'My space trips from Chimoio': Notes about space and temporality in sampling

Reference: Conqui, Milton & Rantala, Janne (2023): ‘My space trips from Chimoio’: Notes about space and temporality in sampling. Quentin Williams and Jaspal Naveel Singh (eds.) Global Hiphopography. London: Palgrave Macmillan.   

Abstract: This paper aims to think about sampling, space, and temporality, starting from the metaphor of beat making as a space journey. The notion came up during an interview the authors conducted in Chimoio, a city also known as Vila Perygoza, which is a vibrant city of Hip Hop in central Mozambique’s hinterland, less than 100km from the Zimbabwean border and 192km from Beira, another city of Hip Hop. With a nickname that literally means ‘a dangerous village’, it has a distinct sound in the Mozambican Hip Hop movement. While producers in Chimoio as much as anywhere else are sampling elements from all continents, particularly diasporic expressions of jazz, funk, progressive rock, and soul, some artists have preference in sampling local and regional music, to create fragments of music to use in the process of beat making, thus paying tribute towards the music from the hinterland and lands by the Indian Ocean. The method of research is listening to the local Hip Hop beats and related music, reflecting and drawing from our Hip Hop activities and experiences, particularly Milton Conqui’s sampling as well as learning from other local producers; and thus centering artists’ point of view aligned to hiphopography. Because listening is a highly personal state of being and acting, essential also in beat making, this paper is as much about Hip Hop’s classical quests about ‘who I am’ and ‘where I am’ as it is an ambitious academic quest about sampling.

Keywords: Sampling, Chimoio, Space, Time, Memory, Listening