add rhythm sampler international rhythm stars about - artists - download

In 1967 the Harrow based Ad Rhythm Records put out its first three 7 inch singles, entitled Add Rhythm. Rather than featuring complete songs, each of them contained four drum rhythms; two on each side for musicians to "Add Rhythm to your own melody". The three singles, entitled Dance Time, Pop Time and Latin Time, are a unique example of technological repurposing; it was no longer your gramophone it was now, "the most effective practice aid a musician ever had".

Ad Rhythm Records never put out any further Add Rhythm 7 inches. And for the rest of their career, which lasted until about 1975, they concentrated on popular albums, largely composed using electric organs of various types, and some of the exciting new synthesizers that were starting to appear at the time.

In August 2013, I found two of the Add Rhythm 7 inches in a Red Cross charity shop in Hendon. Charity shopping is often a form of media archaeology. Over the years in this same shop I have found artifacts as disparate as a hand-painted Balinese divination calendar and Deutsche Grammophon's eight DVD set of Wagner's Ring cycle.

Taking the Add Rhythm singles home two things became apparent: firstly that these rhythms were entirely usable, and secondly that they represented ancestral missing links in the technologies of break beats and sampling. I resolved to use them for my own recordings, but then as I showed off my newly won treasures online, I had a bigger idea: I thought that it would be better if *lots* of people used them for recording.

I set up an event on Facebook and invited every musician I know, and they invited a few themselves. It was an opportunity to fool the shopping mall of the latter-day internet into doing something creative. Something more collaborative, obsessional and fetishistic. Something more like the sort of thing that the internet used to be so good at.

I was slightly surprised at the enthusiasm of the response. After all, what I was asking these musicians was to record completely original, exclusive tracks, with strict limitations on the form, and with no opportunity to make any money out of the process.

In total there were thirty-nine applicants. I digitised all of the rhythms, initially at the intended 45rpm and then at 33rpm, to give a total of sixteen rhythms, and then put them up onto Archive.org. I chose a rhythm for each applicant, using a weighted stochastic distribution which I like to call the Krishna Tombola System, and sent instructions and a deadline:

Most of the rhythms are a little under three minutes in length at 45rpm, and extend to something like a minute and a half at 33rpm. Each rhythm is introduced by a lead-in beat on a wood block and some vinyl crackle. In many cases the artists left the vinyl crackle intact and in one case even resampled and exaggerated it.

By the 30th September I had received twenty-seven recordings from the contributors. Over two thirds of the original applications. I was astounded both by the quality and the range of material on these recordings. Certainly I expected some of the playful noise-based reactions to the rhythms but there were a wide range of musical responses using a variety of techniques and even a pleasing array of songs. With most tracks ranging between three to three and a half minutes, the resultant feast is more like a mouthwatering selection of tapas than a stodgy diet of carbohydrates.

In summary, I'd like to thank all of the contributors for their hard work and their enthusiasm for this project which has turned a late 60s folly into a living musical chimaera. Whatever ambitions the anonymous drummer and the studio technicians at Ad Rhythm records might have had for their product, it is unlikely that they imagined that over forty years in the future their work would be interpreted in such a variety of colourful forms.

Zali Krishna - Add Rhythm Sampler curator.