John Oswald’s Plunderphonics - Dab (1989) and Plexure (1993)

Listening to John Oswald’s Plexure is one of the most disorienting musical experiences a listener could have. It is essentially the musical equivalent of a seizure, with its in-your-face maximalism. It is hard to say whether Plexure is enjoyable, but it is, ironically, highly ‘original’.

Before I listened to Plexure, I listened to Dab, Oswald’s ‘reworking’ of Michael Jackson’s Bad. Dab is, undoubtedly, a much easier listen since Oswald experiments with only one song. With Dab, the cut-and-paste method (reportedly inspired by William S. Burroughs) that Oswald uses changes the structure, but it is easy to identify the portions of Bad amidst the cuts. The effect of listening to Dab only made me want to listen to Bad again.

With Plexure, Oswald takes this concept that he calls Plunderphonics to another level. He works with hundreds of songs, cutting and pasting, looping and manipulating the samples in a multitude of ways. Released in 1993, Plexure is, in a way, a history of English music of the 80s and early 90s.

In an interview with Wired magazine in 1995, Oswald stated that he wanted to explore “the threshold of recognizability”. With Plexure, Oswald challenges our natural biological instinct to instantly try to guess a familiar sound. But, I think, Plexure doesn’t just play with this sense of familiarity, it also challenges the listener's perception of music. When I was listening to it, I often felt that the pieces were rather long but in actuality, none of them is over 2 minutes. During my first listen, after about the 5th or 6th piece, I found my attention span drifting. What began as an aural assault somehow morphed into background noise, like changing radio stations or TV channels.

My first reaction to Plexure was to naturally try to identify the samples used, which are numerous. Oswald combines many genres - from heavy metal to R&B and Jack swing. The first piece, Open, begins with a sample of a spaceship launch as if Oswald is warning the user of what is to come. The piece then dives straight into its frantic “tempo” (though it does not have what could be described as a tempo). It was hard to identify many samples, although I did hear bits of Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and Whitney Houston.

From Open, Oswald increases the pace of the samples. With each song, the samples become shorter and increasingly unidentifiable. The first 4 to 5 songs are easier to listen to. Manifold, for instance, begins quietly before transitioning to Edie Brickell’s What I Am, which is cut and interspersed with other songs such as Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These), with the piece ending with U2’s With or Without You. Cyfer is the closest to an actual song, using a single sample looped over with a few cuts.

One of the most interesting songs that stood out to me was Worse. I think Oswald intended it to be a sequel to Dab, with its title being a clever joke and most importantly, the very prominent Michael Jackson sample dominating the piece. The titles of the pieces in Plexure are very interesting; Massive is exemplified by heavy metal samples. The final piece, Velocity, runs at a very fast "tempo", with quick and short cuts that eventually become unrecognisable to the listener.

In the Wired interview, Oswald said, “There are so many points of initiation that the sense of familiarity is confounding - your memory gets morphed.” For a composer who triggered a big debate about originality (and copyright) and whether his Plunderphonics can be rightly described as original, I think his mission to challenge the listener’s perception is ultimately what gives it originality. It is one of the most extraordinary pieces of music produced and Oswald's skills in recording and mixing samples are technically astounding. Even if it is not conventionally listenable, Plunderphonics' and - by extension - Plexure's aim to rightly challenge the way we think and hear music makes it simply beautiful.