den sorte skole: indians & cowboys

From Middle-Eastern dancehall madness, freaky jazz experiments, and heavy dub psychedelia to beautiful piano trips, dark machine raids, and spaced-out traumas. From here to there -- out there, and everywhere. This is the sound of Danish sampling duo Den Sorte Skole's 78-minute album Indians & Cowboys. Here, forgotten musicians from the communal musical treasury come together to jam in a global ghost-orchestra crossing time and space. Indians & Cowboys follows Den Sorte Skole's monumental sample-based 90-minute triple-12" Lektion III (2013), a magnum opus that earned them the Danish Critic's Composer of the Year 2014 award and won them an international following, and which Sasha Frere-Jones included as one of six titles in his "What I Missed: 2013 Albums" list for The New Yorker. Den Sorte Skole take their strictly sample-based methodology to even more extreme territories on Indians & Cowboys. With an immense amount of samples, even finer-stitched collage work, even more diverse musical energies, and a renewed complexity of composition derived from the duo's work as composers in residence with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra, this is arguably the most ambitious sample-based album ever made. Indians & Cowboys is self-released by Den Sorte Skole. None of the samples have been cleared, but all of the samples are listed on the sleeve; contemporary copyright law makes it practically impossible to clear the number of samples involved in Den Sorte Skole's work, and the duo insists on challenging a system built by big businesses to favor mainstream artists and big record companies. But by revealing their sample-sources, Den Sorte Skole hopes to pass on knowledge, spark interest, and give credit to the forgotten musicians upon whose shoulders Den Sorte Skole -- and the rest of the music business -- stand, build, and create. Includes fully illustrated 32-page booklet.