Canadian composer John Oswald composed, or perhaps we should say assembled, Plunderphonics in 1989 from digital samples of an enormously wide range of recorded music. Because most of Oswald’s material was under copyright to someone else, the collection was not released commercially. Record company lawyers obtained an injunction to stop circulation of Plunderphonics, but bootleg copies remain pervasive. You can read a surprisingly good discussion of John Oswald and his works on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Oswald_(composer).

Here are Oswald’s notes on Plunderphonics and on the two cuts in the syllabus:

The plunderphonic CD (never-for-sale, remaining stocks destroyed by Michael Jackson & CBS) became an underground cult classic. The realistic cover photo of a nude Michael Jackson revealed as a white woman paralleled the musical transformations depicted on the disc. Other electroquoted artists included Bing Crosby, The Beatles, Glenn Gould, Public Enemy & (consequently) James Brown. The samples Oswald used to create these pieces were studiously footnoted with all due credit given to the source artists. The disk was not sold but distributed freely to radio stations, libraries, critics and musicians. Despite this approach, prudes in the “Recording Industry” representing Michael Jackson destroyed the remaining copies and prohibited Oswald from distributing or reproducing the CD.

20. SPRING: The first part of this Stravinsky number is played by a big orchestral sampler conducted by a computer. The second part is played by, in effect, 4 record players synchronized at different speeds from slow to very fast.

14. BIRTH is a sampled portion of the Beatle tune “Birthday” played by four improvising computers.