Campus radio host Ambrose Moncrieffe is big into audio and digging under the surface of the music he loves. His show The Sample Set, which airs Thursdays at 11 p.m. on 101.5 UMFM, is a mix of sample-based hip-hop that goes into the samples themselves.
“What I’m pursuing currently is becoming an audio engineer or somebody who works within the audio field,” Moncrieffe said.
“Stemming from that, I am a nerd in terms of audio.”
“I like making music, I like making beats and I also just like everything to do with audio. So when I’m watching movies or listening to music, I’m always kind of listening to the dynamics of the audio,” he continued.
“I just like to hear how things are done.”
Keeping with Moncrieffe’s audio obsessiveness, the show’s production value is quite high, featuring admirably smooth transitions.
But beyond just showing listeners how hip-hop production works, Moncrieffe is also trying to present a sort of history of hip-hop itself.
“Hip-hop started as somebody taking records from a different genre and playing them in a manner that almost created a new genre, similar to drum and bass and things of this nature,” he explained.
“Something that I like to express on my show is that hip-hop is a sample-based genre, no matter if it’s new hip-hop, old hip-hop, whatever sort of hip-hop.”
Genre-wise, The Sample Set features lots of old school boom bap music, along with newer tracks that share the sensibility. But alongside these tracks are the songs that went into their production, meaning the show features a healthy dose of funk, soul, reggae or whatever else producers spun.
Recent episodes featured tracks from legends like A Tribe Called Quest, The Avalanches, DJ Premier and The Alchemist that mixed with music from Ohio Players, Isaac Hayes and The Gap Band.
Though the show’s concept of musical dissection may make it sound dry, the show itself is above all else a vibey mix of classic rap and thrift store gems.
Moncrieffe hopes the show will help demystify and destigmatize a long-held belief among music fans about sampling.
“There’s a stigma unfortunately that sampling’s lazy, because people say, ‘well, you lack creativity musically,’ that’s why you’re sampling” he said.
“But when you really analyze the art, which I do on my show, you can see that it’s actually very intricate and very difficult to sample music.”
Moncrieffe acknowledged that “there are lazy ways to sample, where you just literally grab a quick chop from a soul record and throw it on some drums and call it a day.”
But Moncrieffe sees the art of flipping a sample as “people that are carefully choosing sections of art, to stitch them together and create a whole other art piece.”
Much in the same way, episodes of The Sample Set weave together rap songs and their sample-sources to create a recontextualized work that frames the music in a new light.
The Sample Set airs Thursdays at 11 p.m. on 101.5 UMFM, and an archive of past episodes can be found at https://umfm.com/programming/shows/the-sample-set
