There’s a great band – one of my favourite bands – that you should check out called The Books. They’re an American/Dutch duo whose music combines instrumentation with bits of audio they’ve culled from a variety of sources; old commercials, instructional tapes, cassettes found in thrift stores, archives, and friends. Ostensibly known as Collage Rock, they released four albums between 2002 and 2010 before breaking up to focus on their own projects. I think all of their albums are great, but I recommend their first two albums; Though for Food (2002) or The Lemon of Pink (2003) because that’s where they really lean into and explore this style of composition.
Their music can be seen as part of a wider style or method of composition known as Plunderphonics. I say style instead of genre because there are a lot of different artists and genres that can fall under this category. At its most basic level it’s the act of taking pre-existing audio and restructuring it into something new. The term itself was coined by Canadian composer John Oswald in his 1985 essay with the thrilling title; Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. Part of the essay argues against what Oswald believed were copyright laws that were too restrictive, and trying to look at a recording itself not as a static object, but as an instrument that can be played and manipulated in different ways. Despite its title it’s actually an interesting read.
This idea of plundering existing works isn’t a new phenomenon that came about with the advent of digital recording and sampling devices. In classical music it’s known by the more acceptable or palatable name Musical Quotation. In Brahms Academie Festival Overture composed in 1880 he plundered tunes from other student songs such as “Fuchslied”, “Wir hatten gebauet ein stattliches Haus”, and “Gaudeamus igitor”, to name a few. And Claude Debussy in his Children’s Corner suite for piano, plundered the opening from Tristan und Isolde. Even Mozart plundered a theme from Bach for his Piano Concerto No. 12. In my scant amount of research it seems that that in classical music it’s seen as an honour, whereas in modern pop music it’s grounds for a lawsuit, even if you properly cite your sources. This is the basis for Oswald’s essay but for now I’m more interested in the music that emerged from the practice.
The goal of Plunderphonics, at least in Oswald’s case, was to use a single source material and re-cut and re-mix it until it became something entirely new. His Plunderphonics EP (1988) was a four track album containing plundered versions of “Don’t” by Elvis Presley, “Pocket” by Count Basie, a version of Dolly Parton singing “The Great Pretender”, and “Spring”, a version of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. However, limiting the scope like this does nothing but discount and ignore the myriad of music and genres that employ similar practices. Collage Rock for one, like The Books; but also practices like sampling, mash-up, and even vaporwave.
In the early days of hip-hop artists were literally employing John Oswald’s philosophy and using the turntable as an instrument by repeating the break in a song and rapping over it. This evolved into whole albums being made up of samples. In the late 1980’s the Beastie Boys had a string of hits, however critics had largely dismissed them with their juvenile lyrics, brandishing them with the label Frat Hip-Hop. In an effort to break out of this image they recorded and released Paul’s Boutique (1989), which was composed of over 100 samples. Not as big a commercial success as their previous albums, it has since received critical acclaim, sometimes being described as the Sgt. Pepper of hip-hop. Around this time DJ Shadow was just beginning his music career as a DJ, being inspired by sample-based music like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988). Pulling influence from such varied genres as hip-hop, jazz, funk, psychedelic, and heavy metal, DJ Shadow released his entirely sample-based album Endtroducing… (1996). While Endtroducing… was slowly building steam, American record producer and rapper J Dilla was emerging in the underground hip-hop scene in Detroit, Michigan. In 2002 he was diagnosed with thrombotic thermotropic purpura, a disease of the blood, while also battling lupus. In 2005 during an extended stay in the hospital for treatment he began work on an instrumental beat album from crates of 45’s his friends and mother would bring to the hospital for him. He would release Donuts (2006) to universal acclaim on his 32nd birthday, just three days before his death.
From this Plunderphonics mindset also emerged the mashup genre. Similar in process to sampling, except at least some songs are recognizable. One great example is Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (2004). What began as an experimental project, Danger Mouse mixed a cappella recordings of Jay-Z’s The Black Album (2003) with plundered samples from The Beatles The White Album (1968). Only intended as a limited release, the album gained a lot of attention on the internet and quickly made several Best Of… lists. It also gained a lot of notoriety as EMI attempted to stop distribution through legal channels despite approval from Jay-Z, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr. Another great artist in the genre is Gregg Gillis – better known by his stage name Girl Talk. First introduced to the genre by John Oswald, Girl Talk pulls his influence from a wide variety of genres and artists, including Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, noise music artist Merzbow, hip-hop, pop music, and The Beatles. His latest release All Day (2010) was constructed from overlapping samples of 372 songs by other artists and composed as a single 71-minute song. Great albums to listen to with friends at a party as he combines all the best hooks and choruses from your favourite pop songs of the last 60 years.
It can even be tied to the emergence of internet meme music Vaporwave, which began as an ironic variant of Chillwave and mostly involved the slowing down of 80’s smooth jazz. It has evolved to include snippets from old commercials, and sound effects from early internet culture like PC Startup sounds, leaning into nostalgia while also satirizing consumer culture. Macintosh Plus’ album Floral Shoppe (2011) is often considered one of the first albums to embody vaporwave characteristics. They used a wide array of funk and R&B songs from the 1980’s, most notably Diana Ross’ version of “It’s Your Move”; played with the tempos, slowed the vocals down, and mashed it together with other samples from 70’s-80’s soft rock, snippets of commercials, and even the soundtrack from the 1997 video game Turok: Dinosaur Hunter; creating a sense of something that is familiar, and yet foreign. There is also Blank Banshee’s album Blank Banshee 0 (2012) which utilizes vaporwave elements like OS start-up sounds and video game music from the 90’s, and combines it with trap-beats. Some reviewers have said Blank Banshee emphasizes the more accessible elements of vaporwave, making it more palatable.
Oswald would later break from his own mold with his 20min album Plexure (1992) which began as a challenge from artist John Zorn and is estimated to feature over 1,000 samples. It has been likened to sporadically flipping through radio stations, only catching a small fraction of a song before switching to the next. In that same vein, of mixing numerous samples until the end product doesn’t resemble any of the source material, is Oneohtrix Point Never’s album Replica (2011). This album can be seen as a relative of vaporwave in that Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) sampled old television commercials from the 1980’s and 1990’s, but used them to create an ambient soundscape that barely resembles the original material. When asked why he decided to use TV commercials he said he was, “looking for old things that are meaningful then restructuring and rearranging it to interfere with the original narrative and creating this new poetry.”
When talking about modern day Plunderphonics almost every Suggested Listening list contains The Avalanches’ Since I Left You (2000). Production of the album began in 1999 between members Darren Seltmann and Robbie Chater, who had nearly identical studio set-ups and would spend hours sampling music from vinyl records, swapping tapes, and expanding on each others ideas. When they finished the album they used an estimated 3,500 samples and the international release was delayed as they had trouble clearing some of the samples. It has received critical acclaim and is often featured on Best Of… lists for the early-2000’s.
All this is great, very informative, and it lays out a pretty hefty playlist to explore, but why is it – or why do I – find it so fascinating? It’s the inherent challenges of only using pre-existing recordings and the focus and creativity that brings. It reminds me of the constrained writing practices in literature, best represented by the French Oulipo movement. These writers would use various constraints such as lipograms or palindromes to spur their creativity. One such example is Georges Perec’s French novel La Disparition which is a 300-page novel written without using the letter ‘e’. Equally as impressive is the novel was translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void – and maintained the exclusion of the letter ‘e’. There is also Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, one of my favourite books, that adheres to a strict mathematical formula as it descends through its 55 chapters. I would lay it all out here but it’s very complicated; check Wikipedia. And let us not forget Christian Bok’s Eunoia where each chapter was restricted to using only one vowel among other self-imposed (though they’re all self-imposed aren’t they?) restrictions.
Because it’s a documented fact that by physchologists that there’s something about constraints that can actually stimulate our creativity. When you have less to work with you view things, problems, obstacles, in a different light and you think more resourcefully; strive to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts. There is also the idea of the Burden of Choice to contend with. It seems like an obvious conclusion that the more choices you have, the more options to solve a particular problem, the better the outcome. The easier things should be. But then faced with a seemingly infinite number of options the issue arises that a better option might be just around the corner. You can get stuck in this purgatory of trying out every available option without settling. This can also create a sense of regret and second guessing whether you made the “correct” or “best” choice. Constraints shouldn’t be seen as obstacles or barriers impeding your progress, but as puzzles that need to be solved. As Marissa Mayer, former vice-president for search products and user experience at Google once wrote, “Constraints shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to overcome. Creativity thrives best when constrained.” So, if you’re working on an album, or even just a song, and are only able to use the notes, beats, and rhythms you’ve plundered from the Top 40 Chart – you suddenly have a clear view of your problem and the resources available to you, and that frees you up to do whatever you want with them.
All of that to say; Have you heard of The Books? You should go check them out.