Free Sample Friday: Berlin Trash

As you probably know, I recently returned from a short European tour with my band Assemblage 23.  One of our dates was in Berlin, and, unusually, the venue actually had it's own dorm-style lodging for Artists that played there.  If you've never toured, I can't explain how awesome it is to be able to simply go upstairs after everyone has gone home.  And that we did, along with our trusty bottle of vodka, and we stayed up much later than we should have.

Cut to the next day when some guy outside my bedroom window starts discarding  bottles and other heavy objects one at a time, into a giant, metal dumpster.  Pissed off at being awoken so early, I figured I'd make the best of it and record it, thinking it might be a good source for some industrial style percussion samples.

And indeed it did.  The problem was, I was several floors up from the dumpster, so I couldn't get the levels as hot as I would've liked.  This resulted in dirty, noisy recordings.  If you've read this blog with any regularity, you know I'm a proponent of "dirty can be good", so I decided to take it one step further.  After editing the sounds down, I sampled each one into my trusty old Ensoniq EPS-16+, lowered the sample rate for an old school  Wax Trax Records sound, and dumped them back into my computer.

The result is "Berlin Trash", a small collection of unapologetically lo-fi industrial percussion sounds.

GO GET THEM!