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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 comprehended when played back and the abrupt cut-offs and mixing of songs back and forth is as if a new song has been made using familiar sounds. Some of the effects that are created due to the backwards re-recording of the songs remind me of Outkast’s works in which a similar effect can be heard in the beginning of their songs Mutron Angel and Ms. Jackson. This has to be due to the rewinding of some sound that had previously been sampled from another source. Some of the rhythms I can hear in their song I can find in Plexure (04:42), even though the songs in this album are played backwards.

This brings to question, however, if this is still blatant plagiarism even if the songs that are used are not the original versions but versions that had been modified by Oswald. The music industry nowadays re-uses a lot of sounds and styles. Sometimes artists add a little originality to it, sometimes they do not, but the songs are still considered to be theirs. If that is the case, even this obvious use of songs from other artists to create an album can be considered an original work if it is made up of samples from different songs and sounds. A similar thing is happening in the music industry after all; originality is almost always based on something else, no matter how small the influence might be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Herzogenrath, Bernd. John Oswald – Plexure [Full Album]. Google Drive, 25 Jan. 2023, https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pvUC9CJEWEXb5K-fcuHujNDcobdOzdl7.

Herzogenrath, Bernd. “Lecture Slides: Oswald – Basinski.” Google Drive – Reader FUTURE OF MUSIC, 25 Jan. 2023, https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pvUC9CJEWEXb5K-fcuHujNDcobdOzdl7?usp=sharing. Accessed 6 Mar. 2023.
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