Reimagining Sample-based Hip Hop

Michail Exarchos (aka Stereo Mike) is a hip-hop musicologist and award-winning rap artist (first MTV Best Greek Act winner), with nominations for seven video music awards and an MTV Europe Music Award. He is the creative director of music innovation company RT60 Ltd., specialising in intelligent apps, and has led programmes in recording, mixing, mastering, and production at various UK institutions. Under his Stereo Mike alias, he has produced three critically acclaimed solo albums, and numerous singles for international artists on labels such as EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner Music. Mike’s self-produced album, XLi3h, has been included in the 30 Best Greek hip-hop albums of all time.

0. Sample-based Hip Hop as metamodern phonographic practice (An autoethnography of oscillating between—and beyond—analogue nostalgia and digital futurism) Part 1: (Inter-stylistic) Composition, and Tools 1. Sonic necessity, mother of compositional invention (Making Blues for sample-based Hip Hop) 2. Boom-bap aesthetics and the machine Part 2: (Reverse) Engineering 3. Sonic pasts in Hip Hop’s future Part 3: (The magic of sample-based) Production 4. Phonographic ghosts and meta-illusions in contemporary beat-making Part 4: Mixing (records within records) 5. Manufacturing phonographic ‘otherness’ for sample-based Hip Hop Part 5: (Exponential) Re/Mastering 6. ‘Past’ masters, present beats