Canadian composer John Oswald is a pirate. He may not rape or pillage but he definitely plunders, hence the term “plunderphonics,” which he coined to describe his William Burroughs-inspired technique of cutting and pasting the songs of well-known artists to create what can only be described as mad mashups.
This has gotten Oswald into trouble of the sort that pirates tend to attract, but lucky for him pirates no longer face the public gallows. Instead he’s faced legal actions, including one by the Canadian Recording Industry Association on behalf of several of their clients which led to the destruction of all undistributed copies of 1989’s “Plunderphonics.” I can almost smell the smoke from the bonfire of copyright infringements.
That said, some of his projects are totally legit. Such was the case with 1994 and 1995’s Greyfolded, which Oswald—at the urging of Grateful Dead bass player Phil Lesh—edited fragments of over one hundred different performances of the Dead’s “Dark Star” recorded live between 1968 and 1993. This process led to two new versions of the song each lasting about an hour, and they don’t particularly jar or disorient the way most of his recordings do.
I’ll admit I haven’t listened to Greyfolded in its entirety—hour-long manipulated versions of “Dark Star” aren’t my idea of solid gold entertainment—but the results are conventional enough that non-Deadheads may fail to recognize that Greyfolded isn’t two (albeit interminable) straightforward versions of the Dead song recorded at two different shows. Deadheads, of course, might complain that one-hour versions of the song are too short. You know how Deadheads are; give them enough acid and they could listen to “Dark Star” for twelve hours easy, so long as it was accompanied by enough hallucinatory dancing bears to form a conga line long enough to traverse the dayglo galaxies in their minds.
Such is most definitely not the case with 1991’s Rubáiyát, a five-song promo-CD composed of songs that no one will mistake as the real thing. Rubáiyát offers the perfect starting point for first time listeners to Oswald and plunderphonics, because like 1988’s “Plunderphonics” EP, Oswald filches bits of a song or songs and pieces and rearranges them to create fantastic new creations. “The plundering,” as he told one interviewer, “has to be blatant.”
You won’t have any trouble recognizing the sources of the five tracks on Rubáiyát. He does plundering galore on The Doors, Metallica, Tim Buckley, Carly Simon, and Faster Pussycat (together!) and the MC5. The results tend to be jarring but also exhilarating, whether they fold, spindle, and mutilate just one song and artist (as he does with Buckley), one song by several artists (see Simon and Faster Pussycat) or a number of songs by one band (e.g., The Doors).
Speaking of The Doors, opener “O’Hell” amputates snippets of “Hello I Love You,” “Light My Fire,” “Love Me Two Times,” “Love Her Madly,” “Five To One, “Touch Me,” “L.A. Woman,” “Roadhouse Blues,” “When The Music’s Over,” “The End,” “Break On Through,” “People Are Strange,” “Strange Days,” and “Waiting For The Sun,” with a bit of The Cure’s cover of “Hello I Love You” thrown in for flavoring. To call it disorienting is the ultimate understatement, but what’s amazing is it works. Listen to it a few times and it sounds like a fascinating synopsis of the band’s entire career, and an enthralling one at that. The lightning shifts from one song to the next (and back) will light up synapses in your mind you never knew you had.
On “2 Net” Oswald plays havoc with Metallica, somehow managing to slice, dice, and jam together cuts from the band’s 1988 LP And Justice for All and “Stone Cold Crazy.” It comes at you like a one minute, 21-second DMT trip, and in my case it does the impossible, namely almost (and I emphasize that almost) makes me want to give a band I’ve always despised a listen. The source of “Anon” is Tim Buckley’s “Anonymous Proposition,” which starts with a snippet from the rainstorm that opens The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” then proceeds to layer one strand of Buckley’s vocals over another, in effect creating a kind of one-man duet. It’s an impressive feat, and I would love it if Tim Buckley didn’t annoy the shit out of me.
“Vane” makes aural hash out of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” and Faster Pussycat’s cover of the same. The juxtapositions are jarring, as are the sudden segues between loud and soft and mellow and hard and the radical distortions of Simon’s voice. And the call and responses of Simon and Faster Pussycat are cool as well. Closer “Mother” smushes together tracks from the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams. There’s lots of rapid fire repetition; Rob Tyner repeats “Right now,” and “Are you ready,” some dozen times each, and he does the same with the number five. And like “2 Net” the song comes at you in a frenetic rush that translates into one of the most exhausting and mind-warping one minute and 58 seconds of your life.
Oswald’s discography is a massive one incorporating numerous musical genres, including jazz, country, classical amongst others, and those intrigued by Rubáiyát may want to pick up a copy of the 2000 box set Plunderphonics 69/96, which includes the songs on Rubáiyát as well as fifty-five additional tracks. And Oswald keeps on truckin’, a word I use with trepidation because I don’t want to give him any ideas. I don’t know about you, but a three-disc LP comprised of, say, six hundred live versions of their trademark song might just greyfold me to death.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
