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Looper's Delight
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<<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 __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus – Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com