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.
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