Recently I have been fairly busy with various different sound work, including producing stripped back instrumentals to play out live for London-based singer muva of Earth, also producing an ambient background track for live improvisation for Birmingham-based band I am a part of called SPEW. For the SPEW set, I also spent some time preparing multiple other sound sources to sample live during the show, such as some hand recorded cassettes with two improvisations that myself & Tony Bontana (spew founder) recorded (one from 2021, one from 2022).
This idea of mine, to perform an improvised set with samples loaded on the sp404, being triggered live, as well as the sp 404 sampling a cassette player which had these hand recorded cassettes of previous improvisations is something im quite proud of, and is something I have never seen or heard of being done before. I have asked some other friends and nobody has ever heard of a band performing an improvised set with the sampling of previous improvised recordings being done live as part of the improvisation.
It touches on the idea of intertextuality because the crowd could see me sampling these cassettes, but what they were hearing coming out of them, nobody had ever heard before, and most likely didn’t even sound remotely similar to anything they could think I might be sampling on these cassettes.
As well as sampling these cassettes, I also had samples on the sd card in the sp404, such as vocal samples of Chuck D (from Public Enemy) and Gil Scott Heron, as well as some loops from Black Sabbath (especially significant as they are both pioneers of this heavier side of rock, as well as being very culturally significant given that SPEW originated in Birmingham).
As well as preparing for this set, and a back-to-back beat set Tony & I performed the same night, we were also the 2 that organised and were running the entire event. It was the 5th London edition of a series of underground rap/ alternative events we organise every other month.