John Oswald: Plexure – A Journey Through Music

John Oswald’s “Plexure” is part of the plunderphonic approach. Plunderphonics is a contemporary approach which uses certain sonic quotes that already exist and modifies them in terms of, for example, speed or playing them backwards. However, it is important that the original source is still recognizable. 

Listening to Oswald’s “Plexure” for the first time was quite challenging for me since I was constantly trying to figure out which song was being played at the moment. Since the time span for each song was always really short, this was kind of difficult and I could not figure out most of the songs. I also realized that I had to resist the need to figure out the songs in order to admit to the piece as a whole and to perceive it as music instead of a guessing game. However, this exercise was difficult, because I feel like there is a natural mechanism of the brain to try to figure out everything we might have seen or heard before. Therefore, it felt natural for me to try to guess each song, but I always noticed my thoughts wandering away into completely other directions. Therefore, I consequently had to remind myself to focus on the piece as a form of music. Moreover, the piece is about 20 minutes long which made this even more difficult.

The beginning of the piece fascinated me because on the one hand it sounded like a movie intro and raised my interest, but on the other hand it sounded unnatural and somehow terrifying at the same time. Once this short intro is over, the listener directly gets thrown into the plunderphonic approach of the piece which was overwhelming for me at first. The first thought that came to my mind was that it sounded like skipping through different radio programs really fast trying to find the correct one. One can hear snippets of different songs changing immediately after hearing them for the first time. The range of different genres is huge and everything is combined with each other so that completely different images and correlations are created. Some of those combinations felt like they would fit well but others were rather irritating and chaotic for me.

I think I have never experienced so many different genres, styles, rhythms and forms of music at once which was quite an interesting experience for me. This showed me how diverse music actually is and that there are so many possibilities to create music. All in all, I would probably not listen to the piece in my free time since the fast switches are rather stressful for me. However, it was interesting for me to listen to it as a form of art and felt like a journey though music of the 80s and 90s.