Plunderphonic

In Toronto (Ontario), John Oswald is director of research at "Mystery Laboratory" co-ordinating the creation of recordings for the “plunderphonics” project. Oswald declared during an interwiew in 1994: "The definition I'd set up for plunderphonic was music that was recognisable in some way, and the transformation of that music. I think the most successful examples use music that is the most recognisable. It's more delightful to me to have these pop figures, and by pop I also include Beethoven, as the working materials. There are things that work as plunderphonics for me, I've got a tape based on Edgard Varese's Poeme Electronique, and had the same sort of experience of having changed round something that's very familiar to me, and there are examples on plunderphonic of stuff like that: Anton Webern, and Ligeti, and Cecil Taylor, and Captain Beefheart. But the ones that were most interesting to me were things like Bing Crosby, where you'd play it for somebody who had no great knowledge of all sorts of other things that were happening in the twentieth century outside of the pop mainstream, they'd have some sort of reaction based on that thing that's recognisable within it. The thing that's very nice in a way is that I think there is a bridge between things that are often ghettoised as being extreme twentieth-century avant garde techniques and pop music. The two things can coexist." In 243232, Oswald defined "plunderphone" as "a recognizable sonic quote, using the actual sound of something familiar which has already been recorded. Whistling a bar of 'Density 21.5' is a traditional music quote. Taking Madonna singing 'Like A Virgin' and re-recording it backwards or slower is plunderphonics, as long as you can reasonably recognize the source. But the plundering has to be blatant. There's a lot of samplepocketing, parroting, plagiarism and tune thievery going on these days which is not what we're doing." He added: "The distinctive feature of Mystery Tapes is their anonymity. We don't tell the listeners who or what's on them. With Plunderphonics we tell all."