Revisiting the world’s most important six second drum loop
January 3rd, 2011 § 1 Comment
This audio/video installation project was produced in 2004 by Nate Harrison as part of an installation project “that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break.” This 17 minute audio documentary delivers a lot of history and is highly recommended if you haven’t seen/heard this work. Harrison (who is on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) takes an academic approach to the material and gets a lot deeper than you’d imagine in under 20 minutes. By the end he’s quoting Lawrence Lessig and using the Amen Break as an example of why laws surrounding sampling are faulty. Great stuff. Below is a piece that Harrison created in 2005 celebrating the mythic Roland TB-303.
[...] Defy Gravity” is a treasure trove of sparkly nuggets of sonic gold, particularly this fascinating piece on the worlds most sampled piece of music, The Amen [...]