John Oswald - The Joy of Plunder: The Ethics of Plunderphonics

Those artists who open up new expressive horizons often stand out not so much for the answers they provide but rather for the quality of the questions their work raises. In such cases, the answers normally demanded of the listener lie instead in the questions evoked and in the domino effect they trigger within popular culture.

Canadian John Oswald, born in 1953, has spent a 50-year career dismantling the rules of composition as commonly understood, a cultural saboteur capable of demolishing the very concept of copyright at its foundations through the creation of a musical genre he christened "plunderphonics", which could be translated into Italian as "saccheggiofonia". From his first experiments in 1974 to the release of the essential album "Plunderphonics", put out in 1989 on his own short-lived label, Mystery Tapes Laboratory, he has cemented a reputation as a cult de-composer, releasing music that is as abrasive as it is entertaining, the triumph of a Dadaist unruliness tempered by the rigour typical of a man of science.

Whatever the project, it always amounts to provocations backed by a solid philosophical framework, the scope of which is sometimes proportional to the adverse reaction it drew from the mainstream, as in an episode from '89, when the Canadian Recording Industry Association and Cbs Records, under pressure from two lawsuits filed by Jacko's management, ordered and obtained the destruction of the CDs containing the offending track ("Dab") and, above all, its irreverent collage cover, which superimposed the body of a naked woman onto that of the King of Pop. Revolutions, especially cultural ones, rekindle the bonfires in the hands of those unwilling to lose themselves within them.

John, let's start with your college years. What do you remember about the valuable World Soundscape project?

In the autumn of 1973 I left my hometown, Kitchener, flying to Vancouver. There I attended Simon Fraser University for two terms; the campus was perched atop a small mountain, and the university offered, among other things, courses in physics, kinesiology and communications; the latter was taught by newly appointed professor Barry Truax, who was also a computer music composer, and there was also a course taught by Raymond Murray Schafer, another composer and the author of books like "Ear Cleaning-Notes For An Experimental Music Course", "The Book Of Noise" and "When Words Sing", which I think I'd read even before meeting him. Even though they were both composers, neither of them taught classes specifically about music. By the time I arrived, Schafer had already founded the World Soundscape Project, and was about to release his first record, a double LP called "The Vancouver Soundscape". There was a stimulating atmosphere of research. I remember producing some video experiments around that time, which got me labelled a bit of an oddball. When I dropped out of school, I kept working with the World Soundscape Project in roles that had nothing to do with creative work, but I also pursued my own artistic projects, using the Sonic Studio equipment normally reserved for the project.

What's your main intent?

To live and let live and, why not, also to try to create masterpieces or, at least, to re-conceive existing masterpieces in different but equally valid forms. And, let's add, to experience some special moments along the way, the kind where you go "oh, you really had to be there!"

Since you started out in the music business to today, have these intentions changed?

You know, I'd never really thought of myself as having "started out" in the "music business", or at least not from a commercial standpoint. That said, I have occasionally sensed a widespread feeling of fear and disorientation within that industry.

Your aesthetic owes a lot to William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.

Right. Yes, I was and am aware that my tape cut-and-splice technique is physically similar to the cut-up method popularized by Burroughs with printed material. But he and Gysin used their method as a kind of random generator of texts or images, to create juxtapositions that would otherwise be unimaginable. By contrast, with the pieces that went into my 1975 musical work "Burrows", I took excerpts from a Burroughs reading recorded on LP, and rearranged the words and phrases deliberately, not randomly. I chose that source material first of all because I loved the sound of his voice, but also because the spoken words provided an excellent starting point for my reconfigurations.

Did you ever meet the man himself?

Yes, in 1975, at the Cinema Lumiere in Toronto, where he'd given a reading. I met him behind the movie screen: he was sitting in one of those rattan peacock chairs; standing to his right was James Grauerholz, whom he introduced as his literary agent. On his left was a young man, "My lawyer," he told us. He had a strange way of looking right through you. I gave him a 5-inch reel of the tape I mentioned earlier and, once it was done, asked his permission to use his voice. I knew full well there was a risk he'd say no... I'd spent at least 200 hours working on that cut-and-splice piece. If he'd said "no", I would have felt obliged not to release the result. Instead, he gave me the green light I was hoping for, with no restrictions. Since then, I've never again asked a famous person's permission to plunder them.

How did you arrive at the epiphany of "plunderphonics"?

I've had ideas pass through my mind, sure, but I don't really think of plunderphonics as an idea as such, so much as a method—one that, to me, is pretty obvious—of listening creatively. It all started when I was seven years old, thanks to my first transistor radio: I discovered how tuning the AM and shortwave frequencies could change and distort the sound. A few years later, with my first 4-speed turntable, I realized I could choose to listen to music faster or slower, not the way the artist had intended, but the way I wanted it played back. A few more years passed and I bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder, with which I figured out how not just to record music, but above all to re-record, reverse and manipulate sounds, records, all kinds of broadcasts, and so on. Those were my musical instruments, and thanks to them I could experiment on pretty much any music that came my way. Sometimes I'd get ideas for compositions to record and perform in a traditional way; but then I'd go back to devising new strategies for presenting them to listeners in an original way.

From a decompositional standpoint, can we say that part of the inspiration for "Burrows" came from listening to a song… sorry, a piece, like Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain"?

I love the idea that "It's Gonna Rain" might be considered a song today! The first Steve Reich piece I ever listened to and bought actually came right after "It's Gonna Rain", and it's called "Come Out", an example of his phase-shifting technique with looped tapes, an approach Reich himself called a "new kind of canon". Only one of the eight pieces on "Burrows" is influenced by that Reichian technique, and that's "Word Falling". But even though it involves two phase-shifted looped tapes, it isn't a canon; to be precise, it's a phase-shifted hoquetus of the phonemes that make up the phrase "word falling", alternating the phonemes between the two looped tapes, which overlap one another to create new phonemes, rhythms and meanings. I'm including a link where you can stream the tracks from "Burrows"; some of them can also be played in reverse, and you can even play them all simultaneously, so as to generate a different composition every time.

Each piece produces a different effect, depending on the strategy used.

For example, in the fourth piece, "And Just Let Me Tell You", the length of the gaps increases in line with the repetitions implicit in the rest of the phrase. The fifth, "I Got", is, acoustically speaking, palindromic, and I approached it with both forward and reverse playback in mind. "So Unspeakably Distasteful" consists of interpolating repetitions upon repetitions.

Were you into minimalism?

Not in any significant way. Although, at the time, I did buy albums by Glass, Reich and Riley, and I particularly liked the latter two. In the meantime, I was drawn to maximum variety. I actually loved the first recording of Riley's "In C", the one released on LP in 1968. Just yesterday I listened to David Rosenboom, who played viola on that record, describe the unique atmosphere in the recording studio after the eleven musicians had finished playing those 42 minutes of music live. There was a very long silence, and then the producer, David Behrman, declared: "I think we just changed the very concept of music." I apologize to both Davids if, in answering you, I haven't reported exactly what they said.

Aren't you interested in the concept of repetition?

If I can't really call myself interested in repetition, I've nonetheless used it, in small doses, while avoiding the common habit of repeating everything in groups of four. And yet, looking closely, a bit of repetition handled with originality can actually be a relief against an overabundance of variety.

With the mini-album "Plexure" (1993) your approach became even more fragmentary and abstract. Aren't you interested in a track having some kind of enjoyability?

Jeez, Filippo, this question might sound like an insult, given that "en-joy-ability" (which also means "the-capacity-to-bring-joy") has always been my chief aim, in my work as in my life. Let's put it this way: all plunderphonics, "Plexure" included, are abstractions in the literal sense of the term. Abstraction can also mean the extraction or removal of something from a given context. In English you can indeed say "...to abstract more water from streams" or, using a mild euphemism, "his pockets contained all he had been able to 'abstract' from the apartment." A few years ago I was asked what music I'd bring with me to a desert island (an island, obviously, equipped with playback systems) and I honestly answered that I would first of all take the records I made myself (plus one or two that I produced). A choice that's only selfish in appearance, and which has a very concrete reason behind it: my recordings were made first and foremost to satisfy my own personal listening desires. What I've made was created to fill the most glaring gaps in my own record collection. By taking the listener's position, I can produce things that, even before I think of them as "my music," are exactly what I want to hear. Time and experience have shown that these recordings, as it turns out, are enjoyed by others too, not just by me, which is why, sometimes, I don't limit myself to pressing just a single copy of an album.

We haven't touched on your relationship with live music.

Missing from that desert-island list of recordings are any documents of what I've played live. In fact, however much I could rationally justify their existence, I hope those recordings end up on someone else's desert island instead. Listening to them gives me the same uneasy feeling some people get hearing a recording of their own voice. Perhaps it's this same reticence that stops me from even listening to recordings of my favorite improvisation ensemble, the Double Wind Cello Trios.

Not even one exception?

Inexplicably, I'm actually quite fond of my 1980 solo sax album.

To understand your approach to acoustic music, yesterday I was listening to one of your sax performances with Ken Aldcroft and Mike Gennaro. What kind of musician are you?

Simply put, I play. And I improvise. My work with plunderphonics and my work with acoustic instruments are two completely different things.

Something's not working right on your site 6q.com. Myself and other colleagues have tried to browse it, but we only see a fragment of the "6q" text. What should we do?

There must have been a small glitch when you visited that URL. It's working again now. I designed the site 15 years ago and it was built by a company specializing in website design, bNotions, whose lead designer, Mark Reale, later gave a presentation on 6q.com at a web designers' conference titled "Probably the Strangest WordPress Project You've Ever Seen in Your Life," a title that isn't without its own truth. The 6 q(uestions) the site refers to are who, what, where, when, why, how and, more broadly, the site is meant to function as a dynamic map of texts and images.

Phil Lesh, bassist of the Grateful Dead (who passed away just a few days ago, ed.), is behind "Grayfolded"; how did the album come about and take shape?

Phil and his buddy David Gans phoned me up to suggest I explore the Dead's music through my own style; let's say they talked me into it, but I didn't dive in headfirst right away. Phil was a fan of plunderphonics, so he gave me access to the Dead's archive: I dug through 25 years of live recordings, focusing on their signature piece, "Dark Star," the framework the band used for its wild improvised flights. So this isn't meant to be a reproducible version of the piece – not least because it would be impossible for three different generations of Jerry Garcia to have shared the same stage – but you still get the illusion of witnessing a Dead live show, assembled by selecting from 100 versions of "Dark Star." It was a subject well suited to me, since it offered a vast range of different possibilities while still resting on a coherent foundation. In every version something happened that hadn't been there in the previous ones: my job, then, was to focus on the exceptions rather than the rules. Let's say I tried to create an unorthodox "Dark Star," limiting my use of technology and trying to preserve the purity of the performances. Keep an eye out, too, for a more recent version of "Grayfolded," which consists of the first 45 minutes of the original double album, and was commissioned by producer Massimo Simonini and transcribed by Domenico Caliri, who also conducted the nonet that performed it at its premiere in Bologna in 2015 as part of the Angelica-Festival Internazionale di Musica. One of those concerts, mixed by yours truly, will soon be available on CD.

Conceptually, how do “plunderphonics” differ from the sampling used, say, in the world of rap?

All popular music (and folk music too, by definition) exists essentially, if not legally, within a public-domain context. Listening to pop music isn't really a matter of choice. Whether we want to hear it or not, we're constantly bombarded by it. In its most insidious form, propped up by a relentless bassline, it creeps through the walls of our apartments and burrows into people's heads. And even though, these days, people produce more noise than ever, fewer and fewer are able to see past the all-consuming noise churned out by the stars of heavy rotation and the winners of triple-platinum records. It's stuff that's impossible to ignore, redundant and essentially useless, condemning us to be passive recipients. And do you know what strategy oceanographer Robert Ballard of the Deep Emergence Laboratory suggested for raising the Titanic once it had been located on the floor of the Atlantic? "Hit it with every damn system you can think of." Which raises a question: can the sound materials that inspire a composition, in certain cases, themselves be considered compositions? Within the specific realm of a sampler, moreover, the device is essentially a tool for both recording and transformation, and is therefore, at once, a documentation device and a creative device, effectively collapsing the distinction embedded in the very concept of copyright. We'd need to go further back, starting in 1976, when U.S. copyright law was revised to protect sound recordings in the country for the first time. Before then, in fact, only written music was considered protectable. Then we'd have to examine what the word "author" actually means according to the relevant authorities. But that's a conversation that could go on for quite a while.

Three questions to help readers understand your nuanced view on copyright. First: should your position be understood as a battle against copyright?

I dealt with this topic in full in a short essay I wrote in the 1980s called Creatigality. I'd put it this way: I wouldn't call what I do a "battle" so much as a clarification or, better, an adjustment that dots a few i's.

Second: is there a limit to using samples of other people's material, beyond which it's fair to call it plagiarism?

A "plunderphone" is an unofficial but recognizable musical quotation. The blatant borrowings of the "sound pirates" are a different thing altogether from ordinary sample-pillaging, mimicry, or melody theft.

Third: according to your theories, how could a composer protect themselves?

To artists I'd say this: if you sample, give proper credit. And if you've been sampled, consider the credit you were given.

Another important piece of your journey is your foray into the classical music repertoire, for which you coined the category Rascali Klepitoire.

These pieces are related to plunderphonics, but instead of being created from audio recordings, they derive from scores that traditionally literate musicians can play. It all began with my second commission from the Kronos Quartet, in 1991. Recently, a solo piano piece commissioned by Marc-André Hamelin – dubbed by some critics "the god of all pianists" – has been added to the Rascali Klepitoire repertoire. Over the last four years I've finally started uploading much of this music to Bandcamp; currently about half a dozen albums have been released, which can be streamed or downloaded at pfony.bandcamp.com.

Do you use the same approach for every genre?

Oh no. I love finding a new strategy for every project I get involved in.

Three composers who revolutionized the way we think about music in the twentieth century.

Well, three is a very small number for this kind of inquiry, so I'll name you four, since I've already mentioned one of these revolutionaries: Schafer. His World Soundscape Project, with contributions notably from Barry Truax and Bruce Davis, created a series of nationally broadcast radio programs titled "Soundscapes Of Canada," in 1974. The memory of the first time I heard them still stays with me today. And even though Schafer's music is a bit too theatrical for my taste – despite being very good – and even though his performances outside concert halls, say on the shore of a lake, can last a full day or night, they remain remarkable examples of expanding the musical universe. Another Canadian, this one an expatriate, who outshone her contemporaries in the singer-songwriter/famous-musician category back when I was discovering music, in the 1960s, is Joni Mitchell. Then there's Karlheinz Stockhausen. Among my proto-plunderphonic forerunners, he was the most influential, especially in works such as "Telemusik," "Hymnen," and other great (if at times sprawling) records that explored uncharted musical territory during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. He once sent me a Christmas card that read: "Reinventing existing musical recordings is a sign of weakness: please, invent your music completely, don't touch the works of others, which are the messages of other souls."

A definitive message.

A message I chose to ignore completely, especially since his note was in response to me sending him my CD "Aparanthesi," a work that doesn't contain any external quotations whatsoever and is entirely my own doing.

So there's a composer missing, then.

Cecil Taylor. One of the very first albums labeled "jazz" that I ever bought was "Unit Structures" from 1966. That peculiar assemblage of instruments, arranged according to his own criteria of composition/improvisation, was my introduction to what jazz could be. But it also taught me not to take too seriously the labels people slap on music. I followed Taylor for the next 50 years: he's often long-winded, but hilariously so.

Do your compositional criteria also rest on chance?

That word carries a diminishing connotation. From the Latin, "alea" means "dice game," and in ancient times it was associated with gambling. Looking closely, there's so much randomness/chance in our lives... actually no, life is almost exclusively made of chance. That said, when I compose, I think I make an effort to lower the level of randomness in favor of determination.

As an improvising saxophonist, I have to ask: do you recognize any limits to the free jazz style?

The way you put it, I get the feeling you're not too fond of free jazz. Then again, is improvisation really limited to the jazz genre? And, further, does the fact that I play sax and improvise necessarily mean I'm tied to jazz? I'd add: what if my being free is because I often quite like performing for free?

What qualities does a piece need to have in order to be considered art?

That's not a way of thinking that belongs to me. First of all, why should music have specific qualities? And who cares whether it can be considered art or not?

Today, what do you ask of yourself?

Let's start with what I don't ask myself. I never wonder what art is or whether I'm actually an artist. What I do ask myself, constantly, is: "What are you curious about right now, what would you like to explore, what would you like to play around with, what would you like to get to work on?"

Since I first encountered your work, I've considered you the first breakbeat composer in history. Who came before you?

You know I actually had to look up what the term breakbeat means? It's a bit like when the term "jungle" emerged, a vaguely racist nickname for labeling something that was, in any case, too limited to properly become a genre. At the time, I thought my 1990 piece "Angle," in which I reassembled doowop material, could be considered a precursor to so-called jungle. But maybe, by 1990, it was already too late to make such a claim.

Speaking of instrumentation, how have "plunderphonics" changed in the shift from analog to digital?

I'm fine with digital, except for that one time in a blue moon when some filter makes me want to go back to analog. But now I can create a clone copy of the source, or an infinity of clones of other clones, without any kind of distortion occurring, and I can shape the acoustic spectrum however I like.

Okay, so the digital option satisfies you.

Wait a minute! To this day I still haven't heard a digital equivalent that satisfies me more than the manual operations of jockeying and scrubbing a reel-to-reel analog tape on a playback head. Also, on the whole, analog copies sound more interesting than a similar batch of digital clones.

You're also a visual artist: in that role, what's your ultimate aspiration?

Recognizability.

How do you position yourself in relation to the human eye?

Interesting concept, one that probably deserves an answer as long as a book. Because we could look at how I position myself in relation to the eyes that have been built into my head since I came into the world. Or we could look at the difference in vision, and therefore perception, between the left eye and the right eye. And finally, how does one approach the gaze, and therefore the different vision, of someone who isn't me?

On the subject of cultural sabotage, I'd like a word on two very different realities: Christian Marclay and Negativland.

I agree with you: two very different realities, which have both created wonderful things.

A touch of politics: would Trump in the White House scare you?

I think everyone should decide their own vote without outside influence, including mine.

Captain Beefheart: "The only rules I follow are the ones I made for myself."

I prefer a quote from the artist Michael Snow: "I make up the rules of a game and I play it; if I'm about to lose, then I change the rules."

What's the most extraordinary aspect of being an artist?

That gives you a dizzying confusion.

(27/10/2024)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google