A Long Echo to Noise
Locked groove on 10" Vinyl, modified record player.
‘A Long Echo to Noise’ is a vinyl record consisting of a locked groove being played over and over until it completely wears out. The sound-sample is taken from the Beach Boys’ hit-single ‘Good Vibrations’, a song notoriously famous for being sampled excessively throughout music culture since its release.
The cultural technique of sampling always includes the factor of loss. When sampling from an audio source the sampled recording will never have the same quality as the original. It always only borrows a part of the original. This is not only true for sampling music but for sampling as a cultural tool in general. In order to work creatively with bits and pieces, parts of the original have to be left out of the picture. Yet even when sampling from an already sampled source, there always needs to be something original to borrow from in the first place. This ‘original’ might again be something composed from other sources, a snapshot in an evolutionary process of cultural production. Therefore the sampled is never autonomous, it is like an echo that can only exist temporarily and in an ever changing state, deriving from a source and ‘echoing’ until it’s origin has vanished.
