On Saturday 28th November, WhoSampled invited 20 up and coming producers to take part in ‘Samplethon 2015‘, a unique opportunity to sample pre-cleared material from Universal’s Bruton Music archives, hosted at Metropolis Studios, one of Europe’s leading recording studios. The event was supported by Audeze who kindly provided 20 pairs of their world class headphones, as used by mastering engineers at the studios, for participants to use.
A huge thank you goes out to all those who took part and made it such a special event. All of our judges, among them Mercury Award winner Roni Size, The Herbaliser‘s Ollie Teeba, Breakage, Soundsci‘s Jonny Cuba and our own Chris Read, were blown away by the standard of music produced on the day. Selecting winners was a hard task and the scoring was incredibly close – our three winners, just a few points apart on the score sheets are:
3rd Place – Danny Drive Thru
Snatching 3rd place was Manchester’s Danny Drive Thru, also one of Samplethon 2014‘s three winners. Danny’s track ‘Dusty Corners‘ impressed judges at the first Samplethon last year and he delivered in similar form this year producing another head nodder utilising multiple samples from the catalogue. A fan of ‘recontextualising’ music (see his brilliant Ante Up cover version for a classic example) Danny found time in the allotted 7 hours not only to produce his track, but also to knock together a quick cover version 0f 808 State‘s classic ‘Pacific State‘ using only samples from tracks in the Bruton library.
2nd Place – Sup Nasa
Flying in from Neapolis especially for the event was Italy’s Sup Nasa who won over judges with warm Rhodesy number that made clever use of a variety of samples from across the catalogue and displayed intelligent and well thought out arrangement.
1st Place – Bigg Kid
First place was handed to Bigg Kid, the youngest of our competitors at just 16 years of age! Packed with surprises, the winning track shifted from an intro of vocal harmonies to a hard hitting head nodder that married menacing pianos with sinister synth lines to great effect. A perfect mix of analogue sample sounds and futuristic electronics, Big Kidd’s track showed a different approach to many and rightfully won him the title.
Honorable mention: Myke Forte
Birmingham’s Myke Forte missed out on the 3rd place position by just one point, joining Long Distance Dan in 5th place and Missiles Over Moscow in 6th place as one of the three runners up.
Stay tuned to hear the winning tracks and music made on the day!
