Which song contains the most samples ever?
While sampling may be most commonly associated with genres such as hip-hop and electronic music, its importance right across the musical spectrum is something that can’t be ignored. Many people may consider it to be artless pilfering of another person’s music to take a small sample of a song and reappropriate it, but there’s plenty of creativity that goes into the recontextualisation of samples, where you can see a jazz melody line pitted against an ambient backdrop.
Some samples may be straightforward and not involve much alteration to get them to fit well in a new context, but others require large amounts of manipulation, in some cases taking an existing piece of work and distorting it so far from its original sound that it almost feels entirely removed from its identity. This is the magic of sampling, and so many artists have used their compositional and production wizardry to create masterpieces using samples of other works.
For example, the two albums that immediately spring to mind as having set a high benchmark for creating entirely unique and new works from samples are DJ Shadow’s 1996 debut, Endtroducing…, which was an early example of a commercially successful record pieced together entirely from samples, and The Avalanches’ Since I Left You from 2000; an hour-long odyssey of psychedelic disco painstakingly put together by six friends from Melbourne.
However, who takes the prize for having used the most samples in a single song? While you might consider the aforementioned artists to be in good stead to claim this feat, especially considering that The Avalanches reportedly used 3500 samples in the creation of their debut album, but there are plenty of other candidates who need to have their work scrutinised in depth to see who has made the most elaborate sample-based song of all time.
So, which song contains the most samples?
The claim by The Avalanches is, in fact, wildly overexaggerated, and over the course of 18 songs, the highest number of identified samples on any track is 28 on their oddball hit, ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’. They might have lied about the extent to which samples feature on the record, but this is still an impressive figure nonetheless.
Stepping up a gear, but not quite to the top spot, is a track that DJ Shadow contributed to as one half of the production duo, UNKLE. Hidden in the pregap of CD copies of their debut album, Psyence Fiction (meaning you’ve got to rewind from the start of the album to hear it), there’s a collage of short samples of hit songs from the past that sounds akin to radio stations being changed rapidly. The track, known as ‘Intro (Optional)’, contains an estimated total of 69 samples, as identified by users of online sample database Whosampled.
However, while this number is likely to be slightly higher than 69, it still doesn’t take top spot, and sitting comfortably in this position is a piece that UNKLE may well have taken plenty of inspiration from. Before that, a small history lesson on the art of sampling is required.
While terms such as sampling (directly lifting a clip of music from one piece and using it in another) and interpolation (recreating an element of a song to be used in the same manner as a sample) have existed for a long time, there exists a term for music that is created entirely from samples. Coined in 1985, the term ‘plunderphonics’ was first in the title of an essay, Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative, by Canadian composer John Oswald.
Oswald has committed himself to creating several works within the realm of ‘plunderphonics’ over the years, although arguably, his most definitive work is his 1993 release, Plexure. While it is more commonly referred to as an album, all nine songs run continuously into one another for almost 20 minutes in total, creating the feel of one long composition. Seeing as this album is broken down into several constituent parts, it can’t be taken as a whole, but there have been several reworkings of the album that Oswald has released in the years since.
His 2010 remix, Preplex, is a reworking of Plexure, and is considered to be one long piece of music stretched over 30 minutes and spanning two sides of vinyl – essentially making it both one song and an album. According to Whosampled, the amount of identifiable samples in the song stands at 317 at the time of writing, but in actual fact – and this isn’t an exaggeration – the true amount is most likely in the thousands.
If UNKLE’s ‘Intro (Optional)’ feels like a scattered and disorienting listen, the fact that the samples used in Preplex regularly last less than a second makes for half and hour of unfiltered chaos. The purpose of the original piece was to demonstrate the flexibility and homogeneity of popular music from the past decade, with every sample appearing on the record coming from between the years of 1982 and 1992, and to show that despite diversity in sounds, these songs can all be morphed into one if you try hard enough.
Plenty of the songs used are massive hits; you’ll hear flashes of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in there and maybe hear a snippet of ‘When Doves Cry’ later on, and you’ll have a thirty-second period where Lene Lovich, EMF and Cyndi Lauper all breeze by almost unnoticed because the information overload is too much to handle.
Whether or not you consider Plexure, Preplex, or any of Oswald’s other reimaginings of the project to be albums or song suites, even when broken down, his defining plunderphonics showcase almost certainly has more samples per minute than any of the other nominees mentioned. In the liner notes for one of the many reissues of Plexure, Jon Leidecker of Negativland claims that “there’s only music you haven’t heard yet” – you’ll have heard a lot of the music on Plexure before, just not in any way that resembles this.
