What do you people think about Hawtin's approach to music? I'm calling it hypersampling. So we're on the same page, I'm talking about taking snippets and loops from a wide library of pre-existing music, and then inserting those little snippets into a dj set via the current software of choice. I think it brings up a number of supposed pros and cons.
On the one hand, it seems to give the artist a incredibly wide range of possibilities, taking just those parts of tracks that you like and putting them together in any way/shape/form that you like, hopefully coming up with something interesting as a result. On the other hand though, I feel like there's no "soul" left, for lack of a better term, with what you end up with. If you gut a track to just take the little part that you like, you are still gutting a track, something that was part of a cohesive sound that the producer of said track was going for. You end up with a hundred little pieces that might sound like very interesting little loops, but string them together for an hour and I frankly get a little bored with the results. Hawtin's mixes sound like flipping the channel on your TV every 3 seconds. There's no hook, it's just loop after loop after loop, even if put together in interesting combinations. This is very different from mixing records or even using regular samplers for the occasional insert or loop. You still come up with interesting new sounds when you've got two records playing at the same time, but I feel like it's more of an additive process, with both parts still intact and forming that nice third record, you know? The listener can follow what is going on, and take part/enjoy the new sounds being added, with a clear reference to what is changing and what is being dropped in. With this hypersampling stuff, everything is so completely stripped of its original source that it becomes irrelevant where it came from. I get a great feeling from hearing two or three distinct tracks put together in interesting ways to form new sounds, not two or three drum loops and five high-hats and some random sound effect from 20 different tracks. "...perhaps that one of the last remaining walls (or most of it) between the Studio and the Club has come down." That's Hawtin's quote from that RA link the other day. I personally think that wall can be very important, and shouldn't be knocked down. Beethoven didn't write a great symphony on the fly during a show, he wrote them in the studio. This isn't to discredit the awesome amount of talent and exciting things that live P.A. work brings about, some stuff is certainly better on the fly, but Hawtin's approach seems to discount and not really care about the sources of what he is extracting. One of the earlier posts described this mix as sonic wallpaper and I would agree, although I think the 2nd half does pick up a bit. There's no "there" there. As for Hawtin, I think he's a far better producer than performer. He's written some very, very good tracks, especially most of the plastikman stuff, I just don't care for the new approach to performing. -Arturo
