At last the long-awaited solutions to last week’s spot-the-sample quizz. In the end, you guys did pretty good collectively: I sure didn’t expect that many to be found.

Let’s start with those you found:

Sample 1

… was an easy one. Lalo Schiffrin’s Danube Incident, happily sampled in Portishead’s Sour Times:

Sample 2

… was another famous one. Carol Williams’ Love is You, sampled by Mr. Spiller in his 2000’s hit, Groovejet (if this ain’t love) :

Sample 3

… was The Imperials’ Can you imagine, ruthlessly looped to exhaustion in Daft Punk’s Crescendolls (in case you’re wondering, the latter is made of absolutely nothing but a sample of the former to a standard house beat):

Sample 4

… was short, but obvious enough to let you recognize Dee-lite’s Groove is in the heart‘s infamous break, sampled from Vernon Burch’s Get up.

Sample 5

To spot this one, you had to spend some time near a mainstream dancefloor last Summer, where you could have heard late 70’s band Was Not Was’ Wheel me out, remixed as Woz not woz by Eric Prydz, and marvelled at how little it takes to create a 21st century dance hit (essentially: removing the vocals and adding a stronger beat):

Sample 6 & 8

Two tracks by the King of Sample, a.k.a. Mr. Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim. First turning Camille Yarborough’s fabulous Take yo’ praise into a decent, if not transcendent, radio hit (under the track name Praise you), then sampling Wet Willie’s voice on Macon Hambone Blues for the awesome Talking ’bout my baby, a track I recommend listening to in its re-re-mixed version (used in the sample above), not the anti-climactic album version that keeps building, never starts and sounds like it’s missing a half.

Sample 7

I kinda screwed up with this one: I meant to leave it out, seeing how it is nearly impossible to identify unless you are so badly obsessed with music, you are currently browsing from a psych ward somewhere (or identified the original track and thought of googling it around). Most people will have spotted Kurtis Blow über-famous proto-rap anthem The Breaks. Some might have recognized a riff sample used by hundreds of other tracks (mostly hip-hop and rap) ever since. But the biggest use of a sample of this track is not where you’d expect it. If you pay attention, you’ll notice the entire drum-line has been re-used in Chemical Brothers’ It Began in Africa club hit:

(Yea. Didn’t say it was easy.)

Sample 9

There again, you mostly needed to be acquainted with recent dance hits to immediately recognize Chemical Brother’s Galvanize:

Though I must say I unambiguously prefer the slightly more obscure track it was sampled from: Just Tell me the Truth, by Chaabi-Najat Aatabou (particularly love the amazingly uplifting intro).

Sample 10

I was really surprised to see both original and newer tracks identified, seems you guys have decent musical tastes after all…
While Air’s Modular Mix isn’t of the same depth as the great Gil Scott Heron singing We almost lost Detroit, I always thought they did pretty nice, in an entirely different genre, reusing this odd little tidbit at the beginning of his track.

Sample 11

This one was the extra bonus track of the bunch. Not only because I was confident nobody would identify the remix (and the original sample is obscure enough not to help), but also because, when you hear it, you will probably slap your forehead and immediately recognize it. Provided you left your bedroom at any time during the late 90’s, that is:

Indeed: that’s Eddie Amador’s House Music, you hear… Sampling 70’s funk band Exodus’ We can be together with enough talent to create one of the biggest club hit of the last decade.

Any more?

As I said, samples in dance hits are three dozen a euro cent: just google your favorite club track of the past ten years and I bet you there’s a 70’s sample underneath. In the list above, I purposely kept Fatboy Slim’s contributions low (it’s not even fair), I could also easily have added more Daft Punk (every single track from their hit album Discovery). Notably absent, but deserving of a spot, would be Moby, whose multi-platinum Play album is entirely sampled off Alan Lomax, except maybe for a few very forgettable productions. As I said before, the filtered disco-ish “French touch” sound of the late 90’s is essentially a bunch of 70’s samples with harder beats and effects on them…

Anyway: thanks for playing. Seems we got a tie between Ria and neuro, with others soon following behind, so we’ll say coffee’s on me for any of you, next time you happen within public transit distance of my humble person (that would be Paris for most of the year 2006, and some as-of-yet-unspecified location thereafter).

Edit: This just in from our Vote Recount Department. It turns out Ria is the clear winner, with an impressive six pairs, all by herself (well, I suppose Google may have helped… but overall that’s every single sample left, save for #11). She is therefore eligible for double-coffee and cream on me. Others can still claim their coffee next time we meet.