Wednesday 12th June | 7pm | £5 tickets

Listen Club #14: Chris Cutler: Plunderphonics: Composing with other people’s music.

For centuries music was either composed on paper or with an instrument, and in order to be heard, it had to be performed. But the authors of these pieces neither wrote nor played them; they are all meticulously composed, but performance always precedes composition. Plunderphonic works are often performed by people who are dead, would have refused to have anything to do with one another or never met and never will; you could call it a kind of zombie music - in short, impossible. Yet, it’s so common now you can’t escape it. Listen Club #14 will present some of its milestones, trace the dialectic between art and pop that has driven it from the start and follow it out into the the zone where those distinctions cease to signify.

Chris Cutler wrote the definitive and widely published essay on Plunderphonics.

He is a composer, performer writer and broadcaster. He was in numerous bands, including Henry Cow, Pere Ubu, Gong, Art Bears and Cassiber, and worked with The Residents, as well as in dance, film, Hörspiel, theatre, soundscape, radio and orchestral projects. He runs the independent label ReR Megacorp, had published three books and numerous articles on music, and produces the long-running ‘probes’ podcast for the museum of modern art in Barcelona.