stock footage piece 2: type beats

The piece is the second in a series in which I work with pre-existing material, so-called stock footage. The function of stock footage is less about quotation and more about fulfilling familiar patterns and schemata. The term originally comes from the film industry but has long since found its way into music—whether as “Muzak” or, more recently, as so-called type beats.

In hip-hop and electronic music, it has become common practice in recent years not to create one’s own music for lyrics but instead to rely on type beats. Type beats are musical templates—essentially karaoke versions modeled after well-known hits, usually with the aim of imitating the sound of a specific famous artist.

This material explicitly makes no claim to originality; it only needs to be legally unproblematic in terms of copyright. I see it as an interesting challenge to work with material that was originally intended for other purposes and, ideally, had no high artistic aspirations. It is purely a surface-level sonic material that can be processed and varied in different ways—using the “classic” remixing techniques: sampling, cutting, looping, shuffling. Scratching, in particular, reveals the character of the physically fixed medium.

Hip-hop, which emerged from funk and soul in African American ghettos, is the sound of the underdogs, of subcultures—the opposite of institutionalized music. It is also the sound of Western colonial history, including oppression and appropriation. Even as it spread to other countries, it has always remained the genre of the streets, whether in the banlieues of Paris or the social hotspots of German cities.

Today, the most popular genre among German youth is gangster rap, despite its lyrics being far from politically correct. Here, the genre has adopted provocation as a strategy—something more commonly associated with contemporary art—and turned it into a standard (albeit on a literary rather than a musical level). Since type beats require the provocation to be added through lyrics, I am using only the rigid framework—one that still carries the "scent" of provocation, the vague association of gangster music booming from Bluetooth speakers or souped-up car audio systems.

By juxtaposing these sounds with more classical ensemble textures, which are clearly rooted in the post-war avant-garde, different cultural spheres collide—each viewed from my own perspective, with corresponding memories and reminiscences of certain tropes within each genre. This results in a structure that remains fragmented, dynamic, and not geared toward a large-scale form. The various stylistic elements infiltrate each other: for example, the subtle deviations from the rhythmic grid—typical of the “drunk beats” of early hip-hop (where hi-hats and snares are slightly offset)—are also applied to harmony, with the two keyboards microtonally extending the pianos. Some of the complex rhythms are derived from rappers like Haftbefehl, who often incorporates a variation of the “Scotch snap” (a sixteenth note followed by a dotted eighth) into his flow.

The result is a kind of virtual remix: it sounds like it has been reassembled from existing pieces, yet it is always through-composed, made up of fragments designed as self-contained “preview units” that only appear to have been torn from other contexts.

AI researcher Hans Briegel once described the random combination of memories as the “seed of the new,” a concept that may also apply here as these supposedly coherent sonic worlds intermingle. Additionally, the transfer of the sound of a particular social milieu into a setting like the Donaueschingen Festival raises the question of whether new music is defined not by how it is made, but by how it is perceived.

recorded by SWR at Donaueschinger Musiktage 2022