Information AboutPlunderphonics |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT PLUNDERPHONICS | |
| musical techniques | |
| sampling | |
| canadian styles of music | |
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Although the concept of plunderphonics is seemingly broad, in practice there are many common themes used in what is normally called plunderphonic music. This includes heavy sampling of educational videos of the 1950's, news reports, radio shows, or anything with trained vocal announcers. It should be noted that Oswald's contributions to this genre rarely used these materials, the exception being his rap-like 1975 track Power. The process of Sampling other sources is found in various genres (notably Hip-hop ), but in plunderphonic works the sampled material is often the only sound used. These samples are usually uncleared, and sometimes result in legal action being taken due to Copyright infringement (some plunderphonic artists use their work to protest about what they consider to be overly-restrictive copyright laws). Many plunderphonic artists claim their use of other artists' materials falls under the Fair Use doctrine. The name was first used for a recording as the title of an EP release by John Oswald. Oswald's original use of the word was to indicate a piece which was created from samples of a single artist and no other material. Influenced by record; "Pocket" was based on a Count Basie track; "Pretender" featured Dolly Parton singing "The Great Pretender" but progressively slowed down so that she sounds like a man; and "Spring" was an edited version of Igor Stravinsky 's '' The Rite Of Spring '', shuffled around and with different parts played on top of one another. In 1989, a greatly expanded version of ''Plunderphonics'' with twenty-five tracks was released — as on the EP, each track took material by just one artist, and included reworked material by both popular musicians like The Beatles , and classical works, such as Ludwig Van Beethoven 's '' Symphony No. 7 ''. Like the EP, it was never put on sale. A central idea behind the record was that the fact that all the sounds were "stolen" should be quite blatant. The packaging contained sources for all samples used, but authorisation for them to be used on the record was neither sought nor given. All undistributed copies of ''Plunderphonics'' were destroyed after a threat of legal action from the Canadian Recording Industry Association on behalf of several of their clients (notably Michael Jackson , whose "Bad" had been chopped into tiny pieces and rearranged as "Dab") who alleged copyright abuses. All the tracks from the ''plunderphonic'' CD are available for free download from links found at the plunderphonics.com website. Later works by Oswald, such as ''Plexure'', which lasts just twenty minutes but is claimed to contain around one thousand very short samples of pop music stitched together, are not strictly speaking "plunderphonic" according to Oswald's original conception (he himself used the term ''megaplundermorphonemiclonic'' for ''Plexure''), but the term "plunderphonic" is used today in a looser sense to indicate any music completely — or almost completely — made up of samples. ''69 plunderphonics 96'' is a compilation of Oswald's work, including tracks from the original ''plunderphonic'' CD. Another important early purveyor of what can be described as plunderphonics were Negativland . While Oswald used easily recognisable and familiar sources, Negativland's sources were sometimes more obscure. 1983's ''A Big 10–8 Place'', for instance, consists of recordings of people talking on the radio. Their next album, ''Escape From Noise'', like most of their later records, also makes extensive use of spoken-word samples, often to make particular political points. Their most famous release, "The Letter U and the Numeral 2" featured an extended rant from radio DJ Casey Kasem and extensively sampled U2 's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", which resulted in a lawsuit being brought by U2's label, Island Records . Oswald and Negativland both made their collages by cutting up (''Kaleidoscope'', for example) and DJ Shadow (''Entroducing'', for example) have both made albums consisting entirely of material plundered from other records. shot by shot so that everything unfolded in reverse order, although with each scene running in normal time with comprehensible dialogue. Another approach is to take two very different records and play them simultaneously. An early example of this is the Evolution Control Committee 's ''Whipped Cream Mixes'' (1994), which laid the vocals from Public Enemy 's "Rebel Without a Pause" over Herb Alpert 's "Bittersweet Samba." This gave rise to the so-called " Bastard Pop " or "mash-up" phenomenon where an A Cappella version of one song is mixed on top of a purely instrumental version of another. Soulwax and Richard X have both produced records along these lines. There are also a number of web-based plunderphonics projects. The Droplift Project created a compilation CD of plunderphonic works which was then "droplifted" into record stores (this involved slipping copies of the record onto the shelves without knowledge of the store — a sort of reverse stealing). Dictionaraoke took audio clips from online dictionaries and stitched them together so they recited the words of various popular songs while instrumental versions of the music (often in MIDI renderings) played along. Although the term ''plunderphonics'' tends to be applied only to music made since the 1980s and Oswald's coinage of it, there are several examples of earlier music made along similar lines. Notably, Dickie Goodman and Bill Buchanan 's 1956 single "The Flying Saucer", features Goodman as a radio reporter covering an alien invasion interspersed with samples from a number of contemporary records. The Residents ' "Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life" consists of excerpts from Beatles records. A number of club DJs through the 1970s re-edited the records they played, and although this often consisted of nothing more than extending the record by adding a chorus or two, this too could be considered a form of plunderphonics. Some Classical composers have exercised a kind of plunderphonia on written, rather than recorded, music. Perhaps the best known example is the third movement of Luciano Berio 's ''Sinfonia'', which is entirely made up from quotes of other composers and writers. Alfred Schnittke and Mauricio Kagel have also made extensive use of earlier composers' works. Earlier composers who often plundered the music of others include Charles Ives (who often quoted folk songs and hymns in his works) and Ferruccio Busoni (a movement from his 1909 piano suite '' An Die Jugend '' includes a prelude and a fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach played simultaneously). During the '90's Oswald composed many such scores for classical musicians which he classified with the term ''Rascali Klepitoire''. EXTERNAL LINKS
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