Cunein-Formatics and the Impermanent Groove

     Fluke. This word alone, as used most prominently by noted idiosyncratist and improvisationist Scotch BX, encapsulates an eternal truth of both traditional and non-traditional electronic music: nothing is exactly replicable unless you have digital copies, and even the things that ARE digital will be replicated in different ways in their translation to audible sound by DAC units, etchings onto the readable surface of vinyl records, duplication onto cassette tape via an ever-degrading deck which hasn't actually been 'hi-fi' for a few decades now, and so on. In short, electronic music production is distinctly Heraclitean, and it often survives in just as many fragments as the Pre-Socratics, but the media is lost in the span of only a decade rather than, say, a few centuries to a millennium. After all, SoundCloud, someday to become a Library of Alexandria itself even if 'saved' by ArchiveTeam, houses lossy encodings of so many of these flukes, artifacts of real-time performances and indeterminate sequences, assembled in an oxymoronic blend of painstaking effort and haphazard chaos, and they too will disappear with the rot of hard drives and the decommissioning of servers. We make all our efforts to archive, but SP-FORUMS will shut down eventually, will it not? So much color will fade from this world that day, but the new will bleed in; it always does. I, personally, know that I bled in when I first purchased an SP-404A nearly two years ago, and even though it once brought me great sadness knowing that impermanence is a modus operandi on this scene to which I have grown so damn attached, but I have found beauty in the same concept, for it's baked into the very nature of the music itself, the performance of a Jalen beat or a Brrd tape or one of those assembles /f made as WARM THIGHS or Susan Balmar. Many of these are indeed far displaced from their origins, available only on Soulseek or MediaFire, but the records these artists would cratedig come scratched and damaged and dusty likewise end up voided of their original context in the process of sampling, chopping, resampling, arranging, and recording. We write flukes. We write with impermanence. We never step in the same goddamn river twice. We allow time to eat away at us and resist knowing resistance is futile, but this isn't a tragedy, it's a natural history. Welcome to the world of the sample, where the SP and MPC reign supreme, where any equipment capable of flukes (especially in '12-bit grit') commands unnatural resale prices, where magic is real and happens every day in silence. Join us as we sit around and debate whether MPC swing exists or do comparisons between the 303/404 Vinyl Sims. We have a lot to cover.
    For many years (I wanted to say 'fourteen years ago' but this goes back slightly further), it was possible to find gear for relatively inexpensive prices in local classifieds, online marketplaces, and even yard sales run by beatmakers of yesteryear or their surviving relatives. The Roland SP-404SX and Akai MPC1000 were still in production, but secondhand units, lovingly used and occasionally smelling of smoke (samplers and weed seem to have a lot of synergy - Reverb listings for MPC2000s and 3000s often still specify a 'smoke-free' studio as a smelling point), could be found sustainably and easily because almost no one outside the scope of these scenes thoughy anything about them was anything worth keeping. Computer sampling technology had presented a significant challenge to the E-Mu model, the ROMpler, and even a giant like Akai, which had already spun off its Professional brand in 2000, with an acquisition by inMusic in 2005 (the same year Roland released the original SP-404) that eventually brought us the unreappraisable MPC Renaissance (shame!), among other things. The relative accessibility of sampling instruments in an era where they were (supposeldly) well on the way to uselessness spawned a scene based on esoteric exchange. Forums centered around technique cropped up online, and regulars would dominate pleasantly off-the-wall discussions about the machines, the flukes into which users found themselves falling after acquiring these devices and messing with them. The boards were conceptual exchanges; in a 2007 thread on SP-FORUMS, one user, Cheenergies, attributes their abilities with the 404 to their experience with the cultural conversation surrounding it, their existence in the machine's then-present-day (and somewhat ongoing) zeitgeist. Everything about this was distinctly in-the-moment, organic, and collaborative in an era of far slower internet speeds and peer-to-peer exchange of knowledge and files alike. It would only be natural for ephemerality to play in so heavily, so rapidly.
    It's an exaggeration to say that nothing lasts forever. The concept of divinity, after all, has permeated the entire human experience, apparently since our prehistory, and some of the earliest literary texts preserved are of an explicitly religious nature, calling out to regionally-specific gods above (or below!) with either requests for guidance and assistance or thanks for the good in the world, the fertility of Mesopotamia before its aridification (an extension of how we felt when the sea levels were at their lowest during the Last Glacial Maximum), so I'll put my bets on it. What I intend to illustrate is that divinity/transcendence is as eternal as impermanence, which is itself paradoxically eternal as the opposite of eternity. We face rotting SoundCloud links and embarrassment at the perceived poor quality or corniness of beats at all times; more than that, we face the consequences. Thanks to the partial preservation enabled by Internet Archive, we can even examine this process essentially as-it-happened, so why don't we? We turn our sights to Jalen Tuna. Jalen Tuna, theater kid extraordinaire, perhaps found himself in the predicament of having lived a life too played-out for his own good and began erasing all but enticing traces of his online presence, his Nina-inspired flukes falling back on themselves and incomprehensible to those who hadn't been lurking SP-FORUMS for years already, screaming FUK NINA for months. Jalen effectively conveyed the (apparent) emotional intensity of his feelings for Nina through his sampler: on '4 nina,' you can hear him frantically shifting a tortured voice through every effect readily accessible on the 404's MFX unit, rushing the listener through his flurry of feelings; he still misses her, he still loves her, and he still has things to say, even if she won't end up listening. Keep in mind, now, that all of this has been deleted from the public's view, surviving on archival SoundClouds, MediaFire, Soulseek, and any other distribution service for rare music you can possibly think of. But '2 nina,' cleverly transcluded onto his 2016 (?) work 'For Parker Nina and My Range Rover,' is a lament of the transience of his love for Nina, and he tries his best to make the momentarity forever, singing about Nina more and more with each new mixtape or single, refusing to forget her even when he has covered up all trails that could lead someone to Nina, trails that could explain his story for certain. His sense of deletionism and potentially even humiliation over the mythos surrounding Nina obliterates his message and, in the end, illustrates the ever-changing nature of things he seeks to counteract through his work.
    Much early writing, however, also comes in the form of administrative documents used in burgeoning city-states for the tracking of things which no one (exaggeration) had had to count before. Cuneiform was a tool of trade and commerce in its earliest days, a tool used by officials who didn't want to get fucked over in the process of exchange in a reassurance that some permanence would remain for at least some stretch of time certifying that a singular event occurred and the state was not what it was before. Likewise, hip-hop sampling, in keeping continuity with the prior musical traditions of funk and jazz and soul and R&B it draws from, records the process of abstracting that existing material, the investments made in the (generally respectful, but occasionally sacrilegious) thematic distortion of included samples. The sampler is the utensil with which the thematic mental transactions of everyday art-conscious life are both recorded and turned into clay tablets for - in turn - further bookkeeping on the present mechanics of reality by vocalists. Rap is quite often as powerful as it is because lyricism expresses the current condition, how the world is right now, and even calls us to action based on what we now know. In this sense, hip-hop is of the world and permeates the world, allowing the full expression of all that is, especially so for those who would have no outlet otherwise. Like many genres, however, its inscription was prohibitively expensive and far from taken seriously by anyone willing to pay the necessary recording prices, which created a delay between its inception and proliferation through wax and cassettes. Within this delay we find a distinct dense of loss, for we cannot entirely reconstruct a record that does not exist in any capacity except secondhand accounts and circumstantial evidence. Having forced the artists into a state of protohistory, major record label executives only wanted in when they discovered there was profit in the equation, that the semi-permanence of having recordings in broad circulation would drive more capital, though in the end, the same semi-permanence has allowed hip-hop to prosper, driving the cultural conversation. This in mind, what can we say about online sampler culture, its tendency towards needless deletionism and its frequent exclusion of vocalists and 'text' from the story?
    By purposefully leaning into the same impermanence that was once forced upon hip-hop (and jazz many decades before it, when no one was willing to record it), modern sampler culture both succeeds beautifully and fails spectacularly. Through the omission of sociocultural context and through the decay created when a thoroughly embarrassed beatmaker memory-holes their work from the entire Internet, SP-404ists void their material of worldly context and create discrete realities in which the logic of sampling doesn't work as one would expect from the majority of producers and there is no fame outside the paracosm of the scene. Chushi's "Symantecs" (gone from the public Internet but nevertheless still available today on filesharing networks) includes "hendrix&tyler," centered around an essentially verbatim sample of a Tyler, the Creator track, a Surrealist interpretation of text already extant, where lyrical content is overlayed into an instrumental setting within which words and speech - frequently sampled by Chushi as if instruments - primarily function to create atmospheres, as one would expect from your typical CULP beattape (see: Marineland, also not available directly from the artist in full) chock-full of movie soundbytes intended not to advance a plot or convey a message, but to accentuate the hyperdetail (or, in Chushi's case, just as often hypodetail) of each piece, to see how the timings of speech align with the gaps left in the beat expressly for those timings to take place. Even so, the speech content often remains intelligible in SP-404ist work, leading listeners away from being 'readers' and into being 'curators' of feeling. Always creating transient identities, they shy away from the interpretable discography and its corresponding hermeneutics, becoming imperceptible except on the terms they have created, ready to build or destroy worlds at a moment's notice using the once-cheap, now-coveted equipment they bought on a whim while they browsed garage sales, inspired to integrate into the forum life. However, these powerful artistic phenomena do not absolve sampler culture of its faults, the other side of the same coin. Listeners/readers/curators may not exist in moments past, these listeners having found their cuneiform records of sample-transactions irreversibly altered by link rot and the aforementioned pervasive deletionist tendencies, which make research difficult unless you know exactly what you're doing, makes the all-but-loss of labels like SLF Tapes distinctly tragic, for heritage is lost, a landfill containing thousands of precious minerals is compacted to crush them into dust under the weight off guilty accumulated dirt. I can't help but feel hurt myself by this from time to time, seeing the work eat itself by becoming disposable, but it is what it is, truly. Jalen's work is gone, Chushi's work survives partially, CULP's trimmed down too many of his albums, and Antoje is somehow still going strong, among others. There may be despair here, but rest assured that you, too, can buy a hard drive and start backing up everything you see, such that nothing escapes your gaze, at least not for the time being.
    At the end of the day, these devices wear out, for everything involved in the production and recording process is temporary, even when digital permanence is supposedly the norm. Too often do we ignore the eventual tendency of hard drive disks to rot over time, and flash storage tends to last at most a decade before becoming entirely unreadable - those 1TB SD cards aren't the infallible archival media you may think they are. Ultimately, our tablets - both modern-era glass and etched Sumerian oddities - are fractured, and we only find out how long any of it lasts when it's too late to recover any of our masters, any of the MP3s we ripped off the aforementioned SoundCloud. With our tendency to project the present onto both the uncertain past and the dubious future, we inevitably face this problem, assuming that today will always persist, that the moment is the most authentic thing in our lives right now, yet the qualities of being in-the-moment and of being present are artificial constructions we've built up in our attempts to better deal with the philosophical difficulties presented by change. Likewise, the beatmakers we study intently from a distance often sell off their equipment to unknowable fates at the hands of new musicians, wake up one morning and find that half the buttons on their aging machine with its yellowing plastic case have become unresponsive in ways that can only be remedied by careful soldering. The characteristics of performance also do not survive beyond what can be expressed in a recording; we can only guess whether a beatmaker calls us to action or simply wants us to groove and, if they were inclined to convey a clear message, what exactly that message means for the course our lives will take after the immediate moment. Embrace the work for however long it may last, and when it has disappeared, find beauty in your own impermanence and likewise the perpetual search for the detextualized, ambitious new. Above all else, fluke.

REFERENCES
https://sp-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=240 - "The first time you picked up your SP-404" thread on SP-FORUMS (2007)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfkWvFE0wt0 - Tha Piña da Nina and the Santamaria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txRQ6zyqJYo - Jalen - Goodbye (which contains both '2 nina' and '4 nina')
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUSySuoiLAA - CULP - MARINELAND (unabridged cut)
https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/edition2/cuneiformwriting.php - Information on Cuneiform