para D from Paul Plimley by Paul Plimley

I— One of the things i’d like to clarify about the next piece is the title. This is the same track that has been released a couple of times on eR-R with the title
‘Parade’. Now it’s para d.
O — Which can be pronounced the same, as ‘pear-aid’, or, in Satie’s french, it’s closer to ‘par-odd’. But i also expect it could be pronounced like ‘parody’, which might be a slightly apropos reference to its relation to Satie’s composition; ‘parody’ in the sense of commenting on the original, and not necessarily trying to seem funny. In 1986 i was just beginning to convince myself that plunderphonics could be seen as a distinct genre, and i didn’t quite have the nomenclature together. Choreographer Jennifer Mascall and i created a stage piece which was not a recreation of an historic collaboration, mostly because there was very little information about what the original choreography was. We knew what some of Picasso’s costumes looked like. It was Picasso who said ‘If there is something to steal, I steal it.’
And we had the music. Satie’s score was precisely notated; it has been recorded several times, and there have been modernized arrangements, which replace some of the quaint technological sound effects with their modern equivalents. At the time it seemed like a good opportunity to incorporate a bevy of plunderphonic techniques and other favorite sounds into an anything-goes mélange.
I— It differs from your later plunderphonic works in that it uses sounds, such as the baby, and some guitar and synthesizer parts which are not quotations.
O— We went even further for the initial performance and had the guitarist, Alex Varty play the guitar parts live, and, in a move even more extremely contrary to my nature, at the insistence of the choreographer, i played a bit of saxophone. Thankfully we were in the pit — i have a phobia about seeing musicians onstage in dance pieces.
There’s a remnant of saxophone noise, created on the synclavier by Henry Kaiser, and i’ve flown Alex’s guitar parts to regions in the piece far from where he performed them.
The baby and the little animals and the groaning adolescent are all one and the same person, Cora, who was a month old at the time of the recording. Her burbles are transposed in octaves to create the other characters. Paul Plimley plays some of the more active and demanding keyboard dx synthesizer parts. This is the only time i’ve recorded someone playing one of those things.
As a result of all this added playing, para d seems like a hybrid — part plunder, part... [Rascali Klepitoire]

excerpted from the interview in the '69plunderphonics96' booklet

John Oswald is best known as the the creator of the Plunderphonics genre, an appropriative form of recording studio creation which he began unfolding in the late ’60’s. This got him in trouble with, and also garnered invites from major record labels and musical icons. In the early ’90’s he began, with three commissions from the Kronos Quartet, to compose in what he calls the Rascali Klepitoire.

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