The term was coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay "Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative",[1] and eventually explicitly defined in the liner notes of his Grayfolded album.
This includes heavy sampling of educational films of the 1950s, news reports, radio shows, or anything with trained vocal announcers.
It is a studio-based technique used by such groups as the American experimental band The Residents (who used Beatles tracks), and other noted exponents including DJ Shadow, 808 State and The Avalanches.
[citation needed] According to Chris Cutler, "It wasn't until 1961 that an unequivocal exposition of plunderphonic techniques arrived in James Tenney's celebrated Collage No.
The gauntlet was down; Tenney had picked up a 'non art', lowbrow work and turned it into 'art'; not as with scored music by writing variations on a popular air, but simply by subjecting a gramophone record to various physical and electrical procedures.
In France, Jean-Jacques Birgé has been working on "radiophonies" since 1974 (for his film "La Nuit du Phoque"), capturing radio and editing the samples in real-time with the pause button of a radio-cassette.
It contained four tracks:[6] "Pretender" featured a single of Dolly Parton singing "The Great Pretender" progressively slowed down on a Lenco Bogen turntable so that she eventually sounds like a man; "Don't" was Elvis Presley's recording of the titular song overlaid with samples from the recording and overdubs by various musicians, including Bob Wiseman, Bill Frisell and Michael Snow; "Spring" was an edited version of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, shuffled around and with different parts played on top of one another; "Pocket" was based on Count Basie's "Corner Pocket", edited so that various parts loop a few times.
All undistributed copies of plunderphonic were destroyed[7] after a threat of legal action from the Canadian Recording Industry Association on behalf of several of their clients (notably Michael Jackson, whose song "Bad" had been chopped into tiny pieces and rearranged as "Dab") who alleged copyright abuses.
", from his 1999 album Keep It Unreal, is built around "Bird's Lament (In Memory of Charlie Parker)" by Moondog[5] and has been used in several commercials, ranging from Lincoln and Volvo automobiles to France Télécom and GEICO insurance.
The Avalanches have also been referred to as seminal artists in the genre, in particular with their album Since I Left You, released in 2000,[13][14][11][15] which has been noted as an important pivotal work.
[21] Later works by Oswald, such as Plexure, which lasts just twenty minutes but is claimed to contain around one thousand very short samples of pop music stitched together,[22] are not strictly speaking "plunderphonic" according to Oswald's original conception (he himself used the term megaplundermorphonemiclonic for Plexure), but the term "plunderphonic" is used today in a looser sense to indicate any music completely—or almost completely—made up of samples.