John Oswald’s "Plexure" - A sonic scavenger hunt

After the familiar sounds and harmonies of minimalist avantgarde, I was not prepared for the meal Oswald served. Of course, sampling and mashups play a major role in today’s music, bringing along all kinds of judicial and ideological discussions. Where is the line between homage and appropriation? Where does copyright start and end? A whole song, a line of lyrics, a melody, a single note? So how ‘avantgarde’ can the art of sampling actually become? As it turns out, much more than I had expected.

Oswald call his way of sampling musical recordings ‘Plunderphonics.’ His modus operandi is to cut the recording down to sound pieces and form a sound collage. Instead of using the sampled sounds as a backdrop to new and extended musical experiences, as it usually happens in hip-hop and electronic music such as British big beat, the sampled material is the sole source. Early Plunderphonics of the 1980s concentrate on reworking a single piece of music, but Plexure took a more ambitious path.

Oswald released Plexure in 1993. It is a 20 minute collage of the history of CD music up to that point, so roughly a decade of music. The fractions that Oswald splices the songs into barely last longer than a fraction of a second, apart from some recognizable parts used in their entire length, such as a scream, a reverberating guitar chord or a drum pattern. There are no further manipulations to the sounds such as alterations of pitch, the overall song structure is created by a dense layering of sound snippets.   From the sheer amount of work that was put into the composition, Plexure seems to be unparalleled within the avantgarde music covered in the seminar. One can only imagine how many hours it took Oswald to cut and reassemble everything, especially with the help of a computer.

When we listened to Plexure in class, even though I tried to make out an ‘overall narrative,’ my mind always resorted back to the idea of discovering as many familiar snippets as possible. I found it hard to listen without actively recognizing and eventually discovered that my brain ‘knew’ a song much faster than I could name it. The piece stands on its own as an incredible achievement in sonic artistry and is a gripping one-time listen, but ‘connecting the dots’ by finding more and more weird connections (such as Eurythmics’ “There Must Be An Angel” followed by Slayer’s “Angel of Death,” which might not even be an angelic coincidence) on subsequent playthroughs in a fun way of engaging with it.