A History of Plunderphonics

I just finished reading Chris Cutler's very nice thoroughgoing article
"A History of Plunderphonics":

<http://www.ccutler.com/>

And as regards the idea of "total importation", I thought I'd point
out a few specific pieces of mine on -- of all places! -- mp3.com:

<http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/628/628825.html>
<http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/628/628838.html>

"The Way I See You Now" and "Blue Carrousel" were specifically
composed back in 1987 with the hopes of finely focusing in on some
very particular aspects of simultaneity and intonation that I had long
been interested in. In this case the method, turntables and
preexisting material, was simply an "unusual" means to a very specific
end: Dynamic manual adaptive retuning on the fly in strict
"quodlibet"!

In this case the specific inhabitants of the composite are there to
open the floodgates on another complex dimension of information that
relates to how different expectations influence end results...

In what sense? Well I remember once reading that the Russian film
director Vsevolod Pudovkin conducted some experiments were he would
film say an expressionless close-up of an actor and then splice that
same shot so that it would follow footage of say a plate of soup, a
young girl lying dead in her coffin, a child at play... He then showed
the finished results to an audience who had to tell what they had
seen. They all noticed how the actor gazed hungrily at the soup, sadly
at the death scene, happily at the child... yet they had all seen the
same impassive face each time...

In the case of these studies for turntable quartet, the malleability
of what one can perceive as a logical, internally consistent narrative
is eased into motion -- if not entirely facilitated -- by the
relative, but not explicit, familiarity of the source material.

So "total importation" here was simply the best way I could think of
to calibrate a very specific set of musical questions.

--d.stearns

<http://stations.mp3s.com/stations/55/117_west_great_western.html>
<http://stations.mp3s.com/stations/40/after_later.html>
<http://stations.mp3s.com/stations/40/microtonal_guitar_2000.html>