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vane

from ELEKTRAX by plunderphonics

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about

Then' vane', following 'anon', is based on the Carly Simon song. Her version and [a cover by] Faster Pussycat are interleaved in various ways. The two arrangements were more or less in tune and in the same key, but they were in very different tempi, and the wonky rhythms that result from going back and forth between the two versions is, i think, the endearing characteristic of this particular plunderphonic. When i wanted the two to sing in unison i would cut a little bit out of each phoneme in Carly’s line so she would sing faster.
This is the same technique that happens at the end of 'pretender', and it also was first applied in several octaves at the end of 'para d', to effect a supercharged orchestra.
But most of the time, lines like ‘you had me seven years ago when i was quite naive’ were designed with these two tempi alternating in loping fashion, which, when applied to the Pussycat rendition of ‘you took me hot to perform one thigh’, sounds like a strutting rock star with one leg shorter than the other.
The composition of 'vane' is multifaceted. The back/forwards treatment of the opening lyric is something i originally used in the early ‘70’s in the burrows selection ‘sliding between light and shadow’ in which a phrase spoken forwards is gradually atomized and rearranged into its backwards order while each little bit is still forwards, as opposed to truly backwards — ah, after all these years i still find it confusing to describe. You heard William Burroughs speak the phrase ‘sliding between light and shadow’; then you heard him say ‘and light between sliding’ which is merely edited so the words are in a backwards order; and then i chop the words into smaller bits and put those into a backwards order; and then chopped again and so on, until i had little bits of recording tape 1∕8th of an inch wide, so at the 15 ips tape speed each therefore contained about ten milliseconds of sound time, and each of these played from past to future; but they were all arranged in that backwards sense which we were hearing at the time in the Exorcist movie. It was backwards talking with a forwards texture.
One thing i could do with this effect was to flip the tape around so you would have forwards speaking with a backwards texture. And that’s what’s happening in 'vane' when Carly seems to be singing ‘you walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht’ with a curious speech impediment. There’s also a very coarse kind of gender switching in the line ‘you had me seven years ago...’, which is alternating words sung by Carly and the Faster Pussycat singer, which i think of as approximately an aural representation of the photo collage of Carly and Jim Morrison, which became the frontispiece of the 'elektrax' CD. The components are still individually intact and recognizable, but there’s an androgenic affect.

lyrics

‘you took me hot to perform one thigh’

credits

from ELEKTRAX, released October 31, 1990
anagrammatically sung by Sonic Mylar & Erastus Spyfact

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plunderphonics Antarctica

plunderphonics is the genre title coined by John Oswald to 'cover the counter-covert world of converted sound and retrofitted music, where collective melodic memories of the familiar are mined and rehabilitated to a new life. The blatant borrowings of the privateers of sound are a class distinct from common sample pocketing, parroting, and tune thievery.' ... more

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