For The Range, vocal sampling is very personal
James Hinton not only uses voices of YouTube unknowns, he meets them in person
AUSTIN, TEXAS— James Hinton, the Brooklyn electronic producer who records and performs as The Range, plumbed the darkest depths of YouTube for many a long, lonely night in search of the obscure vocal samples that grace his new album, Potential, so it only seems fair he would be asked to play one of the YouTube showcases during this year’s South by Southwest festival.
Hinton seemed to relish in the plush sound system, driving the thick tides of bass that ooze through his gorgeous downtempo compositions to levels that were probably just this side of dangerous but too tingly and immersive to resist.
“It was insane. The low end on it was nuts. I could see my screen, like, vibrating,” says Hinton, who plays live behind a screen-shaped holographic plate in deference to his chosen means of sourcing vocalists.
You can sense the investment that went into Potential simply from the fact that its heart-swelling piano and keyboard melodies and subtle percussive crescendos sound like emotion distilled to its purest musical form. It’s a record that sounds like it cares, like it might offer you a hanky and a shoulder to cry on. And it does care.
Hinton didn’t just nick a verse or two from random strangers on the Internet and move on; he tracked each and every one of them down, made contact, politely asked permission to use their voices and offered them a cut of the royalties. He made a point of only working with people whose video countenance gave him good vibes, too. As he recently told Pitchfork, he couldn’t bear to work with anyone who looked like “a horrible human being.”
Since then, Hinton has taken his relationship with the unknowns singing into the void on Potential, his second album as The Range, one step further by meeting them personally all over the world in a new documentary directed by Daniel Kaufman titled Superimpose. It premiered before his set at SXSW and will see wider release in May. His instincts about his virtual collaborators were right, he says.
“In my life, I try not to deal with people who are idiots or annoying or not genuine, so it’s been awesome to have that validated when I have met them,” he says. “I definitely thought they were special people and it’s just been totally confirmed down the line.
“The documentary, I think, showcases that quite well, but I’ve had a couple of meetings with people who weren’t in the documentary and it’s been really, really awesome to meet those people in real life, as well.”
Hinton goes to great lengths to unearth YouTube material that practically no one has seen. He studied theoretical physics in university so, unsurprisingly, he has developed a complex, completely secret Internet-search algorithm that allows him to find the most arcane of the arcane online: videos of dads singing songs to their daughters or teenagers singing Ariana Grande covers in their bedrooms that have barely made it to double-digit views.
“YouTube is very geared, as is Google, with page rank to trying to surface the content that’s most linked and most shown. I’m learning the algorithm a little bit better at this point, but it’s still a battle to find something that’s explicitly low views,” he says. “Things are categorically dismissed if they have a huge amount of plays and I just won’t watch them.”
No wonder, then, that some of his “guest” singers were a little taken aback when he reached out to them. Pros, they ain’t. One of them, a 13year-old London rapper named Kruddy Zak, now 18, was completely convinced he was getting scammed. They were, however, uniformly appreciative when they realized what Hinton was up to.
“That was the thing I was most uncertain about how it would go. It’s such a strange concept to have someone you don’t know reach out to you and be, like, ‘Hey, you know that video you made three or four years ago? I want to use it and put some production behind it,’ ” he says.
“I would have assumed at least half the people would have said ‘no’ or they weren’t into it or would not have got back, but as soon as people got the message and heard the songs it was uniformly positive and excited. So it was great.”
Hinton has come out of the nearly two-year project — which involved more than 200 hours spent well down the YouTube rabbit hole — with one of the first truly great albums of 2016. Potential is so lushly melodic in a manner that evokes Philip Glass, Moby in his more reflective moods and modern classicalpiano music all at once that its stately blend of abstract hip hop, Warp-esque ambient techno, bass-y Baltimore club music and rave-y arms-up atmosphere will appeal to you even if you have no idea what that last sentence meant.
Now, he’s taking his enveloping live show on the road, with a stop planned at the Velvet Underground on May 25. He’s also hoping to screen Superimpose alongside his sets as much as possible.
“So often you roll into a city, you do sound check, and then you kinda run around and meet people for press and that, so I think it would be really, really fun to just screen the doc as much as possible and have people come and see that part of the process. It would be so much better.”