plunderPHILe from Phil's Fills by Phil Strong

In 1992, at the behest and commission of John Zorn, i conceived of, and for the next six months put together Plexure [which will appear in a new version on bandcamp in the near future]. Phil was along for much of the ride. i had gathered excerpts from somewhere near a thousand songs and tunes, and desired to have these assembled in order from the slowest to fastest. There was a printed directory available to DJs that listed BPMs for many popular tracks, but it was often inaccurate and not precise enough for our purposes, so Phil often measured these visually by selecting a bar of the digital waveform and noting its physical length. The result was a long stereo file of bar-by-bar juxtapositions, from which i folded and bounced neighbouring electroquotes on 4 tracks (i.e 2 parallel stereo tracks) to create a large portion of the 19’19” long composition. I subsequently frequently returned to a progressively abridged version of Phil’s accelerando track, which 17 years later was finally released on LP as prePlex. 
While Phil was originally assembling the first version of that track, he also put together a performable plunderphonic of some of the sources from the Plexure era, including a particular favourite of his, Thomas Dolby’s Blinded by Science. This composition, which i gave the title plunderPHILe, was featured on a CD accompanying the Plunderphonia issue of Musicworks Magazine (#60 Fall 1994).
Phil performed the piece to a live audience only once (that i know of) in 1997 at a festival in Toronto entitled Plunderpalooza. David Bowie was in town, and attended a performance, allegedly because he said he wished to meet me (we never met) the night Phil and i took turns between other acts playing short pieces on a small keyboard hooked up to an off-stage sampler. Bowie missed my bits but did catch Phil’s performance of plunderPHILe.
The track here is a slightly re-arranged and abridged variation of the Musicworks version.

• Canada