The Extreme Side of Music Sampling: Dancing to Hundreds and Thousands of Samples

Nowadays, sampling occurs in much of the music you hear in the radio. Hip hop music is not ashamed to lift entire melodies from famous songs-even going all the back to Mozart's Requiem.

I'm glad to know this also occurs overseas. I was listening to U.K.'s Dizzee Rascal's new CD, Maths + English, and heard a clear sample of Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock's famous "It Takes Two". But the question remains. How legitimate is sampling?

Some say it's a copout, and indeed it often is, but some artists are taking the concept of sampling to the next level.

Gregg Gillis

I saw this guy live at Oberlin College, and he blew the place apart. He goes by the alias Girl Talk.

Night Ripper, his latest CD, is one of my favorite CDs in the last few years. It's on the label Illegal Art, which is appropriate. The CD is made entirely of samples.

According to an interview on Nerve.com, when asked about how many samples were in Night Ripper, Gillis explained:

"That's a difficult question. I know that there are about 167 artists blatantly sampled, but a lot of those artists are sampled more than once, and then throughout the whole album I kind of add my own percussion, so there's plenty of drum hits, snares, kick drums, that I could no way identify what the source material is. I'd say there's over 250 songs sampled."

The result sounds like a steady, continuous mix that will sound either like the greatest dance party you've ever heard or like two hundred and fifty cell phone ring tones going off consecutively, depending on your taste.

Gillis has a taste for mixing hip hop with light rock and pop. You will hear, and love, for instance, Biggie Smalls rapping over Elton John's "Tiny Dancer". You will hear the Ying-Yang Twin's very-explicit "Wait" over The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony". And much, much more.

The Avalanches

Known for their killer live shows and a highly successful first album, Since I Left You, The Avalanches are darlings of the sampling world. Currently at three members, the group resides in Melbourne, Australia.