays is to preview their tracks as snippet, on Instagram for instance, and those snippets often have huge pull, to the extent that the released track an only ever seem a let down.

 
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