I have been obsessed with this track for a month; been listening to it on repeat almost daily.
I love how vertiginous and chaotic it begins—but once the kick (and later the bass) comes in, it transforms into something coherent and kind of mesmerizing.
I’m curious about the process of microsampling on display here. I’m not sure I would necessarily want to integrate it into my own music, but I’m curious about how one goes about it. I have no idea how he does it here, especially given that this track is nearly 25 years old.
I remember hearing he made the album on a type of cabin in the woods or something, sampling from a radio (no idea if Am or FM. I imagine he sampled the radio in a kind of sampler and went to town sequencing the bits and pieces he chopped out of the recordings. Anyone with further info on the methodology would be greatly appreciated.
No, there is no loophole where sampling a tiny bit grants sampling rights. I imagine they must have taken longer to clear the entire TEN TRACK ALBUM made like this than making it
Got my first MPC like 2 weeks ago, been sitting on my table collecting dust so far. First I need to learn how to use it then need to learn how to incorporate French FM radio moving forward
Well, it sounds random at first, but there are genuine hooks in the sample selection, which is what I find so impressive. It seems like it was probably a painstaking process. Obv fine if it’s not your thing, I like a lot of the micro stuff from the early 2000s.
Also: I’m no whippersnapper—turned 37 this week—but 25 years is a long time ago, c’mon lol
9/11 hadn’t yet happened, you could still rent VHS tapes from the rental store, pizza in New York was a dollar a slice. I had just gotten dial-up internet connection and in the twilight of Napster illegally downloaded my first song: “Ms. Jackson” by Outkast. It took two hours.
I do actually! Probably not the place to ask, but I’ve been wondering about how to best use them in tandem—MPC as the brain and Digitakt synced to it by MIDI?
Also check Todd Edwards - there are still a bunch of YouTube channels digging back through his 90s-00s stuff trying to figure out the samples.
When I hear Akufen I immediately think of Todd Edwards, there are similarities in techniques but mainly because I was reading this academic article about microsampling featuring both a while ago, got to the bit where it quoted in full the first paragraph of this and nearly fell out of my chair laughing. I like both of them, listened Akufen to death at the time, including his Fabric mix, but it’s a hell of a turn of phrase.
The simple answer is that you need an ear for it, and you love what you’re doing. If that obsession doesn’t ruin you and you have a clear vision, the rest is just the execution of patterns.
The patterns are what winds up being relatively complex because a lot of the texture comes from conflicting tempos and the consistency is from repetition of them.
Start with a ton of random samples, chop them up and then hopefully put them on a large pad controller and play around.
Alternatively prepopulate a pattern in your DAW then insert random slices until it sounds good when it loops. Embellish until you’re happy.
30 years ago, it would have been more of a chore, or labor of artistic love.
Because these samples don’t seem to be very heavily modified, there’s always a chance of copyright strike. The only way to avoid that is to modify the sample until it sounds nothing like the sample you liked when you heard it, hopefully it still sounds good and is useable.
Edit: I would agree that this is just sampling, not microsampling.
