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The Sample & Mold sessions, 1987

by Kevin J. O'Conner

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1.
Video nasties #1 06:28
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2.
Ship was in war zone 00:20
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3.
Firestorms destroy city 04:40
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4.
Video nasties #2 07:49
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about

In February or March of 1987, after seeing a report on CNN's weekly roundup of things happening in Japan, I bought a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard. It was decidedly low-fi, mono, had a sampling time of 1.4 seconds, and was a bit buzzy. Naturally, I immediately set about looking for loopable bits from my CD collection and started recording.

Of course, most of the results were not very good. My timing was poor, I wasn't used to playing anything anything anyway, and whatever might have been usable wasn't really usable because the source material was so obvious.

The "Video nasties" pieces came about when I turned on the SK-1 one day, and it immediately started making this horrible racket. So I sampled it and then turned it into a piece. However, it wasn't very interesting, so I dubbed what I had so far to beta (I had a beta hi-fi deck), and recorded myself playing along to it, creating a very crude stereo recording. (This was how I made stereo versions of a few other pieces.)

For "Firestorms destroy city", I'm not sure what I sampled, but I suspect it was radio static. At the end, I added a recording of me slowly tuning the radio dial until I got to this call-in show. The fade-out is the way I recorded that part, so by the time I realized that the host wasn't railing against birth control, I'd already missed whatever else he had to say. (I didn't listen to talk radio anyway.)

The three audio cassettes of these recordings became the Sample and Mold collection, a pun on "Sample and Hold" from Neil Young's Trans album.

For this collection, I made edits to the four pieces (because back then the Pause button on my cassette deck was my editing method), and added a bit of reverb to both "Video nasties" pieces to help them hang together a bit better.

credits

released July 4, 2023

Performed and recorded by Kevin J. O'Conner, spring 1987.
Edited 3 and 4 July 2023.

Recorded using the Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard, a Technics cassette deck and receiver, and the Sony SL-HF300 beta hi-fi VCR.

Cover art ©2023 Kevin J. O'Conner.
All rights reserved.

This collection copyright © & ℗ 2023 Kevin J. O'Conner.
All rights reserved.

Once purchased/downloaded, the individual pieces may be used and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

ART 166

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Tinty Music Bellingham, Washington

Fabricating sounds since 1987. Unafraid to rush headlong into obscurity for the sake of art and making sense out of the world. Folds, spindles, and mutilates as needed. Brickwalling not allowed.

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