week 6: plunderphonia

artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create. in fact they do nothing of the sort. they discover. inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system. for millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe – and telling ourselves that we “created” them.

- spider robinson, melancholy elephants.

a very interesting type of record collector is the one who makes a project of turning that collection into creative output, that is, collects to produce. or perhaps, in spider robinson’s terms, collects to discover. john oswald and his plunderphonics (the term he coined to describe his practice of pop-music collaging) is one of the most interesting figures. pioneer of the mash-up (the cross-breeding, so to speak, of highly recognisable popular music), oswald’s work is amongst the most brilliant and controversial achievements of the audio culture of the west in the second half of 20th century. inspired by the tape cut-ups of william s. burroughs and brain gysin, oswald began experimenting with musical cut-ups in the early 1970’s and issuing these cut-up compositions on cassette via his own mystery tapes label. in 1989 he released this cd:

which included remixes of recordings by dolly parton, michael jackson, bing crosby, the beatles, glenn gould, public enemy, james brown and others. he gave away the cd’s for free and credited all samples, but despite this, he was aggressively targeted (only) by michael jackson’s lawyers and was eventually forbidden from reproducing or distributing the cd’s, as well as having to destroy all remaining copies. this was a violent act of copyright cuntery on behalf of michael jackson (whose music is full of plundered samples, for instance: on his cd dangerous and the track will you be there? which plundered one minute and six seconds of the cleveland symphony orchestra’s recording of beethoven’s ninth).

to be frank, there is much more interesting things to talk about – in life and in relation to plunderphonics – than copyshite. but some things should probably be said, and most are things pointed out by chris cutler in his essay plunderphonia on page 138 of this audio culture reader. in essence, copyshite rests on massively out-of-date ideas that have little or no relevance to the culture. i would think there’s a fair case to argue that the bourgeois ideas of genius and origin were bogus notions in their own day. but whatever. the point is that now in a technological culture rammed full with recorded sound, as well as non-traditional instruments that have developed from the sound recording (turntables, samplers, mixers, synthesizers, digital production software, and so on), these old ideas mean something else entirely, or nothing at all. copyshite began with the sound recording, and it’s end, like the fatalistic fantasy it is, was written in that incipient moment. the sound recording is what enables the situation for a copyright claim, but the sound recording’s only loyalty is, as it were, to its material self (or selves). sound itself obeys no master, and nor will the sound recording if given half a chance. in this sense, copyshite is at war with itself. copyright is in denial of it’s material self. copyright – like all claims of ownership – is both physically impossible and metaphysically arrogant.

another way to say all this is: from that moment in 1865 when leon scott de martinville’s experiments in acoustics discovered (!) that different pitches and timbres of sound could be rendered visible, and then this process reversed to render sound, plunderphonics was always going to happen. it was just a matter of time. as chris cutler says: the history of plunderphonics is in part the history of the self-realisation of the recording process; it’s coming, so to speak, to consciousness.

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i’m attracted to the idea of cutting things up and putting them together. i think that the principle of collage is very important in all aspects of the century, hmm?…

– john cage.

having not wanted to waste all my words on copyshite, of course, i’ve gone and done exactly that. but there’s one line of thought i’d like to follow in terms of oswald’s plunderphonics. it’s a thought about aesthetics, essentially. look at this, or rather, listen to it:

what’s happening here, what’s the effect? the textures of the sound have that doors feel, and the referencing is loud and clear, but for me, it’s like cracking inside the core of the doors universe and finding it exploded into pieces. and in the recombination of fragments is revealed aspects to the universe which no one new existed. morrison was always banging on about wanting to break on through to the other side of perception, but instead, he devoured and got devoured by the culture. it took the genius and originality of john oswald to break apart their sound and put it together in a fully psychedelic way. his activity of recombinant assemblage, with it’s layers and cutting surface, discovers relationships within the doors that the doors didn’t know about, and could not know about. to gut a pop song in such a way and employ a totally new structural principle, as well as sensibility, presents the familiar (that is, the old) as new, and radically new. such newness enables the possibility of engaging with the sound as a new organisational reality, that is to say, to engage the world anew.

engaging the world anew by collaging it, is, as john cage observes, one of the most significant ideas and creative acts of the 20 century, across all the arts. more than 50 years before john oswald, kurt schwitters made this:

it’s an interesting thing to think about the compositional similarities between plunderphonics and schwitters collages, no? though perhaps oswald is closer in sensibility to this:

called arkadia’s last resort, by american visual artist jess, made in 1976 and on the cover of ron silliman’s book the age of huts (compleat).