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Hubert Bognermayr and Harald Zuschrader: “Erdenleicht”
From the album Erdenklang (1982)
This strange little album, subtitled Computerakustische Klangsinfonie (Computer-Acoustic Sound-Symphony), was the first record realized entirely on the Fairlight CMI, the flagship digital sampler originally released in 1979. (The instrument had been used earlier by Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, and EBN-OZN, as well as on the soundtrack for the seminal underground film Liquid Sky, and Herbie Hancock famously rocked out on the Fairlight during a Sesame Street cameo.) Its sound— bright, glossy, and unabashedly artificial— would become one of the defining timbres of 1980s popular music, second in ubiquity only to the dulcet digital tones of the Yamaha DX7.
With the exception of the repeated water sounds, this track makes little use of the Fairlight’s sampling capability to recreate familiar instrumental effects; its characteristic tone (and that of the entire album) is stamped more by the use of the instrument’s built-in sequencer, which allowed for extremely precise automated execution of rhythmic patterns. (MIDI, developed around the same time, would soon extend this capability to virtually all electronic instruments.)
The influence of digital sampling technology on the history of late 20th-century music is ambivalent. On the one hand, as is well known, sampling provided the technological impetus for the emergence of such radically new and progressive genres of music as hip-hop and industrial. (Frank Zappa’s highly idiosyncratic use of the digital sampler is to my ears one of the technology’s most glorious fruits.) But the dark side of sampling was the ever-increasing prevalence of cheap recorded emulations in lieu of thoughtful explorations of the capabilities of digital synthesis. The utopian promise of electronic sound generation was sacrificed on the altar of a mendacious sonic realism, which ultimately meant laziness on the part of musicians and opportunistic profiteering on the part of instrument manufacturers.
Played 90 time(s).
October 19, 2010, 9:36pm
