sunday radio mix

as promised a couple of blogs ago, i have put together a mix of sound clips to represent sunday morning radio here in jamaica. from a little over 12 minutes of recorded audio, i cut 65 discrete samples, some very short, some rather long, and reassembled them using some sequencing software (fruityloops, as usual). i should stress that this 9-minute track is, as i said in the first sentence above, a representation. that is, i am re-presenting this sonic material in order to put forward a particular interpretation. don't get me wrong: i did my best to present fairly faithfully the mix of genres that i captured on my minidisc recorder and the general mood that so struck me on my first two sundays in town. at the same time, it seemed like it would be a bit much to ask people to listen to 12 minutes of unedited radio dial-flipping. moreover, the musician in me was more than up to the task of a little reorganizing. what emerges from these various impulses is, if i don't say so myself, a dynamic montage, with an unpredictable flux and with forms unfolding in various ways.

sometimes i simply follow one clip with another, sometimes thematically and sometimes for contrast. at other points, i assemble rhythmic patterns from the smaller samples and layer other samples on top. in other cases, i juxtapose different soundbites directly on top of each other. i expect that this kind of approach may bother some purists (no worry, though, i still have the originals). but i would like to demonstrate with tracks like these, hopefully artfully, that my representation of the jamaican music scene is always going to have to be filtered through me, even when i wish to portray it as transparently as possible.

hope you enjoy.