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Listening Report: John Oswald – Plexure

John Oswald’s “Plexure” was published in 1993 and contains a mixture of audio snippets of famous songs.

The composition starts with a sound that can be seen as a resemblance of an explosion, followed by silence and a slow increase of sounds entering the composition. This process reminded me as a listener of the Big Bang, caused by a sudden explosion and the slow creation of life. At the beginning, it is hard to distinguish whether the composer used snippets of one song or snippets of several song. However, it is clearly noticeable that the sounds are played in reverse, which can be associated to time travel with the listener traveling through various eras of music. However, due to the random, achronological placement of genres throughout the composition, the listener can also perceive the composition as a compilation of music of the present.

Shortly after, a lot of snippets from the Hip-Hop genre were used. The length of the snippets vary, making it difficult for the listener to concentrate on each snippet. The difficulty to focus on one snippet, the lack of rhythm, the randomized repetition of some snippets, and the sudden changes to different genres throughout the composition caused me as a listener to perceive the composition as very chaotic. Consequently, the composition could be seen as a parody of the songs or genres used, which is reinforced by a heavy contrast of genre at many changes of snippets.

There is also an attempt to create some sort of rhythm by repeating sentences, utterances, or very short snippets of sounds. However, this attempt is not being followed until the end of the composition.

By using snippets of different genres that are getting shorter to the point where the snippets only consist of small sounds, the density of snippets increase towards the end of the composition. By looking at the beginning of the composition as the beginning of life with the Big Bang, the end of the composition can be seen as an approach towards a Big Bang which causes life to get denser until it reaches singularity.
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