John Oswald: Plexure. On Innovation.

John Oswald’s “Plexure” from 1993 is a plunderphonic album – a collection of sound collages – which lets the listener travel through time on an audible level. It begins with the faintest rewind of several decades in music history through small dips into songs. This generates a feeling of confusion and dissatisfaction because the listener is not granted the full enjoyment of a piece.

Two images sprung into my mind when I listened to “Plexure”: the first catapulted me into my childhood car, where the radio would involuntarily create a plundephone when the antenna would catch glimpses from here and there on the highway or underground garages. It also reminded me of a time when you would have to leave the television on or sit by the radio to listen to your favorite song, unless you could afford to call a radio station to request it. Either way, you would wait expectantly for the song to be played and miss it once you were permitted to listen to it if you were unable to buy a copy. This is where the feeling of dissatisfaction when listening to “Plexure” originates from: Oswald allows the listener to hear and perhaps recognize the most familiar part of a song, but changes the tune before it becomes too memorable. In other words, the changes happen too fast, and thus, the entire composition of which “Plexure” consists is impossible to remember.

The second image is a sequence from a movie which I mentioned in a previous post: in Kill Your Darlings, Ben Foster as William S. Burroughs is intoxicated in a bathtub and talks about narcoanalysis, a process which supposedly discloses oneself to oneself in detail. Drug dependence led Burroughs to find inspiration within himself in real life as well and further explains why he considered his voice essential to his words and beats in his compositions. It also leads to the assumption that by inserting a part of himself, Burroughs created an unfiltered form of art because it is impossible to hide from the audience when the artist becomes a medium within their own art piece. The connection between Burroughs and Oswald is the fact that Oswald was inspired by Burroughs’ cut-up technique and transferred it into the musical sphere. While Burroughs created legible cut-ups, Oswald chose an audible variant; both situate readers and listeners alike in an oneiric state. The exact meanings may differ but the inspiration is the same: to combine sources and create a new whole.

I must admit that the structure of “Plexure” disturbed my thinking and that I could not hold onto a single idea while I listened to it but it is interesting to listen to Oswald’s interpretation of Burroughs’ technique and to contemplate his motifs.