Sampling Stories Vol. 7: Katie Gately
Hannes Liechti · Bern Open Repository and Information System (University of Bern) · 2017
Sampling has always been a strategy to deal with the past. It allows musicians to overlay different layers of time to bring them into coexistence and to create, thereby, what Simon Reynolds has called «a time warping pseudo event – something that could never possibly have happened». It is no surprise then that many producers process well known sounds from their own biographies, from childhood in particular. This could include music, or even snippets from pop culture such as movies, advertisement, video games, and so on. The American avant-garde pop musician Katie Gately adds another bullet to this list. In her tracks she samples familiar, sometimes scary sounds and noises from the everyday that are deeply connected to her childhood memory. Below, Gately sheds light on what I would call a psychological approach to sampling.