Sampling, Blues, and the End of Time

    In both The Last Angel of History and Laura Marks' article on the former, Afrofuturist scholars and musicians discuss the potential for sampling, in music, to collapse and unfold time. Greg Tate explains that "what sampling allows—for a generation that didn't have access to musical education—is a way of collapsing all eras of black music onto a chip, you know, and being able to freely reference and cross-reference all those areas of sound and all those previous generations of creators, kinda simultaneously." Goldie, too, adds that "Time is irrelevant, cuz we can take music from any era." At the same time that  sampling technology has the power to time travel—to reanimate and repurpose those sounds that may have remained lodged in the past, to unfold those past sounds—it can also fold time in on itself, rendering the space between the past and present (and all the pasts in between), at least for a moment, nonexistent.

Interestingly, The Last Angel of History itself samples June Tyson's chant from the beginning of the film Space Is The Place: "It's after the end of the world. / Don't you know that yet?" Here too, sampling is tied to a collapse or end in time, where (as Anthony Reed explores in his article "After the End of the World: Sun Ra and the Grammar of Utopia) the "is," the "after," the "yet," and the "end" all seem to exist simultaneously. If sampling, then, has the potential to bring us to this time, this "after the end of the world," by rendering time irrelevant, I wonder what exactly exists in this "after"—what comes after sampling?

Furthermore, the Data Thief's journey within the narrative of the film—one that requires him to reference back to the history of blues and the musician Robert Johnson, and, thus, to sample from the past in order to find the keys to the future—also collapses time; as the narrator explains, "He [the Data Thief] would like to return home, but cannot. No escaping from this time, this space... This is the Data Thief's new home—the zone of optical illusions." Before, the Data Thief freely traveled freely through time, coming from the future in search of past ruins, sounds, technofossils, etc. Now, though, by retracing the steps of Robert Johnson, by "sampling" from an artist that came before him (possibly drawing from the "black secret technology" that Robert Johnson received by turning to his music), the Data Thief becomes locked in time, perhaps not because he is stuck in this past he's traveled to, but because the boundaries between past, present, and future have collapsed in on each other, leaving the Thief in a "zone of optical illusions" where time is no longer of concern.