When discussing sampling in music, all sorts of artists get lumped together. For instance, in an episode of the radio show Sound Opinions, John Oswald is grouped with Igor Stravinsky and MC Hammer as artists who dealt in musical quoting, re-contextualizing or "stealing" from other artists. In an interview, Osborn spoke on the differences between traditional musical quoting, directly lifting samples, and manipulating known music to point just before obscurity; the last category is the only which he considers to a case of "plunderphonics."
The roots of plunderphonics stretch back decades, and span countries. In some ways, it can be traced back to manipulations of audio captured on magnetic tape, going back to 1944, with Halim El-Dabh (hear also: Leiyla Visitations on UbuWeb, created in 1959).
In the realm of pop music, the 1956 novelty single "The Flying Saucer" was the first break-in record, bringing an emphasis to the "plunder" element in plunderphonics. Dickie Goodman and Bill Buchanan made a single that was inspired by Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds," presented as a radio broadcast with snippets from well-known pop songs of the day [transcript with notes]. 17 record labels tried to sue Goodman and Buchanan, a fate not to dissimilar to later audio borrorwers. To appease various parties, the song was re-recorded with different song samples, where most plunderphonic releases get pulled from general release and disappear into dusty corners.
About two decades after The Flying Saucer, John Oswald was melding the tape manipulations with pop music re-appropriation, as heard in the track Power, sampling the intense guitars of Led Zeppelin and the vocals of a Southern US evangelist decrying that same "Devil music." In 1977, The Residents released a single with a track composed of samples from various songs by The Beatles, along with interview snippets. Plunderphonia had arrived in full.
Oswald released an EP in 1988, with release notes that stated the tracks Pretender (previously) and Spring could be played at any speed to experience different nuances of the songs. The collection was expanded into an album (with NSFW cover art). The "Not For Sale" claims on the covers of the record and CD weren't enough to appease the artists and labels whose work he distorted, so Oswald found himself hiring an attorney, agreeing to a settlement, and giving up copies of his work. Oswald shares a link to the album, with thanks to "an anonymous & remote plunderphile," and you can hear a bunch of them online:
dab (with NSFW cover image at the beginning of the track) | white | dont | pretender | brown | net | birth | pocket | mist | tune | spring | rainbow
In the early 1990s, Oswald was invited to "plunderphonicize" The Grateful Dead by Phil Lesh. He chose to plunder over 100 versions of Dark Star, a song the band had played for a quarter of a century. The result was a 2CD set entitled Grayfolded (auto-playing music; excerpt on YouTube)
Other notable works of plunderphonia include Negativeland's U2, in which the band sampled Casey Casem's rant on the band (previously) in preparation for his coverage of the band on America's Top 40, and was packaged with a very predominant U2 on the cover, and Negativeland in a small font below. Though Negativland dealt extensively with sampled audio, most of their prior works were sourced from more obscure material. But with such material, The Tape-Beatles made an album of minute snippets, and it was an underground hit. It was called Music with Sound (full album on YouTube). The album even garnered a place on the top 10 import albums of the year from Tower Records (the album was originally released in Canada in 1991).
Where most plunderphonic artists started working with tape splices, Christian Marclay started physically splicing and playing vinyl records in the 1970s, creating audio-visual works. Marclay, previously.
Mash-ups were born by the plunderphonicians, Evolution Control Committee, when in 1993, they released a 7" record of Public Enemy a capella tracks over music by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, in their Whipped Cream Mixes (Rebel Without A Pause [official video] and By the Time I Get to Arizona [unofficial video]). Their plundering of Dan Rather's deadpan delivery on various atrocities was mixed with loops of AC/DC tracks was titled Rocked by Rape (official ECC video), which got the attention of lawyers at CBS. By 2003, the legal threats hadn't continued, and Rocked by Rape had been broadcast on NPR and played at a roast for Dan Rather that was aired on C-SPAN.
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