John Oswald presents the Plunderphonic Coveralls at Electric Eclectics 2025

This August 1–3, 2025, John Oswald—legendary Canadian composer and the mind behind “Plunderphonics”—will take the stage at Electric Eclectics in Meaford, Ontario, presenting the Plunderphonic Coveralls: a live, irreverent deconstruction of familiar sounds and musical history. For those who follow experimental music in Canada, John Oswald and the Irreverent Art of Plunderphonics and his presence at this festival is more than a performance; it’s a living chapter in the ongoing story of how we listen, borrow, and invent.

Dicovering “Plunderphonics”

What is “Plunderphonics”?

John Oswald defines plunderphonics as “the act of taking familiar music and altering it into something new.” He first came up with the term in 1985. 

“Plunderphonics is the granddaddy of sampling, remixes, mashups and other derivative techniques,” he writes. Before that, one of his first plunderphonic projects was BURROWS (1974-75). You can explore more of his work, and his official record company for Plunderphonics, Mystery Tapes, and other audible ventures, at Fony Records. For videos, check out the official Plunderphonics YouTube channel. Oswald also has a unique site, 6Q.com, and a visual projects site, Observia.

Permission vs. Free

Questions of permission linger over Oswald’s work, which is never about hiding sources, but about making them visible. As David Gans wrote in Wired, “On John Oswald’s Plunderphonic CD, Dolly Parton’s voice slows to that of an operatic tenor – aural sex change, the artist calls it. The bombast of Beethoven’s Seventh blares like a bronco in the chute, Count Basie’s ‘Corner Pocket’ twists in a kaleidoscope of sound, fragments of James Brown’s voice slip from Public Enemy recordings. And in the pièce de résistance, Michael Jackson squeaks out a version of ‘Bad’ like a kid on nitrous.” (Wired, Feb 1, 1995)

Oswald never set out to profit from the inspiration of others. The Plunderphonic CD was distributed free of charge to radio stations, libraries, musicians, and critics, never for sale. Yet, the industry’s response was swift: legal threats, the destruction of remaining copies, and a settlement that required Oswald to hand over his master tapes to be crushed. As Gans puts it, these were “analog attorneys, apparently: no one on the complainant side of the equation seems to know that, for all practical purposes, every copy still in circulation is an exact copy of the ‘master tape.’”

Participation and ownership

Oswald himself reflected, “I started off as a listener, but like most kids, I had a short attention span. I couldn’t comprehend the structural pretenses of classical music: in the sonata form, the exposition and development would stretch on for several minutes, and by the time the recapitulation arrived, I would have capitulated.” (Wired, Feb 1, 1995) Over time, Oswald made himself into an “active” listener, playing records at different speeds, manipulating and dissecting existing sounds. He said, “I’d play 33-1/3 rpm LPs of classical music at 78 rpm, and – lo and behold – the structure would come into focus in an aural version of an overview.” (Wired, Feb 1, 1995)

Oswald scrupulously credits the creators of all the material used in his plunderphonic releases. In 1989, Oswald collected his experiments and pressed a thousand copies of the Plunderphonic CD, which he distributed free of charge. He then asked the musical question, How can we be sure the “original” artist, whose wishes are sacrosanct, did not derive anything from any other source? According to Oswald’s reading of US and Canadian copyright law, and some lawyers’ interpretations, Oswald had thought that by not selling Plunderphonic works, he was legally in the clear. “I was fairly confident that what I was doing was not breaking the law, but I got a threatening letter from some record-industry lawyers saying that they considered what I was doing illegal,” Oswald recalls.

For more, check out reFUSE  – a musical movie in progress.

John Oswald and the Irreverent Art of Plunderphonics: Challenging how we listen

Appropriation or derivation?

John Oswald and the Irreverent Art of Plunderphonics challenges how we listen to music. David Toop, on the inner sleeve of the Plunderphonic EP, notes the lack (until very recently) of fossilized sound for study by audio archaeologists. He also asks some of the questions about ownership of sound that John Oswald has brought to the foreground. Toop concludes, “When you buy music, you get ‘the privilege of ignoring the artist’s intentions. You can take two copies of the same record, run through them with an electric drill, warp them on the stove, fill the grooves with fine sand and play them off-center and out of phase half-speed on twin turntables through a Fender Vibro Champ amplifier with the vibrato on maximum and the volume on 11.'”

As Gans writes, “By freely appropriating sound from the vast sea of information that surrounds us, and by taking pains to acknowledge that he is doing so, John Oswald is making explicit what is often ignored or obscured in the highly derivative world of mass-marketed culture.” (Wired, Feb 1, 1995) Gans continues, “The music industry traffics heavily in familiarity but values what it considers uniqueness: it’s the nature of the game, if you’re a recording artist, to come up with something that sounds enough like everything else to get the attention of a record company or radio programmer but is just different enough to be copyrighted.” (Wired, Feb 1, 1995)

David Gans sums up his argument by saying that “Everything old gets to be new again and again, as the Stray Cats, Harry Connick Jr., and any number of kids with granny glasses and Rickenbackers have demonstrated over and over and over.” (Wired, Feb 1, 1995)

Spurring public discourse

That same year, Elektra Records hired him to work his twisted magic on a few of the company’s greatest records, as an adjunct to the label’s 40th anniversary collection, Rubiyat, which featured covers of classic Elektra cuts by current Elektra acts, which is another form of plunder.

His subversive CD was a roaring success. It forced important legal and moral issues into the public discourse, and it made Oswald’s reputation. The Kronos Quartet commissioned Oswald to create a piece for its 1993 album Short Stories. Oswald spent a day in the studio with the musicians, collecting a vocabulary of expressions. A piece of the avant-garde, Fellow Kronos composer and producer John Zorn commissioned Oswald to create Plexure for his Avant label.

John Oswald’s Plunderphonic CD was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Heritage Prize (September 2016).

John Oswald and the Irreverent Art of Plunderphonics : Listen differently

By freely appropriating sound and taking pains to acknowledge that he is doing so, Oswald makes explicit what is often ignored in mass-marketed culture. He invites us all to listen differently, to hear the familiar as strange, and the strange as familiar. In Oswald’s hands, listening itself becomes a form of composition, and the boundaries between artist, listener, and source dissolve into the music itself.

If you find yourself in Meaford this August, you’ll have the chance to witness Oswald’s sonic sleight-of-hand in person—a rare opportunity to see a living legend at work, and perhaps to ask yourself, as so many have before: “Did he have permission to do this?” And does it really matter?