John Oswald – Plunderphonics: Medleys on speed

 John Oswald, who coined the term “Plunderphonics”, is a Canadian composer. Plunderphonics is the art of music collage, so making new music out by piecing together other musical elements. In contrast to a medley where songs tend to go smoothly over into one another, Oswald just cut them quickly behind each other.

When listening to Oswald’s music, one really must get used to the different sounds. At the beginning it tends to sound like pure chaos of different songs, mashed together, to create a lot of noise. But as you continue to listen, you start to notice all the different elements more and more and it becomes more of a musical “Where is Waldo?” than just pure commotion. The more you listen to it, the more you can make out one single song after the other, but the way it is mashed together, it constantly throws you for a loop when it changes completely from the original piece you know.

John Oswald also calls Plunderphonics Audio-Piracy, because his steals his parts from other artists. Hey says that all different techniques can be Plunderphonics but one must be able to recognize the original piece, even if it was mixed, mashed, chopped apart or recorded backwards. So just the extraction of single sounds to mix together would not fall into this category for him.

A lot of his music is derived from pieces by internationally famous artists, such as Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton and Led Zeppelin. The use of these prominent parts helps to support his idea of being able to recognize the distorted music, as the listener is more likely to know the original song to begin with. This would be a lot harder with less famous sources.

To be frank, I thought at the beginning that I would hate it, but alas, I did not. Somehow, I ended up listening to the whole album while trying to figure out how many songs from it I recognized. The way you never really know what will happen next in the song, even if you know the original made it much more interesting to listen to than I though. Also, compared to a lot of the other piece I listened to during the seminar, here the lyrics were present but not the single element.