John Oswald
69 Plunderphonics 96
[Seeland]
Rating: 8.6
Is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family? Maybe. Is
it wrong to steal a slice from every bakery in the neighborhood to feed your
starving family? Probably not. Theft always seems more excusable when the
scope is large and the magnitude is small. I mean, what are you going to do
with a slice of bread, anyhow? You're not even stealing it as much as you
are... sampling it. But where is the line drawn? When have you taken a big
enough chunk of that bread that you can't eat it for free without the cops
banging on your door? Somewhere between sampling and stealing lies
Plunderphonics.
Like Amon Tobin and the Avalanches, John Oswald makes music second-hand. But
rather than using the traditional, totally played-out instruments-playing-notes
approach, Oswald has made a name for himself chopping up massive chunks of
some of the most popular music ever made into entertaining, amusing, and
occasionally brilliant reconstructed songs. 69 Plunderphonics 96 is a
double-disc retrospective of Oswald's work to date, containing 60 tracks of
cut-up craziness that puts forth the concept of his Plunderphonics project in
all its flawed glory.
Though the music has been heavily circulated on bootlegs and MP3s for years,
and long-since earned "legendary" status, most of it has never seen official
release, since the licensing fees would be extraordinarily expensive. So,
after years of in-limbo impossibility, Negativland, known for their own brash
disregard for copyright laws, "stole" the project from Oswald and released it
in deluxe packaging with an incredibly detailed booklet. We're not sure of
the legality of any of this, but no one has issued a subpoena yet.
One of the great things about Plunderphonics as a concept is that it works on
so many different levels. There's the simplest, "hey, that sounds pretty
damned cool" level. A Viking frozen in time for 1000 years could appreciate
some of the tape-splicing masterwork of Plunderphonics without having any
frame of reference. (Especially the plundering.) And at its best,
Plunderphonics embodies all the playfulness and overall sonic coolness of
expert DJ scratching, minus the wicky-wicky. Bits and pieces of pop songs
build into massive, terrifying swells of sound, and the source of the sound
almost ceases to be relevant. This is good.
While parts of 69 Plunderphonics 96 are immensely fun to listen to, other
parts are just as much fun to analyze. "Btls," the first track on the
retrospective, begins with the resonating final chord of the Beatles' "A Day
in the Life," a beautifully blasphemous way to open up an album that pays
little heed to any kind of musical convention. As if that weren't enough, the
opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night" is then layered directly over that
famous final chord of "A Day in the Life," resulting in a chord that sounds
like utter dissonance, but makes perfect sense from a logistical standpoint.
This is the musical equivalent of painting big flirty eyelashes on a picture
of Jesus Christ. And it rocks.
Clocking in at just under a minute, "Btls" is more of a one-off statement
than a fully developed piece of music. "Power," the first full-length track
on the compilation, starts a fascinating retrospective on a rather sour note.
Consisting of a radio sermon by Brother Shamrock layered over some mildly
altered Led Zeppelin riffs, "Power" does sound pretty cool-- but that
coolness stems more from the choice of source material than from the way
it's manipulated.
"Power" is indicative of one of the only real problems facing Plunderphonics:
at times, Oswald seems to content to let the source material speak for itself.
Just chopping up a piece of music into three-second chunks and looping them
doesn't always cut it. Anyone with a tape deck and a pair of scissors can
make a Plunderphonics piece that sounds like a fucked-up copy of the original.
But John Oswald isn't just anybody with a tape deck and a pair of scissors.
"Madmod" showcases Oswald's amazing talent for manipulating songs as a whole
better than perhaps any other track here. Building from bits and pieces of a
good deal of Madonna's catalog, Oswald constructs from miniscule tape loops a
gorgeous, overpowering wall of sound, interrupted occasionally by unadulterated
snippets of her songs. It's gorgeous and it's hilarious, oftentimes
concurrently.
And therein lies the true brilliance of Plunderphonics. As the name implies,
Oswald is often able to dive into a popular recording-- from Michael Jackson
to the Doors-- strip its defining characteristics, and turn it into something
all his own. The end result embodies many of the characteristics of the
original piece, but is imbued with qualities that are often completely
contradictory to its nature. While Oswald's music does sometimes seem to be
too content resting on concept rather than execution, 69 Plunderphonics 96
is an excellent document of some of the most original, unoriginal music ever
made.
-Matt LeMay