sampling 

Variations is a seven part series history of appropriative collage in music, compositions made using recordings of older ones. It's a practice that in the '80s became known sampling — after the digital sampler — a breakthrough instrument which was designed to mimic traditional musical instruments by allowing the player to trigger recordings of them back on a keyboard. But it didn't take long for musicians to realize that the true strength of the sampler was the way in which it made it easy easy to collage and manipulate the best sounds from their favorite records into new pieces of music. This practice entered the popular mainstream by the 80s, long after observers had already identified collage as the defining new art form of the 20th century — and the roots of this music go back just as far. Over the course of this series, Leidecker looks at these roots, as appropriative collage developed across experimental and mainstream paths.

In the seventies the avant-garde finally crosses the line into wholesale plundering of commercial pop music, and the pop disciplines of disco and dub become increasingly comfortable with manipulating released music into new forms, narrowing the divide between art and pop practices.

As the sixties came to a close, the progressive optimism of World music collages were met and tempered by a new strain of self-examination and critique. Composers shifted away from using obscure, generic, or safely public domain sources for their pieces, and began to work with instantly recognizable samples from commercial pop music on a much wider scale. As the focus turned from global to cultural, Utopian visions gave way to a pragmatic sense of musical research and development. This episode documents the collages of the 70's that began demolishing the distinctions between art and popular music, from concrète to dub to disco to the attention-deficit-disordering world of FM radio. 

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