Anyone know about sound collage?
By Tyler Zahnke
@mininifty (38)
Belmont, Michigan
April 25, 2016 12:27pm CST
I was just wondering if any of you have heard of the concept of sound collage; often it is a form of mixtape. Usually, sound collage is when an artist makes an entire track out of samples of other people's recordings; Wayne Butane has made entire tapes like this, and Negativland had commercially-available albums containing collages, and I think he even got into a little trouble with Island Records because of it. Have any of you heard about this art form? I am actually working on a (probably noncommercial) effort that is all sound collage, and I don't really record anything for it! I take clips from thousands of different sound sources (movies, TV, songs, audiobooks, spoken-word records, YouTube video blogs, podcasts, etc.), I sometimes make them tell a story, or make them humorously respond to each other. Are you familiar with sample art like this?
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1 response
@FourWalls (69033)
• United States
26 Apr 16
In the early 1980s I took every Eagles song and ran a line from them together chronologically, and sometimes they made quite funny lines (e.g., "Most of us are singing like a nightingale"). One of the earliest albums to ever feature sampling (if not the first) was My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne & Brian Eno, in 1981.
@mininifty (38)
• Belmont, Michigan
26 Apr 16
What about the Flying Saucer record by Dickie Goodman in 1956? These were novelty records; yes, the same comedy genre Weird Al falls into; but he would ask a question as if he was a news reporter giving an interview, and the response would come from a recording of a popular song. Mr. Jaws, a Goodman record from 1975, did the same thing. My point is that it was sampling and it was the 1956 when Flying Saucer came out.
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@FourWalls (69033)
• United States
26 Apr 16
@mininifty -- they were commonly called "cut-in records," and in some regards you could say they were "sampling." 
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