John Oswald - Plexure

    John Oswald is a composer who likes to experiment with "plunderphonics", or the kind of music that was recorded, chopped and remade to become unusual, yet still somehow recognizable.

     Sheer amount of used materials and intensity makes it almost impossible to listen to “Plexure” the “usual way”. You can’t really hear if you’re trying to listen to it. It’s a disorientating blur, devoid of any traditional dynamics. It is everything that is more like nothing in particular. You need to learn to listen to it on your terms. You need to stop worrying about getting it all at once and relax and then gradually go with the flow.

     The best way I can describe the feeling of the album is taking a radio and rapidly flipping through all the channels, except this album does have a cohesiveness to it. Plexure strikes me as a "belongs in a museum" type of album. Impressive in how it was created, and respectable for being a major foundational release for plunderphonics. While the concept is interesting and maybe even sounds decent on paper, the execution is heavily flawed. What makes up for a not-so-profound statement ends up sounding like mangled musical hairballs that bare little resemblance of charm to their original samples. Even with the purpose of its musical absurdity and abstraction that's being made both audibly in the mini-album's material and visually on the cover art, none of the above descriptors of avant-garde-ism and chaotic frenzy can serve it justice when viewed through the lens of tackiness and very brief relevancy.