Last week I looked at the synthesis techniques employed by British band Nitzer Ebb, sticking to the genre I’m looking at doing for my remix project in week 5 being Industrial. This week I will be discussing the sampling techniques used by a group called Front 242.
Front 242 is an EBM/Industrial group from Belgium, they came to prominence in the 1980’s with their dance style rhythmic electronic beats. They are similar to that of a techno group in the repetitive nature and simplicity of musical ideas and arrangements. Their music involves synth bass lines and thick boomy bass drums that keep a constant beat going throughout all of their songs. A lot of their songs don’t really have any singing type of lyrics in them, this is where their use of sampling comes into the equation.
Front 242 prefered in some songs to use sampled lines from broadcasts and other media where they can take what that person, then manipulate it in a certain way to fit the narrative of their song and add a cool effect to the tune.
This is extremely prominent in their song ‘Welcome to paradise’ off their 1988 album ‘Front by Front’. It involves speech from what seems to be a church service and they use the words and other parts of the preacher's speech to in a way shun down on religion and make the preachers sound demonic in some spots. On equipboard.com there is video evidence of Patrick Codenys using the E-mu Emulator II to sample and playback sounds. Throughout ‘Welcome to paradise’ sampled speech and other vocal effects may have been triggered by the Emulator II. At 00:37 in the song you can hear where the band has made an effort to arrange someone laughing in such a way that it sounds extremely evil, this was most likely made possible through their use of sampling devices.
Front 242's 'Welcome to paradise' - 1988
Great example of sampling. Good to analyse sampling from both the technical and artistic perspective.