I heard a great program in the radio yesterday while I was running in the local park. It’s a great time to listen to something you didn’t really know you missed out on. Like getting a present – just like that out of the blue, some words to enlighten your spirits or something..
It was an interview with a danish artist called Jørgen Leth, who works with both film and poetry and who has spent most of his life creating very artistic films and documentaries and writing poetry. He was for many years also the commentator for national danish tv, on the annual Tour De France.
Anyways, he caught my attention talking about his notebooks.He always carry a notebook with him, so he can jot down ideas for his films and poems.
It can be a sentence he hears someone speak out, or it can be something from a movie he is watching, or it can be a situation he witnesses on the street. It can be almost everything.
He is sampling from real life and putting it in to his little book, and some day he will come back to it and use it in a film or a poem.
Quite fascinating to hear him talk so passionate about this and very inspiring.
When you are working with music and sounds, sampling from everyday life is something quite common.
You work with sounds, and you sample them and manipulate them and use them in your music. Not so strange really.
But it just struck me that its also a possibility to work like Jørgen Leth, and sample non audio inspirations, even though you are a musician and not working with words or images like he does.
All it takes is to be a little more open. Its all up to you really.
If you are not that open just now, right now when you really wanna do something, then just grab your handheld recorder and start recording in your street or in the field or in the park or anywhere.
Put the pieces together with some help from a computer and some effectfull algorithms and your never failing human imagination, and voila!.. you made a new contribution to this worlds collection of artworks consisting of zeroes and dots.
Why not take the step and put it out on vinyl. All your downbeat, chillout and triphop and electronica and dub.
Sample away. From real life.
<a href=”http://www.ganga.dk”>Ganga – Downbeat / Chill Out Music</a>
