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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.