I was under the impression that John Oswald's Plexure, released in 1993, was the first entire album to depend solely on other musicians' work. Plexure is about 20 minutes of mixed and mashed snippets of pop songs released between, I think, 1980-1990, or at least somewhere in that span of years. It’s pretty disorienting, but also extremely interesting, if you can stand what essentially sounds like somebody fiddling with a radio tuning knob, constantly cycling through radio stations for 20 minutes.
However, I think Oswald has been quick to distance himself from "sampling" in the traditional sense, like what is done in hip-hop. Oswald labels what he does as Plunderphonics (essay: Plunderphonics or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative) and seems to draw the distinction between Plunderphonics and sampling in that hip-hop and other sample-heavy genres, e.g. glitch, normally attempt to fit their samples into an existing peice, or a peice which will exist; either way, the sample is merely a layer among layers. To "plunder" is instead to make music exclusively out of samples, to use the sampling machine as a musical instrument in itself. To create plunderphonic music is then to use such an instrument to recreate "noise" (what we hear around us, natural or unnatural) the same way that composers (Oswald dwells on Ives in particular) create melody out of existing tone scales and public domain pieces (since many of those older composers were creating in a copyright-free era).
It seems that Oswald is aligning himself with Futurist composer Luigi Russolo, who created “music” out of assembled devices which would recreate noises such as whistling, thundering, creaking, etc, and John Cage, whose compositions using radios in the 40s and 50s (I think that’s right) preface Oswald’s own radio-derived pieces. Essentially, Oswald provides an avenue out of the copyright dilemma by asserting that A. “plundering” has been a musical tradition stretching from Bach to jazz to contemporary pop music, and B. the sampler is a unique instrument, just as are pianos, trumpets, guitars, capable of producing music that, though it may be derived entirely from other pieces, is wholly unique on its own and is thus a creation equal to any other musical or artistic creation.
I have Plexure if anybody is interested in hearing any of it, but I won’t post anything from it since I don’t want anybody unwillingly bombarded by such abrasive dissonance. I will, however, post a Girl Talk song; Girl Talk is the pseudonym for DJ Gregg Gillis, who is a contemporary mash-up artist. Mash-up, as a genre, I believe probably comes closest genre-wise to reproducing Oswald’s aims in Plunderphonics, except that mash-up, generally speaking, is party music.
The song is track number 10, I think, from Gillis' 3rd album, Night Ripper (Warning: Explicit language). The video was created by Concordia University professor Matthew Soar, for the Open Cinema Source Project.
Part of the fun of mash-up music, and Girl Talk's in particular, is also being to recognize all the samples (there's something like 200 or so,maybe more, samples spread out over 16 songs) which relates to a buzzword thats been circulating recently about the "pleasure of the known," in which culture has become so reflexive and referential that part of the cultural experience, and part of participating in society, is being able to place references (think of such fare as Mystery Science Theater 3000, Family Guy, the Simpsons, not to mention tons of poetry, etc). To be a participant and to derive pleasure from participation seems increasingly tethered to knowing sources, and being appreciate the layering of sources (a source referencing a source refering a source). Of course, this is incredibly off topic and deserves a different post entirely.
As for what David said about subdivision, I like the application to text poetry and I agree that prosody seems to be the replacement for the music that would accompany a video poem (I guess that should be reversed: music is the replacement for prosody). Or even for a video poem without music, video itself has a rhythm to it, as Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky noted in his book Sculpture in Time: "The dominant, all powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame....[The expression of time]...is the very foundation of cinema...Rhythm...is not the metrical sequence of peices; what makes it is the time-thrust within the frames. Rhythm...is the main formative element of cinema....Rhythm in cinema is conveyed by the life of the object visibly recorded in the frame." (Sculpting in Time, pgs 113-120).
Anyway, I agree that sampling, or plundering involves the subdividing of ideas in a LFT kind of way; the only quibble I have, David, is your statement that "[DJ Shadow] unit[es] others' fragments". Isnt it the other way around, though? Don't his sources, and the sources for most other musical sampling/plundering begin as united, and then the artist/sampler/Dj/plunderer fragments those compositions? At least, that really only applies to music-- not that a DJ couldnt unite out of fragments, I just dont know of any case where a DJ has done so. I think the point you made is still relevant for poets though, and maybe this is where the alikeness between a DJ and a poet ends: a poet can unite fragments or fragment unities and create poetry out of either. We're lucky to have it both ways.
As for what I was supposed to post, about the supposedly French Oulipian idea about how any word has the potential and the weight of all other words (which I think I now actually picked up from Derrida, not Oulipo) I'll get to that this weekend, since what began as a simple "Hey, here's the link" has turned into something else.
And actually, a correction-- Sorry, David, you were right: Dj's do unite out of fragments, just as poets do. For some reason, I didn't realize that the end product of a DJ's fragmentation is a unified work. Just duh. I feel silly.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention there's a terrible amount of typos here. Shameful.
ReplyDeletei'd like to hear the dissonance, either by post or by coffee. either. it's good stuff. of course, it makes me wonder, too, about those lost detroit house music tapes. when is a sample a sample kinda' thing. even as the mixer turntables were taking off, there were the basement stop/record button d.j./producers and those early d.j.'s had a way with anything that could make sound. i don't know enough about music to remember the d.j.'s. but i do remember some of the dance parties where 50 songs were all one song. seamless recording, cumulative beat. and i remember those tapes getting hustled at the back of the yellow bus and i was always too damn broke to cop one.
ReplyDeleteAnother vote for posted bits of dissonance, please.
ReplyDeleteAlso: it's extraordinarily difficult to make something without using anything that already exists —this is a primary problem with genesis, the initial moment in which existence began, if existence began just after a moment in which there was nothing. Once there's genesis, a case may be made for everything being connected to an antecedent, to being to some degree on somne scale in some location for some duration of time derivative.
Plunderphonics and sampling make this derivative nature obvious; an illusion is that creation is possible without influence —without whatever systems prompts idea —which is a system itself, made of existing stuff that leads to configurations unlike existing forms; creation extends, augments, twists, travels, but includes a reference to something on some scale in some location that already has form.
An evolutionary and collaborative nature of all things —once genesis happens (more about genesis later).