[Nettime-bold] fwd a fwd: john oswald and the new release

[Beatrice Beaubien <i2eye@mac.com>]

forwarded from the plunderphonia list:

The nice people at http://exclaim.ca/ magazine forwarded me a copy of their article on John Oswald.

Plunderphonics Now Legit
Plunderphonics, the pioneering sampledelic sound collage project by Toronto composer John Oswald, has resurfaced in a refurbished box set format after 12 years of legal suppression. Oswald's "plunderphonic" creations were recontextualised manipulations of sampled material, reconfiguring or splicing a song beyond original recognition to create a new work. When a1988 vinyl EP and a 1989 full-length CD, both entitled Plunderphonics, caught the attention of the music industry, Oswald was ordered at the time to cease and desist all future and current pressings of the works, because he did not have legal authorisation to "plunder" the works of Michael Jackson, James Brown, Elvis Presley, Metallica, and many others. "Many things have happened in the past 11 years that have been quite interesting," says Oswald. "When it first got suppressed, I knew copies would circulate around in various ways. One of the first manifestations of that was the Copyright Violation Squad; there were branches of it in Vancouver, Iowa, Australia, and London. If you sent them a blank cassette and a self-addressed stamped envelope they would send you a copy from the CD they had of the Plunderphonics album. In the early 90s, one major American institution of higher learning put it up as a bandwidth FTP download ? which at that time would take most people two weeks of computer time to download. Soon after that, the first MP3s started coming out. The album was available in segmented form in MP3s through various places. I didn1t worry so much about people getting it, but a couple of years ago I started a vanity label to put some of my stuff out in nice packages. This was one of the things that seemed like a good thing to do."

Plunderphonics' legal squabbles helped opened debate about the legalities of sampling and issues of ownership in terms of assembling sound collage. Oswald doesn't regret that at all, and insists that he always aimed to be honest. "One of the efforts I made with the first Plunderphonics was that if I was going to quote something, I would credit the quote," he says. "At that time, all the rap records were burying the fact that they were borrowing from other people. They wouldn't say, Hey, this is the James Brown lick.1 It might have been obvious in the mix, but it wasn't good business to say that's what it was, because it made a copyright infringement claim that much easier. Part of the problem with the Plunderphonics album was that I made it so obvious ? not from listening to it, necessarily, but from reading the back cover you could see what pieces I used components of. To me, it was like any kind of journalism or scholarly studies: if you quote something, you credit it. I'm not an adversarial person. I do things I think are good, and sometimes that's a bit controversial." For the box set ? which includes both original works in their entirety as well as later, officially-sanctioned material ? Oswald revisited certain tracks for "creative and perfectionist reasons," he says. "There were a couple of cases where there was record noise in the electro-quote, where I thought the whole thing would sound better if it didn't have these tics and scratches. On other things, the tics and scratches sound great. At the time, in the late 80s, there wasn't a way to clean that up and there is now. "Some things are faster," he adds. "Any audio recordings I was doing in the 80s weren't on computer, and now they all are. It involved taking pieces of tape, little brown strips, and trying to keep track of all these two-inch ? or sometimes 1/8-inch ? pieces of tape was a housekeeping nightmare. Now all those pieces can be assigned names on a computer. It's much easier to keep track of things. The first Metallica piece I did took a couple of weeks of splicing tape, and I did a second one in 1990 after setting up my computer system, and it took a day."

Oswald is an extremely prolific avant-garde composer, working with operas, ballets and symphonies around the world. His best-known work is Grayfolded, a plunderphonic project culled from Grateful Dead live tapes; the album has sold over 100,000 copies. He is also a favourite of the Kronos Quartet, who regularly perform his pieces. "They play a concert every two days for several thousand people," says Oswald. "Over the years, those works have reached a lot of people. But most people come up to me and say, You're the plunderphonics guy!" Following some last-minute delays, the Plunderphonics box set will be available in May, on Oswald's on Pfony Records.



Peter A Lopez


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