John Oswald’s Plunderphonics, or Audio Privacy as a Compositional prerogative doesn’t treat sampling as a technical trick, but as a philosophical problem: when sound can be copied, cut, and replayed endlessly, what does authorship even mean anymore?
Oswald refuses the old distinction between “instrument” and “recording”. A record player in the hands of a scratch DJ is no longer a reproducer – it becomes an instrument. A sampler is no longer a neutral archive – it is a compositional engine. In this sense, plunder phonics is not about stealing records; it is about stealing listening itself and remaking it as music.
This idea resonates strongly with contemporary Chinese internet music cultures. From 土嗨(tu-hai) to 喊麦(Han-mai), from DJ Gurl’s chopped pop and 节奏的奴隶(Slave to the Rhythm) to 头七(you-qi)’s ritualised reuse of old songs, sampling here is rarely about “paying tribute”. It is about reprogramming memory. In plunderphonic practice, sound is not sacred material but more of a social surface. A 1990s Mandarin ballad, once a cliché, becomes ironic. A patriotic melody becomes glitch. A love song becomes noise. The past is remixed into contradiction rather archived.
To me, DJ Gurl’s work is more of pushing the boundary between plunderphonic and remix which somehow polishes and stylises the original but also inferences and breaks its meaning structure. In comparison, the viral trend on Douyin, mixing two iconic, almost memetic tracks together to form a new one, such as Kanye West’s Flashing Lights with Laicai , Jiafei‘s 野花香 with montagemmiau, suits better with the definition of remix.
In a culture of algorithmic sameness, interference becomes political. When every platform demands originality while supplying only templates, plunder phonics exposes a contradiction: that “newness” is often only recombination under corporate permission. The project I did in last year with internet memetic sound ended up more of a remix instead of a parody due to limited technical skills. However, I am inspired by DJ Gurl’s practice of resampling previous work and somehow plunderphonically compose them into a new one. As a result, my work would be the forth processed version of the original tracks- the first one is the original tracks themselves, the second is the remix from Douyin, and the third is my previous project.
