DEN SORTE SKOLE . INTRODUCTION . III sample, reconstruct? Why not deal musically the territory between the composer and the Time Space with the information storm that we are all living arranger, in the sense that they started creating in? That would after all be the most natural urge new pieces of music with sometimes radically Collapse Royale in any cultural setting: To utilize what is at hand, different circumstances for the involved samples. By Ralf Christensen and to negotiate the most pressing problems of They started creating individual songs. They our existence. tested combinations of samples, composed This is what Den Sorte Skole has done. With drums, bass, solos, making music in a great va- Dear reader and listener, what you have in your modern computer tech, dusty vinyl records and riety of genres. Lektion III (Danish for Lesson III, hands and in your ears right now is this: A result broadband Internet they have listened harder while Den Sorte Skole means The Black School, of incurable crate digging, a pathological pas- and searched longer for music and connections the darkly authoritarian school of a, thankfully, sion for vinyl and an unstoppable need to cut it than most. They have moved with stealthy con- lost time) is very far from the hip hop offset of all up and reassemble it in new ways. viction towards a new way of creating meaning Den Sorte Skole. Yes, the approach might be In the feverish hands of Den Sorte Skole the and composing music out of what they stum- that of hip hop, sampling this, scratching that, vinyl of the past has been broken up and glued bled upon out there. but the resulting songs fit better into other back together into something beyond time and genres, if not into one entirely of its own. space. Through the art of sampling they have The work usually started with a loop and created Lektion III, a work of both then and now, Frankenstein songs then hours upon hours of listening their way mostly now. through the archives. They made more than Too much respect for music history is the The concept was simple in thought, but proved 200 sketches before they started working it deadliest poison for our music culture. It soaks to be a staggering task in real life for Den Sorte all toge-ther into one long composition of 26 music in a heavy nostalgic syrup that inhibits Skole’s Martin Højland and Simon Dokkedal. tracks divided into six parts – in a wide range of free movement. It shackles musicians in chains Over their now ten year long career, the two tempos, keys, genres, weights, moods, instru- of tradition and copyright laws inhibiting them Danes have been sampling without any bound- mentations. from reacting to the maladies of our souls and aries, but this time around they decided to limit They’ve altered the involved compositions the politics of our world. themselves in the most unlimited way: Their to such a degree that is doesn’t make sense In the end, being disrespectful towards our third album was to be built only from samples to talk about remix or mash-up, it is compo- heritage is the best you can be as a musician from before they were born – and from all over sition based on single musical performances – and so were the musicians of the past, cause the world. matched from a number of very different that’s how music has made great leaps for- So Dokkedal and Højland’s first task – in record grooves. And somehow it fits. It’s radical ward, caught up with the times, even let us get the beginning together with Martin Fernando juxtaposition and recontextualisation. Beautiful a glimpse of the future. Jakobsen who was part of the initial phase of Frankenstein songs. Perfectly shaped Dada. So. Consider the times we live in. Everybody the project – was one of searching, digging, Pan global pop art. Sonic archaeology. Folk is soaked in music history and the vast expan- downloading and listening. They spent months music of the future. A trans global, time warped ses of recorded music are accessible to common and months in the abstract caskets of our band of supposed strangers, sounding sur- woman and man. We are possibly witnessing the bottomless online-treasure trove and the very prisingly like they are from a splintered family most monumental change in music culture since real crates of second-hand record shops. The finally being reunited. A Swedish guitarist joins recording equipment came around. It hasn’t just goal being to dig as deep as possible in order to hands with a French clarinettist, a Lebanese transformed us into curators in our own YouTube recover obscure vinyl gems. string section and a Greek singer. museums, with our personally tailored Spotify The next task was one of listening and edit- Den Sorte Skole matched harmonics, playlists, it has changed the way we listen to ing: They tested for loops and listened intensely melodies and rhythms from many different music and perceive history and geography. for those very rare spots on a recording where sources, so what you will listen to is gatherings Everyone – at least in the Western world – the guitar, synth or piano stands out naked from of musicians playing in entirely fictitious rooms has the perfect tools for dealing with this. Some other instrumentation, where a vocal flows free- across time, space, nationality, genre, religion, by clicking more passively through libraries of ly or the drummers enter into a break in solitary culture – based on more than 10.000 sam- sonic memory, others by interacting through confinement. They sampled all these parts and pled pieces of sound lifted off more than 250 remixes, mash-ups and sampling. categorized them in an enormous archive. The different original songs from 51 countries on six end result: An immense archaeological library continents. A Turkish rock band finds comfort in So why not approach music in a modern of instruments and musicians at their disposal. the company of Italian, American and Scottish creative way, utilizing the tools at your finger- Then began the herculean task of actually drummers, a Moroccan string section, a singer tips? Why not dissect, copy-paste, edit, re-edit, making Lektion III. It was the task of exploring from The Bahamas and thunder from Brazil. 1 DEN SORTE SKOLE . INTRODUCTION . III DEN SORTE SKOLE . INTRODUCTION . III Finally, they bought the original vinyl records, amounts of uploaded music. And blog sites compositions would not have come into exis- become part of the vernacular up here). Sample this, sample that copyright restrictions, without prejudice. whenever the original source they had been like Blogger also freaked out and closed many tence if it wasn’t because of the kind of access There is after all no way around the fact that ”That doesn’t hold up in court when you sample working on was an mp3. And if that proved accounts. This meant that the music bloggers that these blogs granted back then. these gentlemen come from Copenhagen, The art of sampling is the foundation of Lektion ABBA’s “Dancing Queen”, so the album was impossible they had help from music lovers all lost their cyber warehouses and the contents After 19 January 2012, it would’ve been im- Denmark. But the general mind set is that all III, ain’t no doubt about it. It’s the proud tra- called back and destroyed. And it was. over the world who recorded and uploaded of them. possible for anyone to make Lektion III without music is created equal, and that there is no dition of collage turned into sonic surgery of It’s also worth noting the significance of their vinyl records in high sound quality. Among the notable music blogs were Holy an insane budget that would allow for buying such thing as an epicentre of global culture. molecular precision. Musicians today are kings epochal records of the mid 1990’s: British Granted, there have been compromises. Warbles, which like many other blogs linked to countless out of print and super rare records as Lektion III is detonated from all over the map in of control in a way that Andy Warhol could Portishead’s Dummy (1994) and Tricky’s Simon Dokkedal was born in 1979 and Martin Megaupload and thousands of albums from well as huge research capacities of an institu- a lateral and decentralized orgy of sound. And only dream of (“Machines have less problems”, Maxinquaye (1995) and American DJ Shadow’s Højland in 1980, and not all sample sources especially, what we in the west call, The Third tional scale. it’s certainly not subscribing to world music as he said) when he and his employees sampled, Endtroducing... (1996). date back to before those days. They didn’t World. And we’re not talking the current K-pop Dokkedal and Højland did it before the a marketing label, as it emerged at a meeting treated and recontextualised Campbell’s soup The two former founding trip hop artists manage to find or couldn’t afford to buy all the of Seoul or the latest South-African house mu- great firestorm of the music blogs; with a grand on 29 June 1987 at The Empress of Russia. cans or images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis understood how to employ a single sample recordings on vinyl. And they have also added sic, but records that have been out of print for sense of timing they secured the realization of After the success of Paul Simon’s 1986 Presley. There’s a precision in the tech of today with strong emotional impact inside quite a some bass synth of their own onto a few tracks.