Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

William Basinski – The Disintegration Loops III

  The Disintegration Loops is a quartet of albums published in 2002 and 2003 by American avant-garde composer William Basinski. The pieces are made up of tape loop recordings that were played over time, with noise and crackles rising as the tape deteriorated. Basinski noticed this effect when attempting to convert his older recordings to digital format. The completion of the recordings coincided with the September 11, 2001 events, which Basinski witnessed and adds a deeper meaning to the composition. The composition is fascinating in many ways and makes the listener lose track of time. The tape loop recording had a very calming effect on me and put me in a trance-like state when I listened to it in its entirety. The tape loop is really soothing, so much so that I didn't even notice the loss of quality when I first listened to it. It makes you forget about time and allows you to really get into the piece capturing the calmness it exudes. You forget or don't really notice how i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pierre Schaeffer - Étude pathétique

  Pierre Schaefer begins the piece with sounds produced by drums and similar percussion instruments. One hears the sound of an object spinning and then coming to a stop. I assume it is a circular object, like a cymbal or hi-hat of a drum kit, that spins until it comes to a stop. Sounds of a locomotive follow, continuing with a mixture of drums and spinning objects as well as voices. There are slight parallels here with another piece by Schaeffer, "etude aux chemins de fer," in which he has the musical piece consist of sounds of trains and locomotives. I also recognize an accordion and a violin playing rapidly, accompanied by human sounds that are not really decipherable. By combining all these background sounds and using human voices, Schaeffer creates an exciting atmosphere while listening to the piece, and the listener's auditory senses are constantly challenged to decipher all the details of the sounds. At times one could be reminded of a scene from a scary movie, at l...
Post a Comment
Read more

Listening Report on John Oswald: Plexure

 Sarah Kumar Dr. Bernd Herzogenrath The Future of (American) Music 06 Mar. 2023 Listening Report on John Oswald: Plexure According to John Oswald, “[a] plunderphone is a recognizable sonic quote, using the actual sound of something familiar which has already been recorded” (Lecture Slides 18). However, only if the source stays recognizable can it be called plunderphonics. In his album Plexure , several songs are played back and mixed together, thus creating a new sound. This is interesting because while the excerpts of songs that are used are recognizable or at least sound familiar to some degree, played backwards and mashed up as they are in Plexure , they create a new sound. Like on the cover of the album, on which a collage making up a man can be seen, the mixing of different songs played backwards gives a new feeling to something known. The way the songs are mixed makes them unintelligible. The meaning of the words of the original recordings are not able to be compr...
Post a Comment
Read more