Vampire Rodents - The Science of Collage

“VAMPIRE RODENTS: essentially, an attempt to crossbreed the innovations and techniques developed by many composers in the latter half of the 20th century with the experimental applications of sampling technology. An attempt to combine the science of the academic music world with the ferocity of punk and the logic of the mechanics of chaos. Among other things, a great opportunity to annoy a few human beings”. 

“Never repeat yourself more than twice”. (Daniel Vahnke)

A musical research coalition 

Starting to write a monograph on Vampire Rodents is like finding yourself inside a labyrinth without knowing which way to turn. We're not dealing with an ordinary band, but with an entity that remained hidden in the underground for many years, one that never wanted to rely on live shows or record-label promotion. Rather, Vampire Rodents are an open-ended project, a research laboratory where ideas and styles drawn from the history of music as a whole converge. Vampire Rodents were created to study, catalogue, uncover possible paths, alternative imaginaries and, perhaps, even new compositional practices. Ultimately, Vampire Rodents are one of the most mysterious musical entities of the Nineties, and perhaps of the entire history of popular music. 

Daniel Vahnke, the mastermind and orchestrator of the outfit, soon paired his studies in anthropology with those in avant-garde contemporary music. Together with colleague Victor Wulf, a composer of soundtracks for independent Canadian cinema, he founded Vampire Rodents in 1988 to pursue experiments unworkable within academic settings and, at the same time, to create a self-entertainment outlet completely detached from the rules of the music business.

Before delving into the presentation of the music, we'll offer a quick premise regarding the aims of this piece. Essentially, it's meant to provide a concise listening guide, one that can help the reader get their bearings in the discography and prove exhaustive enough for the purpose.

To avoid any possible misclassification, we'll stick to the Vampire Rodents' programmatic manifesto, which can be summed up in the following essential points:

1. Vampire Rodents use different languages: English, German, Latin and Chinese.

2. For their experiments they invite numerous singers, who perform freely, without any preliminary instructions.

3. The instrumentation includes strings, winds, piano, keyboards, timpani and every kind of "found sound." "No one can torture a cello like a RODENT".

4. The lyrics encompass politics, environmental issues, eccentric philosophies. Leaving aside rants and monotonous repetition.

5. Vampire Rodents develop two peculiar compositional and performance procedures: Sample-Based Composition (SBC) and Linear Time Graph Notation (LTG).

6. The use of sampling explores a ballistic sonic deployment that's hard to pin down, mixing orchestras, ragas, atonal guitars and whatever else you can think of.

7. Vampire Rodents' primary influences are classical music and the great jazz big bands. Not techno, industrial, or other popular electronic permutations.

8. An interview with Vampire Rodents should be read as a bleak, bastardized version of a Monty Python script.

9. The tracks are not composed for live performance or to be touched up by a sound engineer and a producer.

If point eight falls outside the strictly musical sphere that interests us most here, referring as it does to now-dated interviews, we can rightly say that Vahnke shapes the other commandments by drawing on his passion for big bands, old 1930s jazz and his love of ragtime. All while keeping firmly in mind the musique concrète of Todd Dockstader, the microtonal inflections of Harry Partch, the post-serialism of Krzysztof Penderecki and, more generally, the lessons of the atonal avant-garde. Of course, at first glance these allusions might set overblown expectations, even though the Vampire Rodents' ear undoubtedly bears their mark.

Given all this, what remains is to identify the popular sphere to act on, the disguise with which to shape the archetype just introduced. Vahnke and Wulf opt for industrial, leaning on its malleable traits and its natural predisposition for contamination.

Even so, the duo is keen to point out that they don't identify with the genre's themes and don't belong to the industrial scene, about which they admit to knowing very little. "Aside from the singers we've worked with, we don't know much about industrial music". (Daniel Vahnke)

“All VR compositions are Sample-Based Composition (SBC). So wake up and smell it folks”!

The job of the debut album, War Music (Dossier 1991, 17 tracks, 57:03), is to offer a reliable test of the flexibility of the industrial element under consideration. The music here comes across as a trial, an exercise to figure out exactly what the real possibilities for completion might be. These are tracks that aren't representative of what Vampire Rodents will become; they simply want to take the measure of industrial aesthetics, if only to commit its genesis to memory. Meanwhile, two more fellow anthropologists join the lineup: Karl Geist (bass) and Jing Laoshu (percussion), though their actual involvement remains uncertain, lending the whole affair a further air of mystery. The record was completed and recorded roughly around 1989, before being released on CD by the German label Dossier in 1991. The opener is "Dumme Weisse Menschen," written in German. Vampire Rodents sound like Einsturzende Neubauten crossed with Skinny Puppy. There are also a couple of deviant synth-pop numbers, "Press Of Flesh" and "Success," built on backing tracks drawn from Wulf's synthesizers. "Momentous" also plays with Eighties electronic pop, only in a more lighthearted way. "Abortion Clinic Deli," inspired by Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," leans instead toward the burlesque spirit of Zappa-esque collage (once again, the mastermind here is Wulf). Cut from entirely different cloth is "Pla Man," a response in Chinese, credited to Daniel Vahnke, to the Tiananmen Square massacre, which comes close to the machine-gun bursts of Steve Albini's Big Black. His contribution is split between the outbursts of tracks like "Exctinction" and "Holiday" on the cacophonous side, and the first attempts at microscopic assemblage ("Fragrance Of Christ" the sharpest, "The Ninth Floor" the wittiest, "Friktion" the fastest). Getting carried away, he even dispenses his own take on EBM on "Sexrite." Still in embryonic form, Vampire Rodents already prove to be dangerous outsiders with out-of-the-ordinary potential in the percussive derailments of "The Tide Returns," "Autocannibalism" and "Crack Babies." The closing track is "Meat," once again steeped in savagery. Perhaps the real model of ferocity here is Bad Brains, one of the few rock bands capable of firing up the young Vahnke's imagination back then. The skeletal, threadbare, disadvantaged framework of War Music doesn't stop the album from working. The first test is passed with a comfortable pass mark, and if we really want to find a link to what's to come, let's pick "Mummified," branded from the start by the first significant foray into avant-garde music.

"You'll find War Music a bit primitive, but a lot of fun". (Daniel Vahnke)

Confirming the fact that War Music is merely a fine-tuning of the industrial experience, there are the credits: Daniel Vahnke appears only as manager and his place is taken by the alter ego Anton Rathausen (specifically devised to confuse and manipulate identity). 

Having tested out the necessary devices, Vampire Rodents made their game plan official with Premonition (VR Productions 1992, 21 tracks, 70.22). Classical cellist-violinist Andrea Akastia replaces Geist, and Vahnke's name is now bundled in alongside Rathausen.

Premonition is the record that best symbolizes their twentieth-century-rooted nature, and it's built with a broader instrumental palette. Pure anti-technological craftsmanship that takes a step back in order to take flight toward new horizons. Vahnke proves himself a brilliant architect of sound, orchestrating warped data with consummate skill, letting small, shocking sonic events ripple through a meticulously chiseled jumble of inventions. Akastia obliges by lending her service, Wulf by filtering in ambient cues and cosmic pauses. Many pieces are essays in the deconstruction-reconstruction of rhythm, hinting at possible premonitions of what might happen on later albums.

It opens with a few homages: "Babelchop" explicitly unleashes a tribalism reminiscent of Gang Of Four from their "Solid Air" period (the Allen/Burnham duo is credited in the booklet), and "Babyface" dismantles the Little Richard classic, transposing new arrangements and words onto it. Later, the cartoonish voices on "Ovulation" and the shifting parameters of "Subspecies" forge a highly personal industrial idiom. The playful electronic excursions of "Monkeypump" even draw on the avant-jazz of Anthony Braxton. What's truly striking is the continuous reworking of the samples, which are broken down and graphically annotated by their position, as though we were looking at a "visual" score (Linear Time Graph Notation – LTG). In that sense, "Dresden" wrecks the rules of cut-and-paste in the martial deflagration of its own mutability, with chamber-music accents and combative percussion. "Rodentia Ostinati I & III" is a quick sonata for piano and voice recording. The chaotic "Demon Est Deus Inversus" recaps the foundations of serialism in just over two minutes, before the cello on "Apparition" echoes, by contrast, a newfound calm. 

In turn, the new-age openings of "Annexation" and "Book Of Job" veer into dark-ambient, foreshadowing the final charge of the instrumental "Colonies" (here we're at the level of the best "kosmische musik"). All three are credited to Victor Wulf, who wrote the music for "Recoil" and "Sitio," the latter a digression with horror overtones sung in Latin over a backdrop of electronic drones. Vahnke excels on "Deicide," which runs through punk's nastiness in tandem with the fulminate-soaked wails of the strings, in the declamations amid the microtonal trappings of "Infection," and above all in those tiny, self-contained interludes ("Valvasaurus," "Tenochtitlan") that pile on avant-garde gestures and jungles of percussion instruments. Accordingly, "Waterhead" is the mature outcome of an approach geared toward micro-composition, hostile to certain endless rock jams. The spoken-word performance on "Dante's Shroud" sounds like an extra addition, since the track would hold up fine without it. By contrast, "Burial At Sea" delivers such a cruel performance that it's impossible not to think of it as a more advanced rereading of the first album.

Distribution problems keep Vampire Rodents from becoming properly known, but the sheer quantity and quality of the ideas on Premonition are already something stellar and wildly unique. A chameleon-like quality that no one will ever follow up on again, except Daniel Vahnke himself.

Vampire Rodents' evolution, however, was not over, and Lullaby Land (Re-Constriction 1993, 21 tracks, 73.00) stakes its claim as one of the most complex and detailed works ever made. Incorporating half the history of rock, avant-garde, classical, jazz and electronic music, the record is an imposing, definitive masterpiece, capable of exalting the art of counterpoint in artificial, disharmonic orchestrations. This time Vahnke shaped sonic patterns that can recall the Residents or Foetus, breaking the material down into electronic samples symmetrical to the structure of the songs. The operation succeeds in importing into a "rock" context the microtonality studies of great contemporary masters, from Conlon Nancarrow to the ever-present Todd Dockstader, by way of the big bands of the 1930s-40s and the cartoon scores of Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott. All of this is synthesized in a creative process dubbed Sample-Based Composition (SBC), effectively sidestepping a traditional apprenticeship and making up for the lack of performing musicians. We've learned that Vampire Rodents meticulously scour sound sources to build an archive of sampled files. "Lullaby Land," in particular, elevates the method into a sound-editing process comparable to the creation of a mosaic.

The opening track, "Trilobite," adds distorted guitar riffs, funk cadences and tribal percussion to the program outlined so far: a breathless, dancing whirlwind in which the rhythm breaks and restarts repeatedly while the aggressive voice of Babyland's Dan Gatto challenges the cello lines and jazz saxophone samples. The violent tempo changes on "Crib Death" trace unpredictable trajectories, developed through crossover beats that are more total than ever. The bizarre march of "Dogchild" is punctuated by horns and percussion mimicking a parade band gone mad. The scenery painted by these scores veers toward dissonant shores in a deliberately disordered yet rigorously controlled timbral transformation. The title track, sung by Chemlab's Jared Hendrickson, lives inside the nightmare of a spectral ballet, wrapped in electrifying noise generated by the robotic frenzy of its pace. "Scavenger" even goes so far as to sample flying insects amid an atmosphere of cybernetic terror, alongside metallic reverbs and frightening sonic rumbles. Indeed, it's a tall order to find anyone else who could conceive the density of sounds on "Gargoyles" and "Glow Worm" with such ease, even among the most seasoned experimentalists.

And the surprises aren't over yet. "Akrotiri" launches into a reckless ritual where a gothic aura drags itself through ancestral visions bolstered by organ. The raga, meanwhile, ties in with the tightrope-walking flow of "Raga Rodentia," driven by sitar, tabla and electronic pulses in the ethnic weave of its setting. "Awaken" is a formidable staging of a brief orchestral piece that completes the discussion begun on Premonition with "Demon Est Deus Inversus." "Bosch Erotique" layers voices, verses, assorted screams over pressing strings and horns, in a kind of theoretical continuation of Ligeti's "Aventures." The dynamism and rhythmic irregularity of the samples on "Hubba Hubba" and "Cartouche" escape any convention, to the point that it's hard to file them under any currently codified subgenre. Without going too far afield, the fifty-three seconds of "Tremulous" alone are enough to redefine the sampler's craft. Along the same lines, in the guitar explosions of "Grace" (in Chinese) and "Toten Faschist" it almost feels as though metal is wrestling with the contemporary-music casing it's forced to inhabit; for that matter, even the heavy artillery of "Catacomb" can't help but crash against its own walls. Along the same lines, "Dervish" stirs up monstrous cyclical hammering within bacchanals, roars and seismic tremors, and "Exuviate" is a venomous brew in which the symphonic mix suffocates under the blows of electric guitar, propped up by percussion and the gripping pulsations of electronics. As for "Nosedive," try to imagine a startling relationship between punk ethics (Dan Gatto) and the conscientiousness of an academic education; that will give you some idea of what Vahnke was after with Vampire Rodents. The closer is "Passage," a delicate ambient breath that fuses Brian Eno and Steve Roach. The track will remain Wulf's last contribution to the "band's" music, which from here on will have Vahnke as its sole master. That said, the impact and extremism of Lullaby Land will remain unrepeatable, preserving a fundamental originality that time cannot touch.

After barely two years Vahnke turned the page, giving free rein to a personal fixation of his: experimenting with as many vocal shades as possible. Clockseed (Re-Constriction 1995, 22 tracks, 68.39) boasts a whole platoon of guest singers (recruited thanks to Chase, Re-Constriction's boss and Vahnke's right-hand man), relentless drum machines, and the simulation of an orchestra fleshed out by a more or less permanent clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, flute, oboe and saxophone. The Sample-Based Composition setup converges toward more unified modulations, delving deeper into the specifics of techno and hip-hop. "Dowager's Egg" is an essay in organizing the two styles, desecrating the arsenal of dance music by turning it into a purely creative accessory rather than a consumerist one. In the arrangement of resources on "Skin Walker," the voice plays a decorative, adventurous role that reinforces the backbone on which the electronic effects rest. Conversely, "Low Orbit" (feat. Hendrickson) falls back on an immediate performance, like a formidable chart-smashing single. The jungle fractures of "Mother Tongue" (voiced by 16 Volt's Eric Powell) revive Meat Beat Manifesto in the age of the great big bands, with extra industrial-metal guitar. On this occasion Vampire Rodents mark out the boundaries within which the interpretation must move. With "Clockseed" the meanings of entertainment and musical science become one and the same, inseparable from each other. Vahnke nonetheless doesn't abandon his overarching artistic aim, so "Terra Amata" indulges in the luxury of taking on world music, employing the Australian didgeridoo and the captivating voice of Linda LeSabre. Scratching sets fire to the cannibalistic rap of "Revisioned," and the usual orchestrations transfigure the goliardic parody recounted in "Scatter." Dan Gatto is back in the spotlight on the techno-hardcore progressions of "Zygote," seasoned with player piano. The absurd "Floater" demolishes jazz and industrial rock while running through the words of an innocuous nursery rhyme recited by Vahnke, who this time around keeps three other tracks for himself: the poppier "Downwind," the more electric "Another Planet" and finally "Tattoo Me," one of his happiest achievements; light surges, hysterical skits, whispered spoken-word sections amid delightful ornamental classical passages. "Ravages Of Ease" and "Teapot" (here, for once, there's room for a post-production credit given to Panhandler) are, for their part, hybrids of synthetic sounds and psychedelic trips on the verge of a nervous breakdown. "Saturation" could work for a rave party, if its nature weren't violated by symphonic masses. "Iron Clad" is an almost easy-listening blend complicated by keyboard flourishes. Vampire Rodents, constantly on the move, outpace most of their contemporaries thanks to superior knowledge, untouched by any extra-musical distraction. Vahnke's real strength lies in having both a classical sensitivity for compositional form and the talent to sabotage avant-garde dogma whenever needed, studied in an entirely self-taught way. "Heliopause" comes close to launching a new hybrid made of art music and electro-hardcore. The outside help on "Unmoved" and "Cocked, Loaded & Ready" reminds us why the industrial label, like it or not, is still valid. For Clockseed the following rule applies: as the singers change, the result does not. 

"Choose whether to be a composer or a rock star. You can't be both". (Daniel Vahnke)

Never one to rest easy, Vahnke decided to press down on the accelerator of his own inventiveness, spending many hours a year in his lab (let's remember that Vampire Rodents don't work in professional recording studios) to put together a very long album defying any compositional block. The fruit of these sessions is Gravity's Rim (Fifth Colvmn 1996, 24 tracks, 72.46), an experiment that flirts with the song format. The chamber music and background symphonies are pierced by a myriad of electronic samples stretched out into sequences. Besides Vahnke, there are vocal contributions from Jared Hendrickson, Battery's Maria Azevedo, Athan Maroulis (a versatile performer who also worked with Black Tape For A Blue Girl), Mark Edwards of the little-known Fleshhouse, and finally the Society Burning duo (Dave Creadeau, Boom Christophe Paige). 

If the dose of classical music on "Chain" (feat. Maroulis) hits a peak of brilliance right away, "Prophet Clown" expands pop's fixed elements, livened up as it is by the insistent spinning of samples and a gamelan carpet. "Beta" is a cello concerto extended by wails (Jared Hendrickson) and chains of loops. The piano carousels of "Gravity's Rim" and "Porker" bring out more theatrical arrangements. In hindsight, Vahnke said he was trying to emulate Fred Astaire (at least in intention — who would ever have guessed otherwise). Vahnke is practically unstoppable, casting "Schlangenauge" within the mechanisms of a miniature SBC Symphony – if we may use the term – while "Albatross" reinvigorates the shifting silhouettes of orchestral breath. His compositions are increasingly accomplished and catchy ("Underneath," "Ice Borers," "Parameter Seven") without sacrificing any of the complexity we've come to expect.

"H.M.P." raises the power of suffocating alteration, turning techno into avant-garde comic music. The tumultuous collage of "A Perfect Lawn," propelled by magnetic dance cells, holds together carefree partying and surgical precision. But it's in the instrumental carousel of "Sandtrap" that Vahnke is truly 100% himself: a composer skilled at absorbing all the external stimuli of that era's popular electronic music without giving up the formalization of "learned" geometries. Even when he hands his creations over to other singers and lyricists, he gives the impression of an infallible knack for fishing out the most effective devices in any genre, letting the person involved work at their best; in this regard, one cannot fail to mention "Core" with Maroulis, an extravagant and daring "creature" with treated vocals and comic fanfare excesses popping up from every direction. Besides those already mentioned, the other tracks enriched by his singing are "Calibrations," graced with a singer-songwriter elegance, and "Patterns," a futuristic synth-pop that takes its cue from Blue Nile. And what of the harmonic subtlety of "Obsidian," suspended on an agile veneer around the melody, or the carnivalesque humor of "Goatweed" (feat. Edwards), cushioned by the usual frenzied percussion. "Rain Wheel" and "The Happy Box" are a case apart and come across as a training ground for Azevedo's ingenious vocal lines. The climax of "Creeper" and "Fossilized" is just the right kind of horrific, with the latter bringing back a disturbing electric guitar. Hendrickson gets the job of "dirtying up" "Code," while Society Burning gets to see us off on "Evasion," amid laughter and sci-fi-movie atmospheres. Despite having no direct ties to the industrial-rock scene of their time, Vampire Rodents hand the whole genre several still-untrodden paths. What's more, Daniel Vahnke teaches us how to make music that is difficult, imaginative and enjoyable using low technology, relying on nothing more than a Commodore 64 and two Roland S-50s to govern the material. Vahnke is essentially an arranger active in the techno era, yet raised on a diet of contemporary music. 

"The minimum equipment needed for SBC is surprisingly simple and inexpensive. I've used the same setup since 1986: an old Commodore 64 running a Sonus SuperSequencer program from that year, two Roland S-50 samplers, a 4-8 track recorder and no amplifier." (Daniel Vahnke)

From here onward, Vampire Rodents release nothing else (following the collapse of Re-Constriction and Fifth Colvmn). Noises In The Wall, the double album that was meant to mark their conversion to fully instrumental music, remains in limbo. To this day, several unfinished prototypes have piled up (some available on MySpace). Vahnke isn't drawn to the music scene and, going forward, would rather return to his roots and work in contemporary music, cultivating his study of microtonality. With that, the mission of Vampire Rodents can be considered over.

Noises In The Wall (Rodentia Productions, 2016) is finally made available via YouTube in a raw, non-provisional mix. What emerges is a ninety-minute monster of instrumental fragments (as Vahnke predicted, there's no trace of a vocalist), featuring some of his boldest compositions, such as the 8-minute "Cyborghostsex", the ten-part suite "Zombie Dolls", the chaotic multitude of sound-organisms that is "Good Humour" (one of his masterpieces), but also the magical electroacoustics of "Itume" and the bizarre remix of Schubert's "Piano Trio No.2 Op.100". Despite its unfinished demo state often making it sound amateurish, it feels like the most stubbornly personal work of his entire career.

Side projects

Ether Bunny ("Children's music for the morally demented from the creators of the VAMPIRE RODENTS") is Daniel Vahnke's private tribute to big bands. Following in the footsteps of Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott, Papa Woody (Fith Colvmn 1996, 20 tracks, 61:32) sculpts electronic beats, exotic percussion and heavily jazzed-up cartoon soundtracks. The most danceable of the bunch is arguably "Chauncey Gardener", while "Crippled Cricket" brings back that classical-leaning flavour admired in Vampire Rodents. Standing out from the rest are "Telepathetic", born of his studies in player piano, and the drum-and-bass-like variant "Froglegs". The prize for wildest collage goes to "Mr. Poopypants", which sums up Vahnke's entire musical taste in one go. The mini-collages are not to be missed either: "No Paquitos" and "Bunny Jump" come shortly before the closing theme ("S.G.A.C."). The breakneck "Wee" ramps up the techno presence and is credited to Dylan Thomas More and Jared Hendrickson of Chemlab.

In an ultimately non-essential but clever divertissement, Vahnke keeps up the richness of his sampling, and the listen is thoroughly enjoyable. The "children's music" concept is pursued with total conviction in the comic sketches "Wabbitpipe", "Closet Monster", "Baing Presents" and "Silly Willy". But it doesn't drag even in the longer, more intense moments that run past four minutes: the title track, "Jolly Rogger", "Tar Baby", "Meerkats Of Mu". If anything, in a way, these instrumental tracks are where the idea of Sample-Based Composition finds its natural habitat.

This music has an elective affinity with that of another great industrial orchestrator, J.G. Thirlwell, whose main instrumental project (Steroid Maximus) chews on and devours the same obsessions.

The second work, Toybox, never sees the light of day.

Dilate collects ambient music from Victor Wulf's archives. Cyclos (Hypnotic/Cleopatra 1996, 12 tracks, 76:82) and the double album Octagon (Hypnotic/Cleopatra 1997, 19 tracks, 149:51) are influenced by Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream, while still preserving an easily identifiable individual touch. Given the strong homogeneity of the two records, a track-by-track description seems dull and unnecessary. If anything, Cyclos stands out for giving a new sonic shape to soundscapes already heard on Vampire Rodents records: "Colonies" and "Passage". Octagon, on the other hand, is an even more isolationist ambient work that foreshadows the plans of Glacial Movements Records.

The list even includes an adult-pop album composed by Vahnke for the voice of Athan Maroulis. The name of the collaboration (Alchemia) and the title of the record (Timeline), along with its tracklist, are settled on, but the project collapses before it even gets going.

Trivia and insights

– Victor Wulf and Andrea Akastia have worked in academia.

– Daniel Vahnke owns a vintage photography shop.

http://stores.ebay.com/DV33-Vintage-Photographs

– Vahnke has a particular soft spot for Tom Waits and Blue Nile.

– On the back of the original copy of Gravity's Rim a twenty-fifth track is listed, "Smartass", which was not included in the final mastering.

– Some of the personnel listed in the booklets of Clockseed and Gravity's Rim (not named in this monograph) is fictitious, invented to give the impression of a group that we now know never existed.

– Jared Hendrickson, singer of Chemlab, said of Vahnke: “He's one of those people I could call an intellectual without cracking up”. Among his favorite subjects of study, we should mention Mandarin Chinese.

– Vahnke's desire has always been to collaborate musically with scientists and researchers. It's no coincidence that the original core of Vampire Rodents was made up of anthropologists. He's not opposed to live acts, but he simply has no interest in them: “Seriously, I can't find a rational reason to keep replicating a song over and over after it's been recorded. What's the point? You should use that time to create new music. Always.”

[…] “If a composer is genuinely intent on developing entirely new ideas, studying linguistics, mathematics, astronomy or even nuclear physics would be far more stimulating than learning Bach”.

– Vahnke has admitted to having Tourette syndrome and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). He rarely watches television and is a big fan of cartoons (classic Disney and Warner Bros. above all, but also more recent American series like Spongebob).

Biographically speaking, not much else is known beyond what has already been written. As a further clarification, let's add a little explanation of Sample-Based Composition. One might wonder what's new here compared to other artists who compose collages of samples or record popular music without playing a note, to the point of coining their own term for it. Well, Vahnke's technique, besides his exclusive graphic mapping system (LTG), doesn't settle for simply replaying the original samples for a few seconds, but modifies and merges them until they become almost unrecognizable. This goes well beyond simple quotation; to better understand it, let's go into detail through the composer's own words:

“Sample-Based Composition (SBC) is a process that allows electronic music to be composed, through which extremely varied and complex sound constructs can be conceived and recorded at low cost. So, using SBC techniques, we're able to design musical structures of considerable density, complete and self-sufficient. All the parts of a composition (with the possible exception of vocal lyrics) are built using hundreds or even thousands of small sound events and instrumental fragments.

After experimenting with SBC, some composers may come to the conclusion that traditional classical notation has now become an outdated, if not embarrassing, waste of time. With SBC, there are no more performers, engineers or other intermediaries to deal with when recording one's own work. In doing so, a composer can achieve complex results at an extremely low cost”.

“In SBC, part of a composer's job is that of the 'librarian'. Producing the vast library of samples required amounts to 20-30% of the total hours invested in a composition. To start composing a moderately complex 30-minute piece, for example, you have to collect, analyze, modify and archive almost 2,000 samples in different groupings of instruments, tones and ensembles, with subgroups of phrases, figures, riffs, loops, effects, accents, polyrhythms, anchor points, impulses, etc. However, the measurement guidelines, pitch and basic structure need to be established before the sampling process begins. In this way, the natural law of chaos inherent to SBC is given some preliminary parametric controls. The importance of setting control factors can't be overstated. If experimentation is one of the composer's goals, it seems logical to follow the scientific method of research (pure or applied) in some simplified form. This control can be any generalized parameter of sound and spectral structure. For example, my basic controls for Vampire Rodents are tied to using the same hardware/software system and to working from a central skeleton made up of complex rhythmic designs juxtaposed with a barrage of additions that are often contrary but strategic”.

(Daniel Vahnke, excerpts from “Sample-Based Composition, A Brief Commentary”)

Thanks to Giorgio Sala and Francesco Nunziata for their support and encouragement.

I'd also like to thank Daniel Vahnke, without whom this monograph wouldn't have been the same. Thanks for the advice, for your availability, and above all for the music!

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