Susumu Yokota’s Symbol is assembled from fragments of classical recordings by composers including Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, alongside material connected with John Cage and Meredith Monk. Yet the 2004 album rarely feels like a demonstration of clever sampling. The fragments are transformed into an atmospheric world where the historical source can become difficult to identify.
What interests me is what happens to time inside a sample. A digital fragment may last only seconds, but it contains an older performance, an older recording technology, another room and another interpretation. Yokota places those pieces beside one another until musical history stops behaving chronologically.
Sampling is sometimes discussed mainly through questions of borrowing. Symbol suggests another possibility: sampling as memory construction.
The original recording survives, but its function changes. A piece of orchestral music can become texture. A voice can become architecture. Something created decades earlier suddenly occupies the same musical present as everything surrounding it.
The sampler does not merely repeat history. It changes the room in which history is heard.
