ABSTRACT
The advent of digital sampling, the simple reuse of sound via an “electronic digital recording system, which takes samples or Vertical slices’ of sound and converts them into on/off information” was already presaged with the visual sampling strategies of the Cubists, Constructivists, Futurists, and Dadaists. Today's audio alchemists (Eno, Adrian Sherwood, Mad Professor, Norscq, Zazou, Marclay, DJ Spooky, DJ fill-in-the-blank) are ethnomusico-logical bricolage artists, capable of cutting across styles, genres, continents, cultures with great alacrity and an artistic sense of reinvention through reuse. Much of this material was forecast by Cans Cannibalism, Holger Czukay's solo work, and David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981).
