John Oswald is a Canadian composer, saxophonist, media artist, and dancer. Oswald coined the term "plunderphonics" to describe his craft in a paper called "Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative" which he presented at the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto in 1985. Inspired by William S. Burroughs' cut-up technique, Oswald had been devising plunderphonic-style compositions since the late '60s. This collection, utilizing the technique with tracks from Beethoven to the Beatles, was released in 1989 and subsequently banned and burned in Canada.

Experimental Composers is produced by Clocktower Radio and broadcast in partnership with Wave Farm's WGXC 90.7-FM. Writes Clocktower Radio, "Performances from new and established musical innovators. The unfortunate and unintended messages that come attached to a title like Experimental Composers are many. Still it is one of the few labels to come out of the world of music that has not been co-opted by promoters, corporations, journalists, or lawyers. This one just seems to have anti-market goo on it. Hooray. It's also just bad English (as if to imply that these poor souls are themselves, in their flesh and blood, some kind of experiment and, perhaps, even expendable). And then there is the spectre of defying the wisdom of the great Edgar Varèse who said something like, 'I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment."