Deluxe heavyweight vinyl available from www.guessmen.co.uk.


Sampling the seventh son of a seventh son

"Though we tend to see it in the context of the hip-hop generation and the subsequent rise of laptop production, sampling (as such) has been a musical tradition since there was anything to sample—check the snatches of famous martial tunes in Charles Ives’ work, Harry Partch’s bricolage avant-garde chamber music, the match-and-mutate tradition of blues lyricism. As Heidegger (or Kant or Gayatri Spivak or Luce Irigiray or whoever) would say, we’ve always already been sampling, y’heard?

"Perhaps one of the finest examples of a pre-hip-hop/pre-electro sampling ethos is the work of Tom Waits from 1983’s Swordfishtrombones to the present. Not only does Waits sew together scraps of song from all over the world (or perhaps more appropriately, from all over all over the world—field songs, gospel shouts, hobo laments, serial killer monologues, Brechtian opera, Delta blues, Cuban rhythms, Asian strings, imaginary dialects), he draws his entire sonic palette from the concept of bricolage: undersea seed-pods, brake drums, and tables are actually more likely to season his albums than drumkits or electric basses, and on one occasion, he laid down the entire rhythm track for a song by beating the hell out of inanimate objects in a studio parking lot (Earth Died Screaming, Bone Machine, 1992). As such, we’re dealing with natural source material for the GarageBand age, and while this concept isn’t entirely novel (it’s hard to imagine the RZA’s production style without Waits, though a direct influence also seems somewhat unlikely), it’s rarely been so deeply explored as on The Guessmen’s Back from the Bins.

"The Newcastle trio (Alan Edge, Tommy Anderson, and John Ayers, all of whom play various instruments and do programming work) self-describes as a “jazz-krunk-boogaloo” group, and while such a diagnosis is a bit flip, it at least gives something of the taste of their music: this is a band primarily about texture and swing, and to say that they’re influenced by old-school R&B means they draw energy not from Curtis, Isaac, and Marvin, but from Muddy, Wolf, and Guitar Slim. The monstrous grooves that power tracks like Animal Man Robot, Molder, and Troglodyte, electronic as they may be in nature, are pure booze-soaked, sin-and-grin handclappin’ fare from the days when the blues plugged in and moved north, and it’s to The Guessmen’s great credit that these rhythms’ immersion in hi-tech sampling sonics doesn’t feel forced or gimmicky. Edge, Anderson, and Ayers use electronic processing to sully and crack their sound sources, making something grimy, alien, and new from them in a manner that recalls, again, RZA’s application of out-of-tune pianos and dramatic kung-fu strings to sewer-dwelling, frightening ends on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). This is high praise in an era when slapping together a hook from one song with a hook from another can make anyone on Earth the next MySpace mashup king, when more than ever the trend of recognizable, boring sampling (rather than the sort of inventive mutation practiced by the afore-praised) is easy and en vogue."