Max Alper highlights a genre of sample-based music that completely eschews copyright law in favor of "bettering" original recorded content through total re-contextualization. Predecessor to nostalgia-soaked genres like Vaporwave, Plunderphonics paved the way for our post-modern mish-mash of pop sound art we take for granted today.
“A sampler, in essence a recording, transforming instrument, is simultaneously a documenting device and a creative device, in effect reducing a distinction manifested by copyright.” -
John Oswald, “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Composition Prerogative”
Whether it be through tape loops, synthesizers, or turntablism, there has always been a technological bridge between the contemporary pop music industry and more academic music settings. The commercial proliferation of digital signal processing and computer music, however, created new lanes of sonic materials that expanded the bridge between the club and the conservatory even further. Digital sampling allowed for artists to sculpt and compose original works through fragments of pre-recorded digital audio, some of which would only last half a second or less. Through digital sampling, beauty is now in the ear of the beholder. Every micro sound can become a universe in and of itself. Through the popularization of this new audio technology, new legal and ethical questions arose regarding recorded music IP. It was only in 1976 that the U.S. Copyright Act made a revision to include recorded music under the definition of “written music” protections, and to this day recorded music copyright remains a hot topic of debate, specifically regarding sampling. Where does the line between recycling of old media to create new art and plagiarism start and end?
While most producers in the commercial music industry tried their hardest to mask their unlicensed samples in signal processing effects in order to avoid enforcement of copyright law, others chose to lay into audio piracy as an artistic effort in and of itself. In his 1985 essay titled “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative”, electroacoustic composer John Oswald presented the argument that plundering previously recorded music for sample materials was simply the next natural stage in music evolution in the modern age.
“Can the sounding materials that inspire composition be sometimes considered compositions themselves? Is the piano the musical creation of Bartolommeo Cristofori (1655-1731) or merely the vehicle engineered by him for Ludwig Van and others to maneuver…? Piracy or plagiarism of a work occurs, according to Milton, ‘if it is not bettered by the borrower’. Stravinsky added the right of possession to Milton's distinction when he said, ‘A good composer does not imitate; he steals.’”
Oswald’s music under his plunderphonic definition is meant to simply “better” the borrowed popular musical mediums of the late 20th century i.e. digital recordings. None of the recorded materials in a plunderphonic composition are originally produced by the composer themselves; all sounds must be borrowed from previously published musical recordings. Oswald’s compositions toy with the concept of musical memory regarding Top 40 pop recordings spanning back decades. Plunderphonic music proves that through recontextualization, pre recorded sound can be remolded and mixed into a completely different musical artifact, all while finding ways to avoid copyright infringement law. Oswald writes “quoting extracts of music for pedagogical, illustrative and critical purposes have been upheld as legal fair use. So has borrowing for the purpose of parody.”
While certainly bombastic in avant-garde sonic approach, Oswald’s philosophy towards found sound composition laid the groundwork for several other schools of thought regarding electronic music in the 21st century, including Mash-Up, Vaporwave, and Hyperpop to name a few. These styles of contemporary electronic music are vehicles for a nostalgic sound that may have never truly existed the way we imagine it.
A particular contemporary electronic record label that seeks to continue Oswald’s philosophy towards found sound and the “copyleft” is Ohio based imprint Orange Milk Records. While making their mark in the surge of independent cassette tape labels that have popped up in the last decade, Orange Milk’s consistent plunderphonic curatorial ethos has informed the forward development of vaporwave and it’s subgenres as a whole. Orange Milk co-founder Seth Graham explains:
“I realized on a simple level that found art/re-contextualizing needs to happen on a major and new level in music. This encouraged me to re-think vaporwave without any cynicism. In doing so, vaporwave came to mean something really special to me. It questions our sentimentality of originality in art. When critics ask the question, “Is this original?” they assume that is the ultimate value in art. This is a very misguided approach. We are all original; the question should be, “How do we articulate our originality?”
One artist in particular who embodies a plunderphonic vision of the 21st century is composer and producer Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never. No stranger to reimagining synthesized and sampled aesthetics from late 20th century pop music, the OPN project serves to extract the beauty out of sounds that contemporary generations may find crude, primitive, or outdated.
“Plunderphonics for me is about coaxing something spiritual out of something that’s become vulgar for one reason or altogether. It’s a spiritual craft and frankly a fun and personally meaningful way of dealing with ‘environmental sound’. Besides the obvious art historical linkages to post WW1 Europe [dadaism] where artists were grappling with the material realities of an increasingly industrialized world, [plunderphonics] has a personal and psychedelic dimension.”
Just as Oswald stated that absorbing popular music into our contemporary sonic vocabulary “isn’t a matter of choice”, Lopatin’s work touches on the inevitability of popular recordings finding their way into all aspects of our everyday environments. Working within familiar sounds often leads to the creation of entirely new territories worth exploring. To reimagine found sound pop recordings in your own sonic vision is much like recreating a familiar recipe you grew up on. All it takes are the sonic ingredients of your recorded memories and rearranging them through contemporary aesthetics to cook up a fantastic recipe for the next generation of hungry listeners.
Sources:
Oswald, John. "Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative", 1985, Plunderphonics.com
Lopatin, Daniel. Interview with the artist, May 2022.
