Orchestra of Samples is about bringing people together, connecting cultures, blending instruments that wouldn’t normally be heard together and introducing audiences to instruments they may not know.

 

Orchestra of Samples has been a huge undertaking!  Twelve years spent recording musicians around the world, during tours and performing internationally. Addictive TV wanted to create a project that brought together as many musicians as they could from all backgrounds, both cultural and musical – an impractical task in the real world but not in the world of digital sampling.

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So taking recording equipment with them on nearly every gig for many years, they filmed recording sessions with over two hundred musicians in countries from Brazil, Kazakhstan and China to India, Senegal and Indonesia, all across Europe, even Egypt during the revolution.

 

They also became artist-in-residence with a few venues in France over the years, connecting with dozens of artists from Togo, Cameroon, Rwanda and Algeria. They cut up literally thousands of recorded samples, creating new music, recontextualising musicians as if they played together, when in reality none of them ever met or heard recordings from each other.

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No tracks were written beforehand, the samples dictated the direction in the studio, musicians all just improvised and the creative process was simply to find the samples which worked together. In some cases they later wrote or collaborated with others to add lyrics.