remashed

Piece by Randall Roberts at Los Angeles Times on John Oswald revisisting / reworking  Grayfolded, his proto-mashup sampladelic expansion of "Dark Star" by Grateful Dead, 20 years after it was first released.

20 years!

Here's what I wrote about it at the time....


JOHN OSWALD / GRAYFOLDED
The Wire, 1995
by Simon Reynolds

     There are two different schools of sampling. For some (A

Guy Called Gerald, The Young Gods, Techno-Animal), there's a

fierce conviction (50 percent aesthetic, 50 percent legal

anxiety) that all samples must be masked, all sources

rendered unrecognisable.  This is the modernist school of

sampladelia: digital technology as a crucible for sonic

alchemy, musique concrete made easy as pie.  I have a lot of

sympathy for this ethos, but there's a sense in which this

approach reduces the sampler to a synthesiser, and thereby

misses what is truly idiomatic to the machine: taking the

known and making it strange, yet still retaining an uncanny,

half-recognisable trace of the original's aura.

     Canadian musician/producer John Oswald falls into the

second, postmodern camp. Sampling, or as he prefers to term

it, "electroquoting", is a highly self-conscious practice

that allows him to interrogate notions of originality,

copyright, signature and 'the death of the author'.  Long

before the sampler became available, he was using more

cumbersome, time-consuming techniques of tape cut'n'splice to

create his famous if seldom heard Mystery Lab cassettes.  But

he really made a name for himself in 1989 with the

Plunderphonics CD, which caused a major ruckus, sonically and

institutionally, with its digital vivisections of songs by

The Beatles, Elvis, Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson, Glenn

Gould etc.  Despite the fact that 'Plunderphonics' was

distributed on a non-commercial, non-profit basis, the

Canadian Recording Industry Association, acting on behalf of

its clients CBS and Michael Jackson, threatened Oswald with

litigation.  He was forced to destroy the master-tapes and

all remaining CD's.  700 remain in circulation, while the

intrigued can get bootleg copies from a number of Copyright

Violation Squads (see end-note).

     Since then Oswald has mostly confined his plunderphonic

escapades to cases where his reworkings have been solicited,

like his de- and re-constructions of songs by The Doors and

Metallica, amongst others, for a limited release CD

celebrating the 25th Annivesary of Elektra Records. An

exception was "Plexure" (released on John Zorn's Avant

label), where Oswald cannibalised the entire audiorama of

contemporary pop'n'rock in one fell swoop. The result--5000

songs 'composited' into a 20 minute frenzy of crescendos,

choruses, screams, powerchords, etc--is a bit like Napalm

Death with samplers.

     Last year, at the invitation of the Grateful Dead,

Oswald plunderphonized that band's most famous and far-out

song "Dark Star", producing the double-CD "Grayfolded".  The

first disc, "Transitive Axis" came out last year; now the

second half, "Mirror Ashes" has been added, and the whole

'Grayfolded' package is being made widely available,

following the unexpectedly warm reception 'Transitive'

received from the Deadhead community (50,000 copies sold!).

     Entering the Dead's legendary vaults, where recordings

of virtually every performance they ever made are stacked,

Oswald spent 21 days listening to 100 versions of 'Dark

Star', and extracted 40 hours of improvisatory material.  The

original plan was to create just one disc, but Oswald soon

realised he had enough good stuff for two.  'Transitive' and

'Mirror' each took three months of painstaking digital labour

to construct. The results are astonishing. Whereas the

iconoclasm (literally idol-smashing) of 'Plunderphonics' was

patently audible, 'Grayfolded' is true to the spirit of the

Dead:  the nine tracks of 'Transitive', in particular, form one seamless, fluent

monster-jam, and sounds almost like a plausible real-time

event with the Dead in unusually kosmik form.  Although

Oswald's techniques allow Garcia, Weir, Lesh et al to jam

with their own doppelgangers across a 25 years timespan, the

digital methodology doesn't really draw attention to itself

on the first disc (it gets a bit more outre on "Mirror

Ashes", though).

     One of the ironies of "Grayfolded" is that Oswald wasn't

exactly a Deadhead when he embarked on the project. "I

enjoyed 1969's 'Live/Dead', especially 'Dark Star', and might

have heard the odd C&W song or 'Truckin'', but I basically

didn't listen to them for twenty five years," he admits over

the phone from his Toronto office. "But I found what I expected

in the vaults--all kinds of great things were happening in

concert.  I also went to two Dead shows.  The first was in

Oakland, their home town, and I thought 'well, this is not

great improvising', but it was fascinating sociologically, in

so far as there's this relationship between an extremely

active, fertile audience and a very untheatrical musical

experience onstage.  A year later I went to another show in

New York, and found that musically it was quite satisfying,

almost like a completely different band. So I started to

respect the idea that an audience would follow this band

looking for these good concerts. I had got one out of two, a

good ratio."

     In the lysergic daze of late '60s acid-rock, the Dead

did weird studio-as-instrument stuff on early albums like

'Anthem of the Sun' and 'Aoxomoa', But today one associates

the Dead with a keep-it-live, jam-a-long mess-thetic,

possibly because their legacy is godawful American neo-

tie-dye bands like Blues Traveller, Phish, etc. Was there a

sense in which Oswald was making a case for digital music as

the new psychedelia, and making up for the Dead's abandonment

of the studio's possibilities?

     Actually, no. "The technique of this record--using

computers, digital transfers and stuff--is really incidental

to the illusion I'm trying to present.  People would tell me

to stop listening to the tapes and go to a concert, 'cos live

it's a totally different thing.  And I thought what

constitutes this other 'thing'? It's obviously not in the

band itself, cos there's no theatricality. Maybe it's 'cos

there's so much drugs in the air! What I found at the

concerts is there's a give and take between the audience and

band, there are audience surges triggered by certain things the

band do, or by the lighting, which is very subtle and directs

the visual attention back onto the audience every so often.

I thought 'well, we're not going to soak the CD cover in

acid, so how can I achieve what I think everybody desires--a

record that captures this feeling that Dead concerts are

magic?'  So I did things that are unnatural, like have a young

Jerry Garcia sing with an old Jerry, or have an orchestra of

multiple Dead musicians, all in order to pump up the sonic

experience so that at certain points you think: 'What's

happening? Have the drugs kicked in?'".

     These paradoxical sensations--a real-time, flow-motion

band suddenly transfigured and transcendentalized--were

created via an array of intensely artificial and finickety

techniques. Like 'folding', whereby Oswald took similar

material from different concerts and layered them up,

achieving a density similar to the effect Phil Spector got

from having several pianos playing the same chords. "For

instance, on "Transitive Axis" I took a really nice 12 minute

duet between Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia, trimmed out

redundant ideas and folded it down to three minutes. Yet it

still feels like a duet. Using a computer, it's easy to take

something from later in a musical sequence and slide it in

earlier, superimposing it on a different track of the mix. I

used to do that in my earlier analog days but it was much

harder to do it accurately. With computers, I can move things

by a millisecond 'til they fit exactly in the rhythmic

pocket, so you still have the 'feel' of a band.

     "After the first disc, Lesh said he would have liked to

hear even more folding, and in response I took the entirety

of 'Transitive Axis' and folded it 14 times. This created 16,

384 layers and squeezed 60 minutes into 2 seconds! It sounds

like a feedback rush or a jet engine, and I slipped it into

"Cease Tone Beam" on the second disc. It's a bit like that JG

Ballard idea that in the future people will listen to Wagner

operas that have been compressed from four hours to a few

seconds, but still have the flavour, like a whiff of

perfume."

     "Cease Tone Beam" itself is Oswald's plunderphonia at

its most extreme. From the ' drumspace' sections of Dead

shows, which often segue into 'Dark Star', Oswald took a

minute and a half fragment of ultralow-end percussion timbre,

generated on Mickey Hart's custom-made aluminum beam. Oswald

slowed it down 16 times into a protracted sub-aural seism,

over which he layered progressively shorter, less-slowed down swatches

of percussion that went up in ratios (2, 4, 8) that generated a simple harmonic relationship.  The result, at once ethereal

and chthonic, other- and under-wordly, is the missing link

between avant-grunge unit The Melvins and Eno's "On Land".

     Oswald doesn't really know how the Grateful Dead feel

about "Grayfolded". Ex-keyboard player Tom

Constanten did send him a thank-you note, but the death of Jerry

Garcia left the rest of the guys "pretty preoccupied".  Diehard Deadheads

responded extremely well to "Transitive Axis", but the more

anti-naturalistic "Mirror Ashes" has stirred the first

charges of 'heresy!'.  Oswald's favourite reaction is "from a

guy on the Internet who wrote that Grayfolded makes him cry,

because it encapsulates 25 years of Garcia, and it's unreal

in a way that gave him a very visceral sensation of it being

a ghost."

     Garcia's death does shine a peculiar light on the whole

project, in so far as it suggests that a kind of involuntary

immortality for artists may soon become widespread. Oswald

has shown that a sympathetic ear can 'play' another artist's

aesthetic like an instrument. (Of course Luddites like Lenny Kravitz and Oasis

have effectively already done the same thing, vis-a-vis

Hendrix and Lennon/McCartney, by writing new songs in

another's old style).  But what's to stop an unsympathetic,

money-motivated ear doing the same thing?  In the future,

will artists copyright their 'soul-signature' and then sell

it to the highest bidder to be exploited after their demise?

Fond of visual and filmic analogies, Oswald mentions that the

movie business has been trying to devise ways of taking dead

stars and creating simulations of them to play new parts.

The mind boggles....

     In addition to plunderphonic activity, Oswald works as a

producer, where he deploys unique recording techniques like

his Orbital Microphone Navigational Imaging Via Echotronic

Radio Stereo Eccentricity, aka OMNIVERSE (a mic' with the

aural equivalent of a zoom lens, enabling it to do a 'tracking shot' down the entire length of a piano string).  He also writes pieces for

orchestra, and, as we speak, is putting the finishing touches

to a stage production involving 22 choreographers "none of

whom know what the others are doing". Finally, and strictly

as a hobby, he plays sax in a quintet confusingly called The

Double Wind Cello Trio.  On the plunderphonic front, Oswald has a

backlog of classical music related stuff to release, and he's

about to embark on a massive opus that will somehow

"encapsulate this first century of music recording history

that is about to come to an end".

    

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

and a later (2001) piece for Uncut on the reissue of Plunderphonics as part of a box set

JOHN OSWALD

Plunderphonics 69/96

(fony)

by Simon Reynolds

In this "pop will regurgitate itself" era, sampling and referentiality is so par for the course, it's barely comment-worthy. Flashback, though, to a time when the debates about bricolage and (re-, mis-, and ex-) appropriation were more urgent: the late Eighties of Def Jam, the JAMMS, M/A/R/R/S, Steinski, that moment when the sampler suddenly got much cheaper. Canadian avant-gardist John Oswald had been messin' with music by iconic artist for years, using traditional tape-editing techniques, and he seized the opportunities presented by the new digital technology. The result was 1989's Plunderphonic CD: songs by Elvis Presley, James Brown, Count Basie, Stravinsky,  and others, vivisected and rebuilt into grotesque mutant alter-egos.   What was different about Oswald's approach was that each track focused on a single artist, and usually a single work. This sort of aural Pop Art mischief wasn't unprecedented, either in the academy (James Tenney's 1961 Elvis-deconstruction "Collage No. 1 (Blue Suede) or in pop itself (The Residents Reich'n'Roll), but Oswald's cover (per)versions were especially extreme.

Despite being scrupulous about identifying his sources, and circulating Plunderphonic on a non-commercial basis, Oswald was persecuted by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (largely because CBS were upset by his reworking of Michael Jackson's "Bad") and forced to destroy all remaining copies of the CD. For years, the only way to hear it has been to contact various Copyright Liberation outfits who'd tape it for free. But now, finally, Oswald has secured permission for all his  "electroquotes" and has re-released Plunderphonic, plus some of his earlier and later collages, in a deluxe CD box. There's an extensive booklet, which goes into fascinating detail about Oswald's techniques and diverse approaches to each different song-treatment, along with all the related issues of originality, copyright, artistic signature, etc, that Oswald is exploring.

Listening to the set's two discs, a certain Oswald "signature" emerges:   a partiality for choppy, fractured rhythms and weird time signatures. The herky-jerky cut-up of  "Hello I Love You" sounds like the Magic Band reduced to eking out an existence as a covers band, with the players uncannily imitating the Doors's instrumental and vocal timbres, but restructuring the tune in the jagged spirit of Trout Mask Replica.  Extracts from Plexure, Oswald's attempt to compress the entire pop universe into one 20 minute piece, offer a frenzy of crescendos, choruses, soul-screams, whammy-bar back-blasts, etc, an FM radio inferno that spawns monstrous hybrids like Annie Lennox amalgamated with Fine Young Cannibals inna Cronenburg/The Fly-stylee.  There are also moments of beguiling delicacy, though: offcuts of Juan Carlos Joabim bossanova rewoven into a beautiful quilt of lilt; "Strawberry Fields Forever" condensed into a quintessential quiver of wistful ethereality; a varispeeded "White Christmas" that makes Bing's croon droop and ooze like a Dali dreamscape. "Pretender" is a sex-change version of a Dolly Parton song descending from only-audible-to-dogs ultra-treble to a testosterone-thick basso profundissimo, and  executed using a Lenco turntable that  goes from 80 rpm down to 12 rpm.

The most stunning of  Oswald's plunderphonic feats is "Dab", his infamous unravelling of Michael Jackson's "Bad".  Attempting to bring sorely-needed electricity to what he felt was musically lifeless, Oswald does his usual Beefheart/Zorn-style thing at first, transforming the song into convulsive cyber-funk. Halfway through, though, the remake ascends to another place altogether. Micro-syllable vocal particles are multitracked as if in some infinite hall-of-mirrors vortex, and this ghost-swarm of 

nano-Jacksons strobes stereophonically from speaker to speaker, while simultaneously billowing back and forth through dub-space. The opposite approach to Plexure's maximalist assault, "Dab" creates a new universe within a finite, not-especially-great pop song. It's one of the most cosmic (micro-cosmic?) things I've ever heard. And it alone justifies the not-cheap admission price to Plunderphonics 69/96.