DJ Spooky Raps About Remixing

clipped from www.wired.com I think so many issues right now around sampling and digital media in general are kind of at a crossroads…. I I sample all sorts of stuff. The strategy, of course, is to make it unrecognizable. That means sampling has to be a kind of shredder — the equivalent of when you throw away your credit card bill and put it through. I throw away certain recorded sounds and shred them so they are unrecognizable in the same way you would trace someone’s credit identity. They do come after you for both cases. Take for example James Joyce. He would take motifs from posters in the city streets when he was walking and have a notepad and write them down, and they would appear in his book. He would sample stuff from advertising, from other authors, from magazine articles. To me, with hip-hop and electronic music, you are looking at sound as a kind of theater, where samples are almost like voices that you can take from a script….