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Oswald

 John Oswald

Plexure

I just played 20 minutes of “guess the song“ in my head! It was very funny and frustrating at the same time when something sounded familiar and I thought I noticed a song but it was already gone within that second. For me, this piece of music was just a random combination of snippets of popular or less popular songs; and I don’t necessarily find this a bad thing. I was kinda fun listening to it. The genres varied immensely; I think I heard pop, country, and some rock? Very likely even more. The songs were very mixed though and I think some of them were sped up or slowed down, some were louder and some more quiet, and I assume that some songs were even played backwards, at least it sounded like that. As nothing really “fits“, my dad would’ve probably made a joke about the record player being broken or something.

            I like the idea of sampling and I was always a fan of musicians that sampled their own song with an older, sometimes forgotten songs. I would argue that sampling is a great way to dig out some old forgotten bangers and make them popular again in a “modern“ way. Sampling is especially popular in the German rap industry right now. A lot of German rappers use popular choruses of American songs to spice up their hit. And it works!

            However, what Oswald did here does not sound like classic sampling. It was just all over the place and made me pretty nervous. I asked myself the question how Oswald got this idea and why he created this album the way he did. Sometimes when I heard something familiar between all of these short snippets I got kinda upset that he did not play them longer. I really wanted to hear the whole song then. But I guess that is not Oswald’s philosophy. I found it impressive that although it was all mixed through and changed up quite a bit, some songs were still recognizable and I guess that that attracts and that is what makes people want to listen to the album.

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