John Oswald - Plexure  - Structured Chaos

The first few seconds are an introduction to what is about to follow in that song: A mixture of songs, artists and genres. While a big percentage of the song is created by only playing very short snippets of different songs and by also speeding them up, some snippets are a little longer. For some short ones, listeners recognize certain parts of them but before they can grasp the source, the snippet switches to another one. Oswald uses a lot of very famous and recognizable parts like Michael Jackson's famous shout or Madonna's wildly known voice. I could recognize many snippets from Michael Jackson's music because that is what I am very familiar with. 

I like the parts, where the snippets are played a little bit longer and are thus more fun to listen to as one can actually just rest for a moment. In between there were also units of guitar playings without voice, and because that seemed less chaotic, it was more enjoyable for me, too. 

In the middle of the song it seemed as if the tape was suddenly not working correctly because there was a lot of static noise played and right after that, there were were repetitions of one and the same songs. This made the song sound as if it was broken or as if it was rewinded in order to be "properly" played from the beginning. This part specifically and the following snippets of music from my childhood and before, made me remember the days when I would play a tape-recording and once it was finished, I would rewind it. This rewinding always took quite some time and I would hear the each song being rewinded. That is exactly what the middle part of "Plexure" reminds me of. 

I also recognized a lot of pop-music by Madonna and other artists of that time. Around at minute 14 Madonna is played for a few seconds, but the snippet is slowed down before it then changes into faster snippets from various artists again. Within the mix the genres are also switching back and forth, so the listener gets to hear to Pop music, Rock-Music and also more Country like songs. This is a very fun combination because one perceies so much input at the same time that it is nearly impossible to process all of it. Whenever I get to that conclusion, the longer snippets appear and give me a short break from tracing all the input. 
Since the piece is over 20 minutes long and there is a great variation of artists, songs and genre, the process of creating this song must have been very long. Even in a time of more advanced technology, cutting all the snippets and placing it at a specific place in the song takes a lot of work. Before that, the artist has to choose all the songs that should be included into the mixtape first and while cutting them and putting them together, although they might appear very random there is a clear structure behind each snippet. The snippet units need to fit together, like various snippets that only have guitar sounds/solos. Similiarly, Oswald had to keep the speed of each song/snippet in mind and combine it with either similiar ones to create unity or to contrast it by combining ones that have a very different speed. There are many more different factors that he had to keep in mind and thus a chaotic mixtape like "Plexure", which first seems very banal, is suddenly a very complex piece.