plexures by plunderphonics

released September 5, 2022

A complete sample list would prove difficult to construct for Oswald's 1993 release Plexure, constructed from several thousand samples of popular music from 1982 to 1992:  the decade when popular music inexorably transitioned from analog to digital production and playback.  The piece is one long accelerando, all samples placed on the timeline from slowest to fastest, with several extended interludes extending the textures from individual songs.  Though the mind often needs less than half a second of a song to identify a source, as the genres fly by faster than one can count, any differences between individual expressions melt into a continuum, collapsing an entire decade of music into something made of more than just people.
Oswald has continued work on Plexure since its initial release in 1993, adding samples, layers and textures that render each year’s revision into substantially different pieces.
On the surface, pop music seems be all about self-expression and individuality — but all hit songs, regardless of genre, sound like the decade in which they were produced. There are unbreakable rules to be followed, and a message in the uniformity by which these songs are engineered: the sounds in songs need to be just novel enough to mark the moment, they need to sound expensive enough to be distinguished, and any approach that works instantly profilerates across the pop charts. If one were to cut away all the speech, the structures, and leave nothing but those sounds, maybe you’d be able to hear what’s really going on with all of this unavoidably popular music.
One thing suggested by pop music is that recordings and music are the exact same thing. From the beginnings of jazz, the rise of Popular music as a meaningful category is inextricable from the technology of recording, but a recording isn’t music until it’s played. ‘Plexure’ is an overview of the first decade of remix culture going mainstream, where sounds became so plastic and malleable that only transformed noises seemed real. Sounds are never finished, they’re kept alive by being played in new ways. There’s so much going on in ‘Plexure’ that it reminds you that every recording sounds different every time you play it — that’s the secret thing about recordings. They only become music when you play them yourself.
The original 1993 version might have seemed almost overwhelmingly ‘finished’, a terminus point in the sample-density overload being reached by other collage artists, but it was only the first in a number of versions that exist of this piece, the number of layers building up vertically into new relationships with each passing year. The 1996 version is radically different from the 2001 version, where by 2009, the complexity reaches such symphonic levels that one can no longer hope of hearing the crisp transitions of the original. The attempt to finally realize a finished masterpiece — the prismatic torrent of variations on the original idea — is exactly why this thing is a masterpiece. This bandcamp release of course is offering a new version for 2024, but it’s only the tip; the real grail will be the session’s stem files, each one already containing more music than your average box set. There’s only music you haven’t heard yet.
—Jon "Wobbly" Leidecker