Music with Sally Daley and 100 Gecs
Written on May 22nd , 2026 by Brandon Woo SnyderLive concatenative synthesis featuring music by Sally Daley and 100 Gecs. This instrument is driven by concatenative synthesis using Data Knot in Max MSP, as well as diffusion synthesis with Stable Audio Open, which is performing some experimental corpus-augmentation ideas I’ve been working on.
The synthesis samples “My God and My All” (1990) by Sally Daley, “1,000 Gecs” (2020) by 100 Gecs, and my own voice (recorded live in performance)
Short Reflection on Sampling Other’s Music
Sally Daley, one of the artists I’m sampling here, is an American organist and composer of sacred music in the catholic tradition. I used to think of religious music as something restrained and careful, very mindful to not profane the sacred ideas it’s in dialogue with. And from this I felt conflicted about how to sample music; Songs are sacred texts of people and cultures.
At the same time, these songs that became sacred to me; artists in whom I found pieces of myself; I wanted to intertwine myself with them. Do the exact opposite of keeping them at a “sacred” distance.
More recently I’ve felt that ‘sacred’-ness does not necessarily mean ‘separate’ or ‘distant’. As music is an intensely human act, to make music that regards something as sacred means to pull that sacred being into close, intertwined connection with the self.
I sampled Sally Daley’s music as a way to intertwine myself with her. Sampling, for me here, is a means to be in communion with the texts and figures I revere.
(Shout out to @goldenfinch for turning me on to The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates Jr., which opened the door for me into the many ways (reverant and subversive) sampling has played in contemporary hip hop culture)
