Peter Friedman
Lawyer
Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity
John Oswald, pioneer of the aural collage: the futility of law in the face of technology it cannot control.
I’ve written at length in this blog about compositions consisting of digital remixes of pre-recorded samples and the contentious and utterly unresolved tensions between copyright, fair use, and the extra-legal reality of practices that cannot be controlled by legal rules. I’ve written about artists as varied as Negativland, Girl Talk, Steinski, and Kutiman, among others. Negativland and Steinski were pioneers in the genre, composing their aural collages back in the ancient days before digital media made the stitching together of digital information something one could do sitting in front of a laptop in bed.
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).