Popular music sits at the heart of this mode of live intermedial performance-making, through snippets of lyrics, refrains, beats, and samples from a variety of songs – folk, blues, indie, country, rock – which are incorporated into the mix in the following ways:
- Through sampled riffs, beats, or refrains, which are triggered, sustained, and mixed together
- In sections of the lyrics and tunes of songs, which I sing and then loop and layer in a variety of ways, with the use of a microphone and loop pedal
- Through the texts of lyrics, which are written live and projected through the live-feed camera or written digitally and projected through the VJ software Modul8
- Through the images, objects, and video footage I gather, which relate in some way to the songs sampled, and which are activated and mixed as part of the intermedial practice
In using shards and fragments of songs in this way, I am particularly interested in the ‘viscosity’ or ‘stickiness’ of popular music. Van Dijck claims that ‘recorded pop music may … construct a cognitive framework through which (collectively) constructed meanings are transposed onto individual memory, resulting in an intricate mixture of recall and imagination, of recollections intermingled with extrapolations and myth’ (2009, 110). This ‘intricate mixture’ is one that is of interest, in that a piece of popular music may not be personally known or connected to an individual’s life history in any way, but may still be ‘sticky’, viscose, and resonant with ‘collectively constructed meanings’, formed through its positioning in and associations with popular culture. In this project, it was of particular interest to explore how the ‘viscosity’ of a body of music from a particular location might speak to, or evoke, or even reformulate the place to which it refers or where it was made.
I am also perennially interested in what shards and fragments of this ‘viscose’ material do in the context of the intermedial mixes, which are created for and sometimes with those who attend the live events. What kind of ‘restance’ or ‘non-present remainder’ (Derrida 1988, 10) of the complete song is present and resonant in the mix? How does the fragment, as it is encountered within that mix, pull at and long for wholeness – in this case, the complete song from which it has been extracted? Joseph Schloss (2004), in his study of sample based hip-hop, talks of samples or ‘breaks’ as being ‘torn from their original context’ and ‘reconceived' (33) through the act of sampling, so that, often, the whole songs from which they are drawn ‘recede … into the background as units of musical significance’ (32). In this formulation, ‘musical significance’ becomes attached to the particular fragment chosen and how it has been reformulated to different effect and meaning in the new mix or ‘chain’ of signifiers (Derrida 1988, 9); in hip-hop this is represented by the new tune created, using the sample, and in live intermediality it is represented by the mix of media and materials of which it is part.
This reconstruction involved engaging with a predominantly male musical past through a female vocal present/presence, through the act of ‘vocal sampling’. As such, I collected musical materials related to Salford and also addressed in more detail the practice of vocal sampling through listening to female covers of songs by men, by artists such as Cat Power, Nouvelle Vague, Patti Smith, and PJ Harvey – see YouTube playlist. From this research, in combination with my own established practices in vocal sampling, a set of techniques and methods arose, which were used as principles to guide my female vocal sampling of the male music of Salford:
- Unusual or disruptive mixing of sound, lyric, and melody
- Playing with pitch in relation to the original delivery
- Creating beats to put the lyrics to – setting them against spoken word
- Isolating particular lyrics to draw attention to them
- Playing with my personal love of and history with some of the songs
- Stripping back and simplifying
- Playing with gender pronouns – changing them or ambivalently inhabiting those that are male
- Pacing – slowing down, so the lyrics or gaze of the song is clearer, or speeding up to give it a different energy
- Shifting the genre of the original
- Playing with different harmonies and repetitions
- Shifting the tonal quality – softening something that is hard or vice versa
Sampling has always been part of the practice, but, in this project, I wanted to focus my inquiries on the sonic elements and pay more attention to what had up until this point been an ‘implicit’ or tacit process of choosing, sampling, and reformulating song for intermedial performance events. This took two forms. First, I focused on a particular set of musical sources as a starting point – effectively sampling the musical history of a city. Second, I explored particular ways in which that sampling might be conceptually framed and practically activated, specifically through the act of vocal sampling, as explained below.
With regard to the first area of interest, Salford has a rich and hugely influential musical heritage. In my research into this history, I focused primarily on popular music in the second half of the twentieth century, where there was a burgeoning of musical creative energy in Salford and Broughton in particular, as referenced in the introduction. From the folk and protest songs of Ewan MacColl, to the urban poetry of John Cooper Clarke, by way of Joy Division, the Happy Mondays, New Order, and the Fall (see YouTube playlist), Salford has given rise to extremely influential and celebrated musicians and bands.
However, in researching this era of popular music-making in Salford, there was some frustration with the insistent mythologising of Greater Manchester in terms of certain events and venues: the Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976, Factory Records, and the Haçienda dominate the discourse, and this is combined with what I perceived to be a ferociously male perspective and reading of this time, the music, and what was significant about it. A question that arose, then, was where the female voices are in this Greater Manchester musical history. The answer is that in the popular history of this place, they are few and far between and are generally marginalised, in terms of their capacity to occupy the popular consciousness of the city’s music – this is an insistently male mythology.
In addressing this through practice, my sampling of the late twentieth-century Salford musical canon took on an adversarial flavour, imbued with the wish to reimagine, re-present, and remix the refrains and lines of the songs through the ‘grain’ of a female voice and its capacity to generate what Barthes (1977) calls ‘friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language (and nowise the message)’ (185).
These techniques and strategies were chosen as ways of intersecting with the original song, in order to disrupt something about it, through the regendering of the voice. This relates to the practices of some of the female artists in the playlist. Cat Power’s version of the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction, for instance, deliberately slows down the original, taking on the quality of an old blues song, entirely without the insistent energy and aggressive forward movement of the original. She drawls her way through the lyrics, with what feels like a lazy sneer, opening up a sense of loneliness, which is not present in Jagger’s vocal. The lyrics related to what various different men are urging the singer to do – ‘telling me more and more about some useless information’ – feel different when sung by a woman in this way, opening up an implied critique and disrupting the form and content of the original. On the other hand, Patti Smith's famous version of Van Morrison and Them's Gloria feels more directly political and critical. As Roy Shuker points out, Smith’s version ‘reworks the song from a female point of view, exposing Morrison’s macho stance with an exaggerated leering “male” performance, and using gender ambiguities to parody the maleness of Morrison’s song’ (2008, 132).
In a similar way, I approached songs such as Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control, deliberately picking out fragments that focused on depictions of the female figure, repeating and layering these, using my female voice to point to and reveal some of the issues of this depiction, without ever stating them directly. Engaging with ‘iconic’ male voices, such as Mark E. Smith and John Cooper Clarke, was another strategy – setting their voices against mine, so that their words in my mouth were deliberately uncomfortable and challenging.
The result of this exploration through practice was a set of ways of working with the musical material, in accordance with the above principles, and this can be heard in the vocal score playing above. This vocal sampling was mixed together with footage and images I had gathered of Salford, spoken word samples and various writings about the city, from Engels’s Condition of the Working-Class in England to the contemporary corporate-speak of the brochures written to promote the numerous housing developments, which have shot up here in recent times, as outlined on the first page of this article. The types of mixes this created can be seen on the ‘Salford in the Mix’ page. It is also here that some reflection appears on why and how the strand of research specifically related to gender and Salford’s musical history receded in the project as a whole, while the act of sampling, singing, and the presence of the female voice remained. However, before addressing the events and outcomes themselves, along with the findings that have arisen from the practice so far, another strand of the research and its role in these mixes – my subjective positioning within the place being sampled and mixed – is explored on the next page.
