Maybe it wasn’t even that well-recorded to start with, and the pressing was rudimentary, and now it has footprints and cat pee on it.
The record it was sampled from was possibly found on the floor of a record shop basement. Will that sample sound perfect? Unlikely. A drum break by, let’s say, Rotary Connection, is played from the turntable, runs through the sampler’s ADC, into the sampler’s memory, undergoes processing, and passes out to the world through the sampler’s DAC. If a sample is well-recorded and minimally processed, no-one might notice that it is a sample. The sampler is an instrument offering virtually unlimited sonic possibilities, and yet, it presents few sonic characteristics of its own. which got a half-speed remastered 25th anniversary edition last month, was composed completely from samples, a methodology shared with DJ Format’s latest LP from 2021 Devil’s Workshop. Format and Shadow, however, are at either end of a 25 year continuum of atmospheric instrumental beats.
Brighton and Sacramento not the first urban centers you think of in relation to groundbreaking hiphop production. DJ Shadow (aka Josh Davis) is a hiphop DJ and producer from Sacramento, California. DJ Format (aka Matt Ford) is a hiphop DJ and producer from Brighton, England.
