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P L U N D E R P H O N I AN INTERVIEW WITH TRANSPRODUCER JOHN OSWALD by Norman Igma Igma : Isn’t Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley, Igor Stravinsky and Count Basie an odd line-up for a record, especially for an avant garde-type inde release? Oswald : The record is I think very normal and familiar sounding at the same time as it probably seems extremely weird. Dolly and Elvis sing ballads. Igor and Basie have their music played by, respectively, a symphony orchestra, and a jazz big band. So the music and the styles are recognizable enough that anyone can tap their foot or hum along. The weirdness is that Dolly experiences a sex change, Elvis gets a crazy new back-up band, and the other two go through some pretty wild changes. Igma : It really does sound like Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley! Oswald : It is them. These are not cover versions, imitations, impersonations or fakes. These are authentic performances which have never been released before. Each of the tracks is edited and remixed 100% from the original recordings, except for the Presley selection, for which we imported some great musicians like Bill Frisell to cut new backing tracks. By the way, the material we’re working on for the feature-length plunderphonics CD includes an Elvis and Dolly duet, which is, as far as I know, unprecedented. Igma : This is all studio magic though. Oswald : We are using techniques which exist in most commercial recordings, but we manipulate them toward unusual ends. If it’s done in a certain way it’s accepted as reality. Igma : I get the impression that you’re trying to blur the division between innovative music and the conservative mainstream. So do you think of this as experimental music or not? Oswald : I’m reminded that our posthumous collaborator Igor Stravinsky preferred to think of himself as an inventor rather than a composer. Invention, research, et cetera, require experimentation in order to get anywhere. My modus operandi is constant experimentation during development, lots of little possible scenarios, and then total control of the final product. Half the time I have no idea if an experiment will be relevant to any particular project that the Lab has undertaken. Currently, the development often involves plunderphones, so who or what is being plundered is a good indication of where it might eventually fit in. For example, I’ve been experimenting with the Michael Jackson track we’ve been recreating, which is called DAB by the way. So far we’ve got a couple of hours worth of potentially useful material. About a dozen of these experiments and 15 minutes of material assembled in multitracked layers will constitute the final 4 to 5 minute piece. The process entails a lot of searching and failure but the final result is very selective and presentational and not what I would think of as experimental. I realize though that that word has a broader sense to some people. You’re right about the attempt to blur the mainstream. I’d like listeners to think of this music as somehow connected to normal. Igma : What exactly is a plunderphone? Oswald : A plunderphone is 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 musical quote. Taking Madonna singing “Like a Virgin” and rerecording it backwards or slower is plunderphonics, as long as you can reasonably recognize the source. The plundering has to be blatant though. There’s a lot of samplepocketing, parroting, plagiarism and tune thievery going on these days which is not what we’re doing. Igma : I assume you use a lot of digital sampling in these pieces. Oswald : There’s a bit of it within the Elvis cut on the plunderphonics EP and that’s all. Digital samplers aren’t much different from tape recorders except they make it easy to play a tune with recorded sounds, which is a technique we don’t use much. The average sampler has very little storage space for sounds compared to a tape recorder, which is a problem if one is sampling whole songs; and they aren’t designed to allow one to trigger from any point in or portions of a long sample without a lot of redundant use of their limited memories, something that is easy with a tape recorder. Contrary to some reports samplers aren’t everything. Nonetheless, there will be some selections on the plunderphonics CD which will contain a lot of sampling executed in surprising ways, including a sequel to the sped-up “Rite of Spring” on the EP which will be all sampling, with a couple of computers conducting the score. Igma : Will the CD be for sale and will it also be available as a cassette or records? Oswald : It will be CD only and it will take advantage of some of the special indexing functions of that medium. For the EP we emphasized the listener’s playback speed options. This time it’s their accessing options. And, like the EP, it will be strictly not for sale. Igma : So who gets it? Oswald : We’re giving priority to those who showed interest in the EP, which did really well on alternative radio and got out to a lot of people that way. Announcers would tell listeners to get their dubbing decks ready, and then play the whole thing. We encourage copying it. In addition, this time we’ll focus more on the press . In the pass year they’ve finally begun to discuss the morality of appropriation. I hope there will be some dialogue about plunderphonics as an extreme case, and enough exposure for people to know that the project exists. Igma : How does plunderphonics differ from other projects you’re involved with, like the Mystery Tapes? Oswald : 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. Igma : Is the Mike Snow credited as playing piano in Elvis’ band Michael Snow the filmmaker and visual artist? Oswald : Yeah. He’s a very surprising and accomplished improvisor. He used to be a working jazz musician back in the fifties before his other stuff took off. Bobby Wiseman, the other pianist on the cut, has also been doing well with a pop band called Blue Rodeo. You can hear him in the second half of the song, after the new cavity. Igma : That sounds to me like Cecil Taylor. Will other musicians be brought in especially for the new project. Oswald : Probably not, if we stick to the selections we currently have planned. The majority of the tracks are, as I said before, composed entirely from the original material. There are never any drum machines or synthesizers added. Tom Hadju at Princeton is working on a particular transformation for the Michael Jackson selection and I’ll be going to San Fransisco to work with Henry Kaiser on some of the sounds for the Arthur Fiedler cut . Igma : Arthur Fiedler? Who else will be featured, pray tell? Oswald : There’s quite a variety. We’ve finished tracks by Ludwig Van Beethoven, The Beatles, Talking Heads, Bix Beiderbecke and Anton Webern, and there will be appearances by John Barry, Charlie Parker, Don Van Vliet, Jimi Hendrix, John Cage, Led Zepplin, The Bee Gees, Valya Balkanska and Don Messer. We’re hoping an experiment involving Glenn Gould works out, and that our version of the most popular record of the 20th century, Bing Crosby singing “White Xmas” come out. Also I think we’ll have Brown Out, the final word on collaging James Brown. There will be some medleys incorporating juxtaposed performances of people who would never be able to play together otherwise, such as Dick Hyman with a tribe of African Pygmies or Jimi Hendrix and Edgard Varese. We’re striving for maximum variety, generic breakdown, and permanent surprise. Igma: What makes Plexure different from previous plunderphonics? Oswald: Quantity & presence. Igma: Could you perhaps expand that answer a little? …For example, quantity of what? Oswald: Any discussion of plunderphonics refers to sources. A plunderphone is a transformed but still recognizable audio quote. In Plexure there are about a thousand electroquoted sources combined into one continuously interpolated composition. A typical plunderphonic composition is constructed from one source. When there is a greater number of sources, as is the case in Plexure, then there is also a greater quantity of synergistic information: information which isn’t in the source; & information which wouldn’t be in the composition if it wasn’t so referential. So quantity becomes an obvious descriptive if you would perceive this as a brief, non-random, comparative survey of similarities in a thousand pop records. Igma: And presence? Oswald: Presence in two senses. One: of the present, a pop now. The sources were all recorded in the past ten years, the dawn of compact discs, music videos, & beyond. They are recordings of popular contemporary quasi-performances of modern songs. Two: I’m using the word presence also in a sense of physical immediacy, which comes from the technique of electroquoting being used, which entails cloning, making exact replicas of the sources, & maintaining the precise quality of the digital masters throughout the process of recomposition. Igma: If I’m understanding correctly what you’re saying, then if you were to listen to any little bit of Plexure, it would sound just like the CD you’re quoting. Oswald: Right, except more often than not there is more than one source CD involved at any given moment.
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