9.12.2008

"i have the biggest party ever."


banksy does new orleans

digitalism


A light in the darkness



The dj drops the track: you hear the sampled bit and scream out, holy shit, I know that! I know that! And tho you try you can’t hold on to it as the track thunders past—incorporating the sample’s world into its own beat and its own melody, the way the Borg incorporated Picard—all the way except for a sliver. The beat makes you lose grasp of what you thought you remembered. It slips through your hands except for a little wisp, like a silken thread that comes off a feather that you’ve tried to grab…a piece of near nothingness—that's all it is. 2.2 seconds of a remix of a remix, and yet, strangely enough, it keeps sucking on your thought stream and you find yourself mentally thumbing through riffs in your head before it finally comes to you —it’s the breakbeat on a cool-era blue note jazz track—something you’re high school jazz pianist boyfriend used to play in his Nissan’s tape deck as you sped down the highway…you can picture it now, his fingers having to press the Fast Forward button when the song was over because most of his tapes were copies and there was empty space at the end.

Or maybe you don’t figure it out, and instead give up and file the sample away in the auxiliary storage part of your brain until one day, maybe years later, you hear the song in its original form and scream holy shit! again—this time in the middle of a department store or a fast food restaurant. Or maybe you hear it being played behind the announcer's computer enhanced baritone in a car commercial that Tivo forgot to zap. The joy over hearing it again is quickly crumpled up by the realization that the magical moment you had long ago in the swirling lights of an undiscovered nueva york has itself been incorporated—by lawyers at meetings with breath mints and bottled water and voodoo white smiles...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

i still have a tape deck and i am banksy in my dreams.

David Pohl said...

one of my sampled tracks you may enjoy

: )

http://djpingting.blogspot.com/

nk said...

Critical thoughts.

TRUE said...

oooooooh! old friends + new!

lovely comments--new tetris word kingdoms to play in...

Anonymous said...

sometimes you make me feel like i've been to new york, in the way that stephen king makes me feel like i've been to maine