Pitchfork

Is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family? Maybe. Is it wrong to steal a slice from every bakery in the neighborhood to feed your starving family? Probably not. Theft always seems more excusable when the scope is large and the magnitude is small. I mean, what are you going to do with a slice of bread, anyhow? You're not even stealing it as much as you are... sampling it. But where is the line drawn? When have you taken a big enough chunk of that bread that you can't eat it for free without the cops banging on your door? Somewhere between sampling and stealing lies Plunderphonics.

Like Amon Tobin and the Avalanches, John Oswald makes music second-hand. But rather than using the traditional, totally played-out instruments-playing-notes approach, Oswald has made a name for himself chopping up massive chunks of some of the most popular music ever made into entertaining, amusing, and occasionally brilliant reconstructed songs. 69 Plunderphonics 96 is a double-disc retrospective of Oswald's work to date, containing 60 tracks of cut-up craziness that puts forth the concept of his Plunderphonics project in all its flawed glory.

Though the music has been heavily circulated on bootlegs and MP3s for years, and long-since earned "legendary" status, most of it has never seen official release, since the licensing fees would be extraordinarily expensive. So, after years of in-limbo impossibility, Negativland, known for their own brash disregard for copyright laws, "stole" the project from Oswald and released it in deluxe packaging with an incredibly detailed booklet. We're not sure of the legality of any of this, but no one has issued a subpoena yet.

One of the great things about Plunderphonics as a concept is that it works on so many different levels. There's the simplest, "hey, that sounds pretty damned cool" level. A Viking frozen in time for 1000 years could appreciate some of the tape-splicing masterwork of Plunderphonics without having any frame of reference. (Especially the plundering.) And at its best, Plunderphonics embodies all the playfulness and overall sonic coolness of expert DJ scratching, minus the wicky-wicky. Bits and pieces of pop songs build into massive, terrifying swells of sound, and the source of the sound almost ceases to be relevant. This is good.

While parts of 69 Plunderphonics 96 are immensely fun to listen to, other parts are just as much fun to analyze. "Btls," the first track on the retrospective, begins with the resonating final chord of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life," a beautifully blasphemous way to open up an album that pays little heed to any kind of musical convention. As if that weren't enough, the opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night" is then layered directly over that famous final chord of "A Day in the Life," resulting in a chord that sounds like utter dissonance, but makes perfect sense from a logistical standpoint. This is the musical equivalent of painting big flirty eyelashes on a picture of Jesus Christ. And it rocks.

Clocking in at just under a minute, "Btls" is more of a one-off statement than a fully developed piece of music. "Power," the first full-length track on the compilation, starts a fascinating retrospective on a rather sour note. Consisting of a radio sermon by Brother Shamrock layered over some mildly altered Led Zeppelin riffs, "Power" does sound pretty cool-- but that coolness stems more from the choice of source material than from the way it's manipulated.

"Power" is indicative of one of the only real problems facing Plunderphonics: at times, Oswald seems to content to let the source material speak for itself. Just chopping up a piece of music into three-second chunks and looping them doesn't always cut it. Anyone with a tape deck and a pair of scissors can make a Plunderphonics piece that sounds like a fucked-up copy of the original.

But John Oswald isn't just anybody with a tape deck and a pair of scissors. "Madmod" showcases Oswald's amazing talent for manipulating songs as a whole better than perhaps any other track here. Building from bits and pieces of a good deal of Madonna's catalog, Oswald constructs from miniscule tape loops a gorgeous, overpowering wall of sound, interrupted occasionally by unadulterated snippets of her songs. It's gorgeous and it's hilarious, oftentimes concurrently.

And therein lies the true brilliance of Plunderphonics. As the name implies, Oswald is often able to dive into a popular recording-- from Michael Jackson to the Doors-- strip its defining characteristics, and turn it into something all his own. The end result embodies many of the characteristics of the original piece, but is imbued with qualities that are often completely contradictory to its nature. While Oswald's music does sometimes seem to be too content resting on concept rather than execution, 69 Plunderphonics 96 is an excellent document of some of the most original, unoriginal music ever made.