This was a side-project begun and mostly carried out during 2007, with the focus on sampling.
Now when I was first starting out I was using samples all the time, and even had no problem with the occasional interpolation of riffs from other .mod files I'd ripped from various sources. Suffice to say I was crap at it and my use of samples in those days tended to be painfully bad. Over time I found myself hankering after a more synth-based approach as I thought, naïve and ignorant as I was, that sample-based songwriting was too limiting. I really didn't know just what could be done with a sampler and had no clue about the plethora of ways samples can be cut and twisted and manipulated to create something new. I remember at some point seeing Youtube videos reconstructing Prodigy tracks and actually being kind of shocked and in a way, feeling cheated, by how sample-heavy it was.
By the time Rude Corps came about I was very focussed on composition and very rarely used samples. Actually, I think this has led to something that gives my music a fairly unique characteristic: typically, in dance music especially, arrangements are built up of short phrases and riffs derived from unique sounds / instruments. Each instrument has only one part and while it may be looped, twisted and distorted (like a sample, in fact!) it generally won't change to such an extent as to become a different part. My approach though is more like a traditional rock band where there's the same instrument playing different parts more or less continually throughout the song. I'm less interested in sound design and arrangement hooks, and more into just layering a bunch of more or less compatible musical ideas on top of each other and building my arrangements like that. I think its probably the main reason so much of my production sounds so pedestrian and unflashy and, well, different to the music that inspired it. I think I sort of fall between two stools in that my music derives from rave and has the same loop-based ethos, but without the care for hooks and the confidence that my ideas are strong enough to stand up alone on heavy repetition, so instead I smother them in dense layers and keep switching to a different one to try and drive the track forward, but I just lack the musicianship to make that work in a way that's compelling or in any way sophisticated.
Anyway, all of this is to say that I generally don't use samples and so a project which is sample-based sounded like a fun change of tack.
My first efforts in this field were actually kind of a misstep, as I started with a sample and then just built a pretty regular track around it. This resulted in a few fairly dull tracks which feature as bonus material. The project really came to fruition though when I set myself a strict methodology to follow. First of all, I set my media player (in those days, WinAMP) to pick three random songs from my entire music library, and whatever came up would be what I would sample. Secondly, the only sounds allowed to be used in the track had to be a sample from one of those three songs: no VSTi's or other sample-sources were allowed, though I was free to use whatever FX plug-ins I wanted. The results were pleasingly different to my usual sound and style, though I quickly felt I hit the limits of this approach – hence why there was only ever a handful of tracks, sort of amounting to an EP that I never quite got round to giving an official release to (though I did, some years later, get as far as doing cover artwork for it).
It's actually been at the back of my mind to return to this project and maybe do a second EP. I think I've since learned some tricks that could allow me to push the idea forward again. Maybe sometime soon.
Discography
 Audio Vandalism Esoteric Jones [2010] |