But no one was there before John Oswald of Plunderphonics. A mere fraction of his career’s chronology demonstrates that he is perhaps the pioneer of the genre:

1973-75

With the sanction of William S. Burroughs, John Oswald cut up recordings of him reading his texts advocating cutting up methods, & consequently discovered an acoustic pallindrome, mediations between backwards & forwards, polysyllabic masking & phase imploding.

1975

Oswald melds a radio evangelist with alleged satanists Led Zepplin in the early rap track POWER. released in 1995 by Musicworks magazine.

1975-85

MYSTERY TAPES assembly & dissemination (by Mystery Tapes Etc.International), include many early plunderphonistic experiments.

1980

Oswald guest produces a one hour radio show for CFRO in Vancouver called Sounds Wrong which includes the first public issues of Dolly Parton & Rite of Spring transformations.

1982

Collusion, a British magazine publishes an article by Oswald, entitled “Revolutions & Mr Dolly Parton – a vortex of of androgeny”.

1985

An essay by John Oswald entitled “Plunderphonics, or, Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative” was presented at the Wired Society conference in Toronto.

1988

The original Plunderphonics EP (never-for-sale, out-of-print) was for its time the most extreme example of sampling ever produced. Four well-known music personalities representing four musical genres & four notable epochs of recording history were presented in surprising ways, or, as the press release put it: warp drive.

1989

The Plunderphonic CD (never-for-sale, remaining stocks destroyed by Michael Jackson & CBS) has become an underground cult classic. The realistic cover photo of a nude Michael Jackson revealed as a white woman paralleled the musical transformations depicted on the disc. Other electroquoted artists included Bing Crosby, The Beatles, Glenn Gould, Public Enemy & (consequently) James Brown.

You can read a more complete biography of Oswald here.

Far more interesting is an extensive recorded interview with Oswald. One of the most fascinating parts of the interview is Oswald’s account of his experience with the overwhelming legal forces brought to bear in the name of copyright enforcement against his new compositions. In a series of events not unlike those experienced by Negativland in connection with their composition U2, every last CD Oswald retained of his recording was destroyed. Of course, he had already distributed some of those CDs and was unable to recover them. And we all know digital media metastasize beyond any capacity of corporate control. So, of course, as with Negativland’s U2, Oswald’s recording not only continues to exist; it is available (for free) for digital downloading.

For your listening pleasure, I include here one track from the album: Glenn Gould-Aria(mp3).

The absolutely original artist is an extremely rare and possibly imaginary creature, living in some isolated habitat where no previous works or traditions have left any impression. Like virtually every artist, Mr. Dylan carries on a continuing conversation with the past. He’s reacting to all that culture and history offer, not pretending they don’t exist. Admiration and iconoclasm, argument and extension, emulation and mockery — that’s how individual artists and the arts themselves evolve. It’s a process that is neatly summed up in Mr. Dylan’s album title “Love and Theft, ” which itself is a quotation from a book on minstrelsy by Eric Lott. (hyperlinks added)

Another masterful artist, David Foster Wallace, wrote, “No one who is invested in any kind of art . . . can read [Lewis Hyde's book] The Gift and remain unchanged.” It is Hyde’s thesis not merely that all art builds on earlier art, but that it is precisely the artist’s recognition that his creations are gifts that sustains his creativity. In other words, the capacity to create is a gift given to the artist and is given only if the artist understands his own creations as gifts themselves that other artists can use themselves in their acts of creation:

It is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Or, to state the modern case with more precision, that works of art exist simultaneously in two “economics,” a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.

So it should be no surprise that Andreas Hykade entitled this brilliant video “Love & Theft“: