As always, I don't read the Zorn digest as it arrives, so I may have missed some of the responses in this thread, but so many folks have ignored the long history of using recordings in electronic music since the post-WWII musique concrete studios in French that it's hard to know where to start. The following are just some of the highlights I can think off the top of my head: Most of the early Pierre Henry & Pierre Shaffer recordings are constructed entirely from recordings of natural sounds, including some recordings of music. James Tenney's " Study #1 (Blue Suede)" and Lawrence (? I could have his first name wrong) Trythall's "Ommagio a Jerry Lee Lewis" were two early (1950s, I think) reconfigurings of pop music using classic tape studio manipulations. David Mahler's King of Angels is a later (mid 1970s) tape technique piece on a different Presley recording. (Mahler also has a Tzadik release called Hearing Voices that's a set of four more recent works, all edited digitally, that are "portraits" of four artists he knew made by manipulating recordings of them talking.) Steve Reich has been mentioned (though I think his recent pieces Different Trains, the Cave and the new triptych work very differently from his early tape pieces like Come Out and are worth a separate kind of listen). Also Terry Riley's The Gift is quite interesting on its own as well as a precursor to the Ostertag Verbatim/Say No More project. There were dozens of other pieces like these made long digital sampling was an idea let alone a possibility. Other pre-sampler work was done by Carl Stone a composer who's been making electronic pieces out of other recordings since the early 1980s. One of his earliest mature works, Sukothai, was made simply with one album bouncing tracks back and forth until he'd dubbed the same thing out of synch with itself 1,028 times. In the mid-1980s, he used a stereo digital delay fed by record players to do collage pieces using classical recordings, Motown songs, field recordings, etc. When that piece of equipment was stolen he went to a (new at the time) MIDI system and continues to make the same kinds of pieces. He's got CDs on many different labels. Many of Alvin Curran's pieces use tape collages and or samples in idiomatic ways. Most of his Tzadik discs have some of this material, as do some of his other recordings. Also in the mid-1980s, guitarist Scott Johnson made several works based on vocal sounds. The tour de force of these works was John Somebody, for tape and instruments. The tape part was edited by hand splicing many hundreds of short sounds (words, laughter, crying, etc) to create the melodic and harmonic basis for the work. He apparently had strings of laughs of various pitches and lengths that he cut together using a razor blade and editing block. Nic Collins has been mentioned for his piece Devil's Music, but several other of his works use previously recorded material as his source. His albums It Was a Dark & Stormy Night & Sound Without Picture have a lot of this kind of work. Bob Ostertag who was also mentioned is perhaps particularly interesting because so little of his work, until quite recently, used commercially available music. For the most part his music is made from recordings he made himself (Sooner or Later may be the strongest of these) or from recordings provided by friends such as Fred Frith and John Zorn (Attention Span includes some of this work). His disc Burns Like Fire begins and ends with Ostertag's own recordings with a particularly striking use of other musical material. Noah Creshevsky is a NY composer who makes work quite different from John Wall's (Creshevsky's work is vaguely more "classical") but in some ways at least uses similar material in similar ways. In terms of the pop stuff that's been mentioned, you don't want to miss out on Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel, which may the first commercially distributed recording of a rap turntable solo piece that's not backing up a vocal (though it uses some earlier recordings by the rappers with whom Flash performed); Steinski's piece with a title something like The Motorcade Drove On is probably also of interest. And, if you want to dig into the history of the pop stuff, don't forget things like Alvin and the Chipmunks and the various fake news recordings with a "reporter" asking a question and getting a song lyric in reply. Some else may have a better memory for a name of one or more of these; they were released throughout the 1960s. And, though this may get me into some trouble, but hey. In terms of use of electronic music tape techniques, Sgt Pepper's use of multi-tracking is MUCH more innovative, more of a technical breakthrough, and much more influential, than something like Revolution #9 which, given what was being done in non-popular music is extremely derivative. For me the distinction that it's the "first" tape collage on a pop album has roughly the same as, say, the first rock songs recorded by Ella Fitzgerald on her Reprise discs. It's great that the Beatles were interested in that kind of work, great that they wanted to expose their audience to it, but within the constellation of the electronic music being done at the time, there'd already been a lot of work that was just as good if not better. If I have time to look around later this week, I may have some other sampled things to suggest. Bests, Herb -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb@eskimo.com