John Oswald - Music Time Capsule

John Oswald, Canadian composer, and media artist was awarded by Canada Council for the Arts, for lifetime achievement. He is famous for his “Plunderphonics”, the project consisted of making new music out of previously existing recordings. He made an experiment with the music itself using popular singers and their works putting everything into one piece of work where he could mix them together and make his music.

Oswald created everything but not “regular” music, he used many parts of recognizable music and artists such as Michel Jackson in order to create completely new sounds. Such a case is “Plexure” combined with hundreds of samples that are not very recognizable at some point. While listening to it, it reminded me of my childhood when we had a radio and tapes, so we were able to record the different songs on one tape and thus make music we liked to listen to. What I find impressive is that the recorded music belongs more to R’n’B, HipHop as well as Techno where people can actually enjoy the bits while their favorite song is probably somewhere out there. It is like a music time capsule where all is presented in a disoriented way so everybody could be able to find themselves and enjoy it. 

However, the interchangeability is so fast that it is quite hard to hear the actual song, although curiosity does not allow you to stop listening to it.  The main goal of “Plexure” is to register the exact time when the music has been recorded, thus creating timeless music.

The result of the composition is extraordinary, unpredictable, yet contemporary. I kept listening to it, wondering about the next single and if I will recognize some of them. “Plexure” is an important piece of work in the history of music for it documented music from a particular point in time.