[Anthony-G]

In case anyone is thinking of emailing Paul with the answer, note that article submission is from 2000. The Last-Modified HTTP header for the web page is Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:32:42 GMT and the Wayback Machine does not have a record of this URL before 2013 (I guess it lived at a different URL before then).

Back on-topic, being able to pick out a few seconds from a 18-minute, primitive electronic music recording and transform it into something much “catchier” is an impressive musical talent.

[srwhittaker]

I emailed Lansky with the answer in 2000 or 2001. Unfortunately I no longer have his reply, but the link to his "second computer piece, which has never been recorded (commercially released), and never will be" was to his 1976 piece "Artifice (On Ferdinand's Reflection)": <https://paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu/artifice.mp3>. The piece is also (publicly) available via <https://paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu/mymp3.html> and on UbuWeb with this little program note:

> Here is my very first speech piece, never recorded, done in 1976. The entire piece is made from a male and female speaker uttering the phrase "This music crept by me upon the waters". It's about 22 minutes long.

[jollybean]

The sample is dead clear.

I have a musical background but I would expect anyone who is at all familiar with the song to pick it out instantly.

Imagine if you were listening to someone speak Russian for 5 minutes, and they uttered a familiar phrase in English somewhere in there.

The English, because it's understandable/familiar to you, would pop out.

If they highly modified the sample (i.e. Daft Punk) it would be hard to pick out.

But this one is pretty straight forward.

[Anthony-G]

I think you misunderstood what I meant by the phrase, “pick out”; I was actually referring to Johnny Greenwood’s gift for choosing which musical phrase to sample. I probably should have used a word like “select” instead of “pick out” but I figured the second half of the sentence, “and transform it into something much catchier” would suffice to communicate my intent.

As a Radiohead listener, I recognised the sample as soon as I heard it. It was quite a pleasurable experience to hear it in a very different context and to learn about a chapter of electronic music history that I had not previously been aware of.

As a music consumer (not a musician) and without the gift of hindsight, I probably wouldn’t listen to a piece of music – particularly an 18 minute track – attentively enough to notice and think to myself that there’s something potentially special about those few seconds compared to the rest of the 18 minutes of the track. That’s the gift that I admire sampling artists for: the ability to recognise the potential of a seemingly unremarkable snippet of music and transform it into something special.

[jollybean]

Oh that, yes. In retrospect the sample fits perfectly with the song, probably because they built the song around it.

If they had picked a different sample, they might have made a great song, that would sound completely differently, making us also wonder how they 'picked out that sample'.

All of that said, yes, it was a keen choice, Greenwood is definitely the real deal.