Tape+Loop
i am sitting in a room
Alvin Lucier, 1969
- Marc Chia (Onemannation/Tara Transitory): Bufferrrbreakkdownnn Arkestra
- Lieven Van Speybroeck: Word in Process
tactical cut-ups
... when you cut into the present the future leaks out
"Pluderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative"
The precarious commodity in music today is no longer the tune. A fan can recognize a hit from a ten millisecond burst,9 faster than a Fairlight can whistle Dixie. Notes with their rhythm and pitch values are trivial components in the corporate harmonization of cacophony. Few pop musicians can read music with any facility.
An active listener might speed up a piece of music in order to perceive more clearly its macrostructure, or slow it down to hear articulation and detail more precisely. Portions of pieces are juxtaposed for comparison or played simultaneously, tracing "the motifs of the Indian raga Darbar over Senegalese drumming recording in Paris and a background mosaic of frozen moments from an exotic Hollywood orchestration of the 1950's (a sonic texture like a "Mona Lisa" which in close-up, reveals itself to be made up of tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal."
Piracy or plagiarism of a work occur, 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." An example of this better borrowing is Jim Tenney's "Collage 1" (l961) in which Elvis Presley's hit record "Blue Suede Shoes" (itself borrowed from Carl Perkins) is transformed by means of multi-speed tape recorders and razorblade. In the same way that Pierre Schaeffer found musical potential in his object sonore, which could be, for instance, a footstep, heavy with associations, Tenney took an everyday music and allowed us to hear it differently. At the same time, all that was inherently Elvis radically influenced our perception of Jim's piece.
- Dab, from 1989 Plunderphonics Album
- Michael Jackson and Plunderphonics
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