Radio LBB: Found Sound

I remember discovering electronic music in my early teens and the novelty of hearing random soundscapes or unusual samples mixed with ‘proper’ music and thinking 'how fucking cool does that sound, they’ve gone and recorded a load of stuff at a skatepark and here it is twisted in with other noisy real-world atmospheres to somehow combine into a tune that has a feeling or mood’.

There’s something about the use of found sound or obscure samples I find incredibly inventive and that the result will inevitably feel somewhat unique too. It feels art-like, like a little insight into how the producer hears melody or rhythm in the real-world or an audio version of seeing part of their initial sketches.

I apply similar principles when sound designing now, thinking about how you can manipulate all the audio elements to create or enhance a specific emotion. But I always have little teen Charlie in the back of my mind when I hear interesting sounds along the way – ‘get that sampled in a tune!’

So here’s a little playlist of (mostly older) tunes that use recorded audio and samples to help create a mood, or simply make me think ‘cool sample that’.