Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture

by Paul D. Miller, Editor
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008
416 pp., illus. 23 b/w. Trade, $29.95
ISBN:13 978-0-262-63363-5.

Reviewed by John F. Barber
Digital Technology and Culture Program
Washington State University Vancouver

jfbarber@eaze.net



According to its editor, Sound Unbound has one focus: "the remix." Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, says, in his chapter "In Through the Out Door: Sampling and the Creative Act" (can you catch the reference to an LP in the title?*), the remix is "a sampling machine where any sound can be you, and all text is only a tenuous claim to an idea of individual creativity. It's a plagiarist's club for the famished souls of a geography of now-here. Get my drift?" (5). This sampling machine can handle any sound, any expression. "Map one metaphor onto the other, remix, and press play" (6). The remix of form and function, fact and fiction becomes "faction" (9). Faction often is found in the spaces between the sounds. "There's always a rhythm to the space between things" (17). Sculptures, manifestations of various descriptions, all intangible but nonetheless real can be created in this space between you and the information you perceive, all in continuous transformation. It's the remix, says Miller, the sculpting of information in virtual space driven by the desire to ride the rhythm of the digital imperative: a time, a place, a space where "free content fuels innovation" (Miller quotes Laurence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World). Anything that stays the same speaks to another era, another place when things stood still, not the current cultural of constant change where we create information driven by desire, manifestations of deep elements of our beings.

And there you have Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. As the title suggests, the contents range broadly. For example, in a chapter titled "The Future of Language," Saul Williams argues that humans are manifestations of their thinking patters. Language, words are abstract symbols meant to communicate that thinking. The future lies in using language (words) to visualize and vocalize complex and abstract thinking patters and processes of consciousness.

"The Ecstasy of Influence," a chapter by Jonathan Lethem, argues that appropriation is the norm: "it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production" (29). The remix. Lethem goes on to discuss and detail various methodologies for working this sampling within the context of current copyright laws.

Daphne Keller, in her chapter, "The Musician as Thief: Digital Culture and Copyright Law," argues the other side, concluding that by legally foreclosing the "entire realm of digital culture" copyright law fails to achieve its Constitutional goal to "Promote the Progress" (147).

There are chapters about sound as well. "An Interview with Moby" by Lucy Walker has the artist-musician explaining his take on the remix-sampling machine and his own work. In the chapter "South Africa's Rhythms of Resistance" Lee Hirsch chronicles his experiences making films in South Africa in 1992 when members of the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party and African National congress were killing each other with abandon by arguing that "song has been a life-preserver in the daily struggle to survive" (217). And Naeem Mohaiemen argues a profound Muslim ideological influence in the evolution of hip-hop music and culture in his chapter, "Fear of a Muslim Planet: Hip-Hop's Hidden History."

In between, Brian Eno writes about "Bells and Their History," Bruce Sterling chronicles the history of his Dead Media Project, Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand write about a three-dimensional sonochemical observatory, and Jeff E. Winner writes about musician, sound composer, and engineer Raymond Scott (thanks to Bugs Bunny his work is remembered; again, the remix).

For Miller, from his perspective as a cultural DJ and editor (are they different, or different forms of the same?), the archival impulse of this collection, coupled with the hunter-gatherer milieu of the remix, becomes an emergent system of large-scale economies of expression. Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture is an important chronicling of the sampling possibilities and philosophies.

The book is accompanied by an audio compilation CD from the book’s contributors, and others.

*"In Through the Out Door" was the eighth and final studio album for the English rock band Led Zeppelin, recorded 1978.