24 Plunderphonia CHRIS CUTLER ‘Chris Cutler (1947~) has been a key figure in vanguard music for more than three decades. In 1971, he began playing drums for experimental rock outit Henry Cow, which combined rock, improvised music, avant-garde composi- tion, and left-wing politics, and collaborated with like-minded groups such 2s lapp Happy, and Gong. Following Henry Cow's dissolution in 1978, Cutler went on to found a number of other groups (Art Bears, Cas~ ‘and to perform with Pere Ubu and The Residents. In the past two ‘has ben a significant presence on the British free improvisa- forking with Eddie Prévost, Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, and others, ‘Cutler has been equally important as a musical organizer, distrbutor, and 178, he formed Rook in Opposition,” a collective of musicians .d to resisting the power of the commercial music industry. The same year, he founded Recommended Records, “an aitertiative, independent, yhon-commercial record distribution, mailorder network and label.” Cutler's fessays have consistently pursued the ideal of a genuinely democratic cul- ture. In this article, Cutler places sampling and “plunderphonics” in historical perspective, examining the ways in which recording and musical technology hhave altered the very nature of music and musical practice. ‘Until 1877, when the first sound recording was made, sound was a thing predi- fan object that jead musie to press upon th wyole, an answer strenuously essay attempts to dig shit initiated 198 + audio culture Introduction Sounds like a dive downwards as @ sped up tape slows rapidly to settle into a recognisable, slightly high-pitched Dolly Parton. tinues to slow down, but ‘hore gradvaly now. The instruments thicken and their timbres stretch and richen. Details unheard at the right speed suddenly cut across the sound. Dolly is chang- ing 50x, she's a man already, the backing has become hallucinatory ad strange “The grain ofthe song is opened up and the ea, seduced by detail ats 2 throng of ‘burpnsing associations and ideas fallin bohind i. The same thing is suddenly very Gitferont. Who would have expected this extraordinary composition to have been ured ina generic country song, 1000 times heard already and 1000 times copled ‘ near John Oswald's version of Dolly Parton's version of “The Gi tender” effectively a recording sald playing Parton's single on sly edited together). Anat controled dec which is, a8 fanding composition ifferent from those of the ‘given—along with and agai Created because the rest ‘aesthetic, significant, polysemic both a source of for the valiity and el ce ofits means, wader” and other pieces—all originated {rom existing copyright recordings but employing radically afferent techniques —were included fon an EP and later a CD, Plunderphonio. Both w 2 to radio Stations and the press. None was soid. The lin reproductions | ‘access and by 412” EP, consisting of four pieces feon Christmas Eve 1989 and the end of Januar ‘and all extant copies were destroyed. Of al the plur ‘Jackson who pursued the CD to destruction. Curious! Jackson's own plundering, for instance the one minute and six seconds of Th hony Orenestra's recording of Beethoven's Ninth which open You Be There?” on the CD Dangerous, for which Jackson ciaimr chris culer + 199than six credits, including composer copyright (adding plagiarism to sound piracy), seems to have escaped his notice Necessity and Choice (Continued) has to include other people's already cacorded work: ‘sound is just raw material, then recorded sound is always ray— ish now in part to redress. 3d all audible sound as material for musical organlsa- tion, art music composers were slow to exploit, and remain so today. One reas is thatthe inherited hhave not escaped their roots in both what musical material ‘model visually what we know as melody, harmony and rhythm represented by, and limited to, arrangements of fixed tones (quantised, mostly 12 to an octave) and led degree of complexity 1 music can be said, after a fash- jongst other things, fon, to be constructed upon and through not Creates “the composer" who is thus constitutions No wonder then the ues fo cause such const ‘minally teatens the deepest roots ited art music paradigm, rep notation with the direct transcription of performances and rendering the clear di tinction between performance and composition nul. {quent extension has come typically through other, less, less paradigmatically confused?) musical genres, new technology are simply not For art music then, recording is inherently problematio—and surely plunder- phonies is recording’s most troublesome child, breaking taboos art music hadn't ‘even imagined, For 140 + audio culture {uidance and confirmation of a sound object may be cartied through by listening alone. ‘The new medium proposes, the old paradigms recol. Yet| want to argue that is forbidden zone that much of what is genuinely new inthe cre- ‘age of recording. History to dato is ive way. The question is—to what? the conditions of a new at form is that it produce a motalanguage, a theory through which it can adequately be described. A new musical form will need ‘such a theory. My sense is that Oswald's Plunderphonie has brought at last into sharp relief many of the enitical questions around which such practice which until now has been tually to apply retrospectively, creating its own archaeology, precursors Originality n. Where personal contributions are made or expected, Clearly prescribed mits and iterate sanctioned and trac ms. Thus, far from describing hubris or transgression, originality and the ind ual voice became central criteria of value for a music whose future was to be ‘marked by the restless and challenging pursuit of progress and innova bacame essonti ship of a sound bluepr give it body, sound, and moaning, ‘and immortality of a work in the al Copyright The antv ring, howe nent and fixed as the score is r, made each performance Copyright was no longer so si re as perma ja When Jahn chris cutier » 141current thinking derives, and which commercial copy to rellect. as a practice radically undermines three of the centr rhame, as often stil occurs, of a bandleader, nothing is expressed by this except the power relations pertaining in the group. Oniy it iis all the partcipants, are ot speaks only with the voice of o Concition of ts very existence). Recording History: The Gramophone ‘claim a composer's copy originated work, one had to produce some kind of score constructed from the the improvised parts or all the money would a ‘melody. In other words, the response of copyright auth< brane, causing the membrane to vibrate of recording was to cobble together piecemeal compromises in the hopo that, its track on a glass cylinder coated with lampblack moving at a fixed speed. Suc ‘between the copyrights held in the composition and the patent rights granted over experiments were conducted only to convert otherwise invisible, transient sour ‘questions of assignment could be agjudicated—and vio- into a “writing” (phono-greph means "voice-writer), a fixed visible form that woul ‘and punished. No one wanted t allow it to be seen and studied. It was some ten years before it occurred to anyon und thus writen might be recoverec urely mechanical phonograph wa lers were recording devices as 3.2 initiative to the mass reproduci foductive medium. Its mass production sumer market for muse ecorings. Tough is reproductive quality was poor than the Edison cylinder, the disc was cheaper and more accessible, and in th processes involved were without precedent but rather ‘were at last brought together in a focused and. The immediate re witha Nevertheless, the geni a recorded sound the same quality. A recording of a recording recording. No mora, no less. advance; the chance interpent We have to start here. Only then can we bet ‘examine, as with photomontage The first concréte pieces, is by eng (which takes as ts strength of meaning the fact that a photograph of a photograph rneericomposer Pierre Schaeffer, were made by manioulating gramophone record is—a photograph) how the message is qualified by a communica- tat is plagiarism and whi is public domain m: from technologies even to comprehend such qu it constitutes @ new like Oswald's hearing of the 142 + audio culture chris‘magnetic tape. Other composers began to experiment with disc manipulation around the same time “Tistram Cary in London and Mauricio Kagel in Buenos Al ‘-4o-dise recording by 1850 and the studio that was to become an instrument was ments seemed to have become a primitive ‘curious that, in 1 intimacy of record and reco 1usique coneréte on dise was not released u Where the gramophone was an acoustic instrument, the magnetic recorder, also invented at the end of the nineteenth century, was always electrical. The gramo- phone, however, had numerous intial edvantages: it was easier to amplty (the , and as soon as Emile ‘adopted throughout the word. Within five years tape had (ofessional recording app Teproductive media was to ‘was on the gramophons story, I want to take a quick look at plundering precedents in some other History/Plunder From cay nthe went cet condos sted Hat ne woud expect 1 have encouraged sound plundering experiments as a matter of course, Fi special claims toward objectivity and transparency, the tongue of a record- ing is atways eloquently forked and thus already placed firm ‘Secondly, montage, collage, borrowing, bricolage have been endemic visual arts sings at least the turn of the century, The importation of reacymade ‘ragments into original works was a staple of cubism (newspaper, label samples, etc), futurism and early soviet art. Dada took this much further (Kurt ‘Schwitters above all and the photomontagists) and as ear Duchamp hi plete unm 144 © audio culture strangely it weited 25 years for John Cage in his Imaginary Landscape No.1 (1986 to a public performance as an instrument—and h {trom 1922), Lszi6 Moholy-Nagy at th 2) and Edgard Varese (1936) had all experimented with disc mani fal work. Paul Hindemi Framarce (100) am Duige Vets Ensim (121), Ther oa also be Some pees offen musi whe feared "aus teatents sound eso rool ceates wit ds before begtarsereda clu poseisas es Saute Avr ornegge an Ma tn but oad isionary proposal ich, needless to sa Hollywood—2 proposal ‘With so many precedents in the world ofthe visual arts, and the long availa ity of the means of airact importation and plunder, it does seem surprising that took so long for there to be similar developments i ians of the two principle ‘two very different spheres, each su separate publicity and theory. The key works were Pien rents with radio sound archive discs (e.g. Etude aux tou 16 and music were plundered wh , Imaginary Landscape No. 5 specified as sound materal forty-two gram phone records. Thus, although Schaetter used pre-recorded materials, these we inderphoni ‘Blue Sui that an unequivocal ex, in James Tenney's celebrated Collage No. chris cutler + 145down; Tenney had picked up a “non at," lowbrow work and tumed itinto “art; not ‘as with scored music by wing variations on a popular ai, but simply by subjecting ‘2 gramophone record to various physical and electrical procedures. Stil no copyright difficulties. ‘To Refer or Not to Refer ‘Now, it can easily be argued that performances with—and ra re from all representational attributes. This can take the fo tence that al at all semiotic systems con sist of nothing but referentialty—signallod by the addition, a it were, of imaginary iguishes completely sounds mourning the presence of the ccause.”"' Here the goals to “purify” the sound, (though it may well be the islance a sample—may be no more than a frag- 19 self reference, a version, and may be used to point at this very recording, is origin not so much e cations, of course, do not exhaust as debris from the sonic environment, a plundered sound also hi to be used because ofits cause and because ofall the associations and cul- others}—all of whieh depand upon ‘mades)—can equally be done with c Plundered sound carries, above >a; it offers not just a new means bul confuses the debates about originality which so vex High and Low Popular musics got off to a slow start with sound pit . Nevertheless they soon proved far more able to explore its inherent possibilities than art musics, which 148 = ausio culture tre so doing drew atenton to anther igfia 7 that, in the same way that they conceal and I travel ie necessary, one need bolong 6 no sped ier a 1¢. Indeed, from the moment recordings existed, @ now kindof “past and “present” wore bor—both mmedatoly aval Gamand, Time and space are omagenised inthe home loudspoakor rte hea Shane tad the pop OO costs tha same ns the claslal CD and probably comes from the samo shop, Al commodt eat lowing the dasire ‘genres as fast as y‘ ‘what you heard. A kind of sound intoxication fons encountered in recorded music of between high and low art that wou! tive musi. In plunderphonies to, dering For instance, athough te rst plunder pices (vz the the Cage werke mentioned) belonged fm inte at camp, neverteles remained fay of Its Regotaieconcom tho of creating rom 3 tronsingsbout mh cer people's work "The word of ow at has coin a profound sense lundeing wae endemic nd coveing 1 nr people the blues form, jazz it century art kind of originally and novel reply was nat an sue here, Meo toa World of ock, musians were happy 10 make fools of themselves. “red Covering Amora” ihe har way chris cutler + 147instructive was how, in a sound world principally medi ‘and low art worlds increasingly appropriated from one is that were glossed over when art was art and there ike Tenney’s appropriation of copyrighted, but lowbrow, ratened to become dangerously problematic when Wer and original began to operate in the same dis- another And how p ‘was no genre cont recordings) sudden genres blurred and uted (art/commercial) space. Low Art Takes a Hand Flock precedents for pure studio tapework come from Frank Zappa, with his decid ‘edly Varése-esque concrete pieces on the albums Absolutely Free, Lumpy Gravy ‘and We're Only in it For Tha Money, all made in 1967 (We're Oni Mor ntains an unequivocally plundered Sur music extract) and The spework on “Tomorrow Never Knows ion No 9" on Tho White Album arly 1960s radios wor guest member Uli Trepte played "Space ceffects—as his main instrument). ‘Such examples—taken in combination with, firstly, the increasing indepen- dence, confidence and self-consciousness of some rook musicians; secondly, a 2 of musicians coming out of at sehools; ‘cheaper home ret J0US to that used by Stockhausen in 1. Opus 1970, which had nothing to do with iediurm. What Stockhauson had done was forhis Beethoven Anniversary rec influence and everything to do to propare tapes of fragments of Beethaven’s music which ran continuously. throughout the performance ofthe piece. Each player could open and st ‘oudspeaker at will and was instantaneously to “develop” what he heard instru. synchronise, imitate, distor) F procedure: instead of Beetho- ‘commenting cn, ‘hus building up tracks. Though they subsequently erased most of the source materal, you can often, as with Opus 1970, stil hear the plundered originals breaking through. In 1977 itwas The Residents again who produced the first unequivocal 100% plunder to come out of pop, following in the high art footsteps of James Tonney's Presley-based Collage No.1, and the later, more successlul 1975 work Omaggio «a Jerty Lee Lewis by American composer Richard Trythall (plundered irom various, recordings of Lewis's “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On"), Tythall comments: Like ; iar musical object served the fation point within a maze af new mat the studio manip- into new, unexpected areas, while main- 148» audio culture ining its past assocations."* The Residents’ work was a 7nch sin “Soyond The Vley OF ADay In The Lie and eubtitos The Residents Play T Deale/The Beats Play Tho Resident,’ eame packaged as an ar object ing." The other was pure plunderphonics. ‘assembled from extracts dubbed off Beatles records, looped, posed with razor blades and tape. It is an ingenious constu ‘Sampling and Scratching were some notable experiments a ‘Although there rita beats eae 10 a code, This really is a kind of a wilting. When but only to a code. This really oes I mean as when an objec is stored rather as discrete de onstruction of a sound (as a vis the sound to its means of Into soft wax and leave Which act as instructions ‘object when electronical sampling allows any recordad sound to be linked and, using electronic tools (comput rca) which taka year o peared and exert te qucky using ony ado "The mace epplcaton i even more bas. simply pus any oun records ot which has been recorded an stored as sotwareon a nol Soar, plod according tothe key Touched The user can recor, mode! asoign othe Keys any sounds at all Atlas here is musta stument whic Erocorang doves ana performing intunent—whose vie simply te co and modulation ofecorcings. How cou hs achnology not give the geen TS pluncorng? twas so spl. No expertise wes needed is user ena cohris culler © 149board, some stuff to sample (records and CDs are easy—and right there at home), ‘and plenty of time to try things out. Producing could be ne more than eriteal con. slivty of Pick'n’Mix. Nor was that all. Sampling wes intro- climate where low art plundering was already dooply {um echoed in a radically ese, Honegger, Kagel, Cary, Schaefer, Knizac iy different aesthetic. m scratching was coined to describe the practice ofthe realtime manipula- 2" dises on highly-adapted tutables. It grew up in US discos where Dus ‘began to programme the records they playad, running them together, cutting one into another on beat and in key, superimposing, crosslading and so on. Soon this Point where a good DJ could instrument, along with a rhythm box, Get a bunch of good ‘hythm records, choose your favourite parts and groove along with the rhythm ‘machine. Using your hands, seratch the record by repeating the grooves you dig 80 much. Fade one record into the other and keep that rhythm box going. Now king and singing over the record with your own micraphone, Now you're ‘making your own music out of other peopl cratchingis."— 1970s in rad jons, adopted quite farclay. Marclay used all the above techniques and more, ig also an idea of ty compasite discs comprising rent records glued together. Of course everything Marciay does 10% plundered, but on some recordings he too, like John Oswald lunderphonic re reates works which, echoing Tenney ‘and Trythall, concentrate on a sing thus producing a work which is about bourg, John Cage, Louis Teicher, Fred Zorn Marclay rose to prominence as a member of the early 1980s New York scene, ‘on the experimental fringe of what was sill thought of unequivocally as low ar. He ‘emerged from the context of disco and scratching, not conerdte or other artworld ns with dises (though they were part of his personal history). His cultural ke the status of certain of w York school such as John slowly shifted, from low to high, via gallery installations and vieual works and 150 + audio culture through the release of records such as Record Without A Cover (1985), which has only one playable side (the other has titles and text pressed i Unwrapped with the instruction: “Do not store in a protective package. 1987 grooveless LP, packaged in a black suede pouch and released in land signed eaition of 50 by Ecart Editions. Marclay's work appears as @ lapse but the coming into being of a new aesthet Oswald Plays Records, Curiously, the apotheosis of ‘new creation—oocurred just as the gramophone ra lote and when a new technology that we ratchet, acousmatcst, tape composer 2 record as an instrument—as the raw material of a itself was becoming obso- and Techno, Marcay goes umtabies" appear on diverse CDs and younger players ike Otome ‘Yoshihide are emerging with an even more organ and inmate recor/player es an exposahe Isument* ii almost as sampling had recrested te gramophone recor as cat Insrument, an analogue, expressive vole, made authentic by ost cence empowers a now mi Disc-Tape-Dise Applications of a new technology to art are often first inspired by existing art para ddigms, frequently simplifying or developing e: tape for musical effect inspire played! the work of John Zom. This process can be traced more broa its origins in the crisis in art music atthe turn of the century through 10 contempo cohris cutlor + 181new recording techniques. Each refines a shared sonic language, sets proble ‘makes propositions. Each takes a certain measure of itself from the o living and dead: "Records are... More Dead Than Quick performance-recording loop winds through th wfough rock experiments and on to the most abstract noi that belongs to its participants while what is recorded is placed inevitably in the public domain. Moreover, as noted carlor, corded music leaves its genre community and ‘enters the universe of recordings. As such the mutual interactions between com posers, performers and racordings refer back to sound and structure and not to Particular music communities. Leakage, seapago, adoption, osmosis, abstraction, those doseribe the life of sound work today. They account for the gen gence atthe fringes of genres once mutually exclusive—and about which it simply makes no sone to speak in terms art or popu lar, indeed where the two interpenetrate so deeply thatto attempt to discriminate ‘between them s to fallto understand the sound revolution whioh nas been effected through the medium is the widespread plundering of records for samples that are recycied on HioHop, House and Techno records in particular, but increas- ingly on pop records in general. This means that drum parts, bass parts (often loops of a particular bar), horn parts, all manner of details (James Brown whoops 182 + audio culture inythme and tempi can be adjusted and synchronised, pitches altered, dynami ‘shape rewriten and so on, Selections sampled may be traceable or untraceable it need not matter, Reference is not the aim so much as a kind ferism, a bricolage assembly trom parts. Rat 80079, you start with a large record and CD col hugely time consuming and slightly ridiculous and reat for amateurs and small fish. Oswald's CD Plexure (1993). Instance, has so many tiny cuts and samples on it that, not only ar t impossible to register by listening, but compiling credit data would be like ass ‘We have to addrass the question whether this is what we ret ‘now | am more interested in the way pop really starts to ess and the feeling ‘enough now endlessly to reinterpret and rearrange in production gives way to another (ito one at al) hearing carry referential weight, this being oniy one opt choose to employ. The An Heiner Goebbels and Christoph Ander ples act both as struct ‘complexities; no piece is reducible to a score, a set ‘and superimposed viewpoints are charact the tension between invention and passion on the one hand ai “dead” materials on the other. ‘When the group was formed, singer Christoph Anders worked with a instructions, a formul chris eutler « 183lar fragments, though these are often recognisable—and ial—doesn't depend on this quality which is accepted merely fs a possible aspect, but rather on tt is the key) as structur materials can deliver, The Issue formance? it so, Whether sound can be copyrighted or snat do we draw the line—at length (destruction of works, legal prohibition, Itigation and distrain!) have been ag by one side of the argument, hese are questions we cannot avoid ‘A Brief Roviow of Applications ‘cases such as that of Cage, in Imaginary Landscapes 4 and &, where materals are all derived direcly from records or radio and sub- jected to various manipulations. Though there are copyright implications, the prac {ice implies that music picked randomly “out of the air” is simply there. Most of (Cage's work is more a kind of listening than of producing, B. Partial importations: An example of partial importatior ‘Bush Of Ghosts (David Bymne and Brian Eno) and the work of ic domain status should be F most Pop—or any recorded music. C. Total importation: This might rather be thought of as interpretation or re= of existing recordings. Here wo are in the territory of Tenney, Trythall, The lunderphonic pioneer John Oswald, Existing recordings are not randomly or instrumental to distinguish between ceases, sinoe its concems are stil drawn Visual arts Duchamp with readymad il with soupeans and Brillo boxes, Lichtenstein with cartoons and Sherry Levine with re-photographe ho- tographs are only some of the many who have, one way oF another, broached the primary artistic question of “originalty," which Oswald too can't help but raise, fevant. Ths is where recognition of parts plundered is not nec ‘There is no self-reflexivity involved; sound may be drawn as. bbent to new purposes or simply used as raw material. Also 184 » audio cul tact sound produce Universe of vewpolns. For instance, the post found and na posses of ast to onginate any more, since what is already there offers such endless posst teeor the expression of an impiled helplessness Inthe face of contomporan Covaane:namaly, everybing that ean be done has been done and wo can nh rearrange the pecos Tis fed where what may seem tobe quite slmlarprocodurs mi cxposs such wily fren understandings 28 ohopelos tnkaring arias, fans ora clobraton ofthe line of the intemal Final Comments currents run together here. There is the technological aspect: plunderin e absence of sound recording. There isthe cultural aspect: sinc the century the importation of readymade materials into artworks ha been a common practice, and one which has accumulated eloquence and signifi {familiar material is a well-established prac in such a climate the applications of a recording tect yyoack, transposition and processing facilities wil n ted by the old proscriptions of plagiarism or the ideal of origin is lacking now is a discourse under which the new practices can be discussed an ‘adjudicated. The old values and paradigms of property and copyright, sil, orig lel, design and soforh are simply not adcuate tothe tak Un chris cuter « 155: