Den Sorte Skole – Lektion III (self-released)
It’s been some time since the idea of an artist sampling another’s work could be considered shocking or transgressive, either in the positive sense of an artful reappropriation of extant work (Negativland, DJ Shadow) or in the inverse, that of popular musicians swiping large chunks of older material in order to lend their own music a context that it would otherwise lack (too many examples exist to choose from, but Jimmy Page by way of Sean Combs or the legion of gospel singers that acted as window-dressing for some of Moby’s better selling work come easily to mind).
Den Sorte Skole – Lektion III (self-released)
It’s been some time since the idea of an artist sampling another’s work could be considered shocking or transgressive, either in the positive sense of an artful reappropriation of extant work (Negativland, DJ Shadow) or in the inverse, that of popular musicians swiping large chunks of older material in order to lend their own music a context that it would otherwise lack (too many examples exist to choose from, but Jimmy Page by way of Sean Combs or the legion of gospel singers that acted as window-dressing for some of Moby’s better selling work come easily to mind). Same goes for the sort of Western artists who jet-set around the world in an attempt to search for the next big Third World thing, whether that’s the work of the well-intentioned (Sublime Frequencies or Mississippi Records) or that of a certain brand of cultural conquistador (Diplo). It’s all been done, and it’s been done a hell of a lot.
It may seem to be an obvious statement but the new Den Sorte Skole mix is interesting and relevant because it stands in close proximity to some of these fairly boring tropes without ever overstepping the boundaries around them. The Danish production duo created Lektion III from thousands of samples gathered from hundreds of albums originating in dozens of countries. While this might seem to suggest some forced cross-cultural melange, a site for a DJ (or in this case, a pair of them) to construct a mini-Tower Of Babel, layering snippet upon seemingly incongruous snippet until it slips from familiar bounds, it comes off as anything but.
Despite Den Sorte Skole’s description of the album (it’s accompanied by a 23-page PDF that gives an intricate breakdown of everything that went into each song), where Lektion III succeeds is through the manner in which the music, when it’s playing rather than being deconstructed, subsumes its component elements into a cohesive whole. Sampling has often been utilized because of its ability to conjure up a psychoacoustic hole into which the listener can fall, with a snippet of sound used to elicit some association with the sound at hand. The work present on Lektion III, however, obscures many of the samples’ more sharply defined characteristics, blending one into the other until it sounds less like slivers of disembodied, pre-recorded material and more like small orchestras plucked from every corner of the globe and locked in a room with no way to communicate except through their instruments.
But because so much of the album’s content succeeds by not calling attention to itself, the occasional presence of a recognizable sample can prove somewhat disorienting, and not in a way that helps the material. Because of the wide variety of sources present, it’s entirely possible that a listener’s cultural identity would lead them to pick out elements that he or she considered the most jarring due to their recognizability. At least to me, though, it seemed that the most American of samples – the Ralph Stanley and the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins clips – were the least integrated of all the moments. One can imagine a krautrock fan registering the same criticism regarding the use of Popol Vuh, or an ambient dub aficionado immediately picking out African Head Charge samples. This culturally dictated discomfort, bred from familiarity, doesn’t mean that these particular samples are out of place or sound bad, only that a certain preconditioning can hurt an appreciation of the album’s subtler and better-incorporated qualities.
While Den Sorte Skole’s approach is far from unprecedented, they are able to sidestep cliché in a manner that renders their work both more relevant and more listenable than many artists attempting cross-cultural and/or sample-based work. Additionally, the herculean/sisyphean quality of the task at hand – not only wading through hundreds of albums to spot a sample, but tracking down physical copies of each record, constructing the songs, and then ultimately not being able to release it commercially due to copyright restrictions – lends it an almost noble quality. It’s creation out of a genuine sense of reverence towards the artists from whom they borrowed. There is no attempt to be mysterious or artsy, only an honest sense of creative transparency and an implicit erasure of the boundaries that are perceived to exist between people and the art that they create.
Download Lektion III for free here: http://densorteskole.net/lektion-3/
