AMEN: INITIAL MUSIC RESEARCH

I had been developing the idea of the Amen Break piece as an installation or avante garde documentary and doing some minor research but now I felt I needed to step this up and did even deeper into the possibilities of the piece. The first thing I did was polish my research into the band

Next I needed to start to research who had sampled the track. From my own experience, knowledge and understanding I knew of about 20 songs many of which I owned but knew that the song had been sampled over 2300 times. This was obviously a massive job to find out which songs had sampled it and lots of legwork. Luckily through the process I realised that there was an app that did all this work for me. Called Who Sampled it is an app that lets you put in the sample you want to look into and it then lists all of the artists who sampled it and also even the timings of where the sample appears in the track. It is available online and as a download. http://www.whosampled.com/apps/

From here the next process was to try and find some good examples of tracks to use. My criterion for selection of songs/music was simple.

• Variety of musical genres.
• Variety of tempos and bpm.
• recent tracks as well as older ones.
• Full versions sampled/used as well as cut up versions of the 6 second Amen Break.
• Some well known artists that the audience should have heard of.
• Few lesser known artists who have used the track
• Original songs that had used it predominantly but also a few remixes if strong.
• Predominantly music tracks but if any interesting uses in TV themes, adverts etc may consider.

I was considering of doing a 10% sample of the tracks to start with which would be 230 songs. It did involve a lot of listening and i started by scouring the list of 2300+ songs for ones that I was aware of that met the criterion. Then I randomly used the Who Sampled app did allow you to go to Youtube and hear the songs to see if I felt they would work. Quickly I became bogged down in this and days passed by.

My attention then passed to getting enough songs together with enough variety to develop the idea and consider the possibilities. I started by using my own collection to choose the tracks I owned that I felt would potentially work and then to add a few more that I also thought would add to the piece. I would continue the other research in the background but felt I had a variety to start to develop, experiment with and to see if the idea would work. The popular initial tracks I collected were by Amy Winehouse, David Bowie, Oasis, Primal Scream, Chase and Statue and La Roux. I mixed this with slightly more obscure tracks by  NWA, Eric B & Rakim,  Peshay, Pendulum and Ganja Kru.