Description
Book SynopsisReimagining Sample-based Hip Hop: Making Records within Records presents the poetics of hip-hop record production and the significance of sample material in record making, providing analysis of key releases in hip-hop discography and interviews with experts from the world of Hip Hop and beyond.
Beginning with the history of hip-hop music making, this book guides the reader through the alternative techniques deployed by beat-makers to avoid the use of copyrighted samples and concludes with a consideration of the future of Hip Hop, alongside a companion album that has been created using findings from this research. Challenging previous theoretical understandings about Hip Hop, the author focuses on deconstructing sonic phenomena using his hands-on engineering expertise and in-depth musicological knowledge about record production.
With a significant emphasis on both practice and theory, Reimagining Sample-based Hip Hop will be of interest to ad
Trade Review
"This book needed to be written. We’re lucky the job was done by such a creative soul, expert engineer, and insightful scholar. The gift we’re left with is a penetrating exposition of the poetic fabric of contemporary music recording practice and culture."
Albin Zak, Professor of Music Emeritus, University at Albany
"Reimagining Sample-based Hip Hop is a tour de force and the best example I have seen of theory and practice coming together in hip-hop studies to date. Not only does this book provide a useful template for practice-as-research based methods, but it is rich in theorizing sampling, remix and beatmaking cultures. Exarchos has combined a number of worlds in ways that we were all waiting for someone to do expertly."
Justin A. Williams, Associate Professor of Music, University of Bristol
"Reimagining Sample-based Hip Hop provides deep insight into the rich tapestry of underlying layers that embody sample-based Hip-Hop. Michail Exarchos meticulously and clearly poses alternative practices to Hip-Hop production and to beat-making, using originally constructed source material rather than previously released phonographic content. The reader will benefit from the strong coverage of authenticity and mechanical borrowing as applied to a great breadth of music and production approaches that define the style’s unique sonic signature of material ‘play’ with phonographic objects. This is a must read for anyone interested in the workings of or creation of Hip-Hop."
William Moylan, Professor of Music and Sound Recording Technology, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Table of Contents0. Sample-based Hip Hop as metamodern phonographic practice (An autoethnography of oscillating between—and beyond—analogue nostalgia and digital futurism) Part 1: (Inter-stylistic) Composition, and Tools 1. Sonic necessity, mother of compositional invention (Making Blues for sample-based Hip Hop) 2. Boom-bap aesthetics and the machine Part 2: (Reverse) Engineering 3. Sonic pasts in Hip Hop’s future Part 3: (The magic of sample-based) Production 4. Phonographic ghosts and meta-illusions in contemporary beat-making Part 4: Mixing (records within records) 5. Manufacturing phonographic ‘otherness’ for sample-based Hip Hop Part 5: (Exponential) Re/Mastering 6. ‘Past’ masters, present beats
