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Listening Report- John Oswald’s “Pleasure”

 

John Oswald was one of the major exponents of the “Appropriation art”, whose purpose was to make art profitable for everyone, so that everybody could produce and take advantage of artistic creations to assemble new productions.

This kind of new art was highly defended by Oswald, who thought that art should have been available for everybody for artistic purposes and that’s exactly what he did when he released his most ambitious composition Pleasure in 1993. This piece was put together through the cut-up method, that consist of montaging songs in a certain order.

Pleasure is a 20-minute collage of songs, characterized by a bewildering complexity. This piece is extremely complex and fast: I felt like I had agreed to go on a journey through time and I’d gone inside a time machine that goes incredibly fast. This time machine quickly transports me into a space-time tunnel filled with songs from a decade, which I know but can hardly recognize: it feels like taking a full musical trip from the 80's in fast forward. Although it can sound confused, I find that there’s a funky beat in the background that makes this composition really interesting and avant-garde, in fact it reminded me of some kinds of remixes that I used to listen when I was younger, that were so enjoyable.

Anyway it deals with a composition that opened the doors for other millions of artists and DJs in the field of remixes and music collages, that are even nowadays very popular.

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