The sonic quote, the sound of something familiar that someone else has recorded.
Though visual collages were already being cut and pasted together in Paris a hundred years ago and “plunderphonics” canonized by John Oswald in the early eighties, creating sound art strictly out of snatches of other people’s work is a métier particularly well-suited to our tattered media landscape and battered attention spans. The juxtaposition of borrowed sounds can take the form of nostalgic scrapbooking, satire, homage or social commentary, or simply art for art’s sake. Sonic collage is the musical extension of phonetic Dada poetry, the assemblages of Kurt Schwitters, and the “combines” of Robert Rauschenberg. In his Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative (1985), theorist and early practitioner Oswald defined its essential component as the sonic quote, the sound of something familiar that someone else has recorded.
While the mash-up has become commonplace, the vast majority make for pretty banal listening. But sampling, as we now call it, has spread like an unstoppable riverbank overflow, and creative minds with access to nimbler technology have become expert at incorporating the briefest half a note, noise residue, or snippet of dialogue with an impeccable ear for the right sound in the right place, the wrong sound in the right place, when to offer just a tantalizing squirt of melody and when to let it run wild. The Tape Beatles’ “Plagiarism®”, Negativland’s controversial U2 EP, and the UK’s “smash and grab” multitasker People Like Us (Vicki Bennett) are a few examples of artists who have propelled the conversation and perfected the technique.
Below, a few more Artful Dodgers who have put their idiosyncratic imprint on the genre.
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Liz Christine :: Sweet Mellow Cat (Flau)
Sweet Mellow Cat by Brazilian Liz Christine is a delicate arrangement of songs sewn together out of scraps of jazz and chamber music, movie soundtracks, field recordings and kitty hellos collected over the years. Melodically transportive despite its abstraction, delightful in its attention to the smallest detail, it is also somewhat confusing as to provenance, since one KKFS, real name Fernando S. Torres, is credited with being behind most of the music. A game of cross-gender musical badminton? Regardless, the results are anything but confusing. Cuddly, soft focused and fuzzy round the edges, it climbs into your lap to nuzzle and warm your heart like a favorite calico while playing with your imagination until it unravels like a ball of yarn. It’s one of the loveliest things released by a label known for its taste in pretty.
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A.K. Klosowski & Pyrolator :: Home Taping is Killing Music (Bureau B)
Home Taping is Killing Music is the re-issue of a 1985 collaboration between Arnd Kai Klosowski and Pyrolater (Kurt Dahlke), founding member of the Ata Tak label that originally released the album and a member of Neue Deutsche Welle electro-pop group Der Plan. At the time, Klosowski was becoming increasingly proficient at kludging together bits and pieces of machinery and had constructed a tape-looping device that could play far longer loops and samples than any commercial product on the market. He was originally introduced to Pyrolater as the prospective producer of his album, but their strong shared interest in collage, obscure sounds and technology inspired the duo to start over from scratch.
The album is a rough and tumble milestone in the history of sampledelica, a cattywompus of raw, rhythmic sound experiments and mad pop and funk. It’s so much fun, darting from humid exotica, air-conditioned easy listening and zombie dub to raggedy rock’n’roll, dance-floor abominations and a mocked-up conversation featuring Barry White and Louis Armstrong. For this edition, two bonus tracks, three rough cuts and a dub version have been appended to enhance enjoyment and stretch the playing time, like all the recordings reviewed here, to just over an hour.
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Total Normal :: Tales of the Expected (Momental)
Thierry Vaudor is a Canadian in Paris whose sampled tales are chronology- and geography-defying sidelong glances at cultures pop, folkloric and academic. Holder of a master’s degree in electroacoustic composition from the University of Montreal, he opens Tales of the Expected by elbow-poking Vicki Bennett with “Simple Minded People Like Me,” velvety jazz in the clouds that segues seamlessly into a rumba called “Simba” that is a marvel of five-minute metamorphosis.
There is an edge to Total Normal’s message but absolutely none to his edits, deftly overlaying Bill Cosby (a lot of Bill Cosby for some strange reason) and “Mr. Sandman,” baby-boomer lounge and West Coast yachting muzak, bongo grooves and glitch fingerprints, combining smooth sophistication with a beatnik’s cut-up sensibility. Dreamy and flutey on “Hugo Nine’s Nap,” swampy and Mississippian on “Hugo Nine’s Dog Blacky,” herky-jerky and sitar-soaked on “Better Tell Me John,” this is musical joinery by a master carpenter. The joy of hearing someone else´s sounds bending has rarely reached the frabjous heights of the ambient Polynesian zen chamber music of “Soft Cage.”
