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Re: John Oswald



<<I used to do a lot of illustration for Mondo
2000 and first heard of John Oswald &
Plunderphonics from them. What I never heard was
an actual description of what he was specifically
doing (the process) or what the resulting music
sounded like. I think the Mondoids were mostly 
enthralled by the idea of subverting commercial 
music.>>

I remember hearing about Plunderphonics back in
the late 80's, around the time that all copies of
one of his albums were to have been destroyed,
reportedly because Micheal Jackson sued over the
cover picture (which depicted the former child
star changing skin colour and gender on the front
cover). Apparently, not all copies were actually
destroyed, as one of the college radio stations
here in Cleveland had a copy which they played
frequently. I remember there was a track that was
made up entirely of Metallica samples...sounded
like a seriously defective CD. 

Then, I heard some of the tracks for the Elektra
promo disc he did. See, for their anniversary
around that time, Elektra had many of their
current talent do covers of songs by their old
talent, and they put out a double CD of this. You
had things like Faster Pussycat doing the Carly
Simon song You're So Vain, and I forget who it
was who did Hello, I Love You, the old Doors
song, and so on. Well, they also commissioned
Oswald to do a Plunderphonic disc mixing the old
and new versions of the songs. The the Carly
Simon/Faster Pussycat track was pretty hilarious,
as was The Doors one. And if memory serves, they
mutated the infamous MC 5 intro line to "KICK OUT
THE JAMS MOTHER
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF..."
with the pitch on the "F" dropping throughout the
bit. 

But the one that I've heard the most of, and
actually the only one I actually own at this
point is Grey Folded, which is a double CD he did
where The Grateful Dead allowed him free access
to their tape vaults and he basically created a
very extended remix of something like a 100
different renditions of Dark Star. Here again, he
did some interesting things, like cutting back
and forth between differents of the band, you
have a 20 something Jerry Garcia trading solos
with his 40 something year old self. In one
section, he actually took a tape, played it back
in the attic of his studio at 4 times the normal
speed, recording at the same speed coming out of
the speakers, thusly creating four times the
normal reverb when it was played back at normal
speed and creating a sort of a perfect sounding
"audience tape" from a soundboard tape. 

When the vocal finally enters, instead of hearing
Jerry Garcia sing "Dark star crashes", we not
only hear
"DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRK"
(I think it says in the liner notes that Oswald
sustained the first syllable for like 2 minutes),
but you also get a chorus of Jerry's (all from
different eras, of course) singing it. 

One of Oswald's techniques is to take a
recording, cut it in half, and lay the sections
on top of each other. THusly, if the entire
recording was originally 5 minutes long, it would
now take you only 2 and a half minutes to hear
the whole thing. What he ended up doing was he
took the entire finished first disc, and cut it
in half, and layed the two sections on top of
each other, then cut THAT in half, laid the two
sections there on top of each, and kept doing
this until he got it down to where you heard the
entire disc in something like 4 seconds. He then
stuck it this somewhere in the middle of the
second disc. 

I happen to think it's really great, though I
really have no idea what anyone who isn't already
into The Dead would think of it. I've been a Dead
fan since 87, so I was already into the group for
a number of years when Grey Folded came out. 

=====
May you never thirst!
The Scuba Diver Presently Known As Chris

"What do you get when you give a yo-yo to a flock of flamingos?"-James 
Earl Jones

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