Plunderphonics

Plunderphonics works directly with existing recordings as raw material — slowing them down, reversing them, layering them, pitching them, collaging them — usually while leaving the source recognisable. John Oswald's 'Dab' (from the 1989 'Plunderphonic' CD) takes Michael Jackson's 'Bad' and stretches it into a fragmented, pitch-bent ghost of itself. The Avalanches' 'Since I Left You' (2000) reportedly stitched together hundreds of records into something that plays as a single coherent album. The line with sampling is that plunderphonics often does not try to hide the source.

The Canadian composer John Oswald coined the term in his 1985 essay 'Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative'. His 1989 CD 'Plunderphonic' was distributed free, but the Canadian Recording Industry Association demanded its destruction and Oswald complied, recalling and destroying the remaining copies. The aesthetic was carried forward by Negativland, Girl Talk, and Danger Mouse's 'The Grey Album' (2004), each of which generated its own copyright confrontation.

On Oswald's 'Plexure' (1993), individual samples last fractions of a second and the brain spends the entire piece trying and failing to identify what it just heard. The Avalanches operate at the opposite end: the seams are so smooth that the listener can simultaneously feel that something is familiar and have no idea where it is from.

The Avalanches' 'Frontier Psychiatrist' (2000), preferably with the official video, gives an immediate intuition for source reuse as form. Girl Talk's 'All Day' (2010) is a thirty-minute object lesson in patchwork pop archaeology.

Negativland's 1991 EP 'U2' used vocal outtakes by Casey Kasem and parts of the U2 song 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For'. The resulting Island Records lawsuit became a foundational copyright case in the field and is documented in the band's book 'Fair Use'.