plexure from plexure '24 by plunderphonics

version 3 may day

the following is an excerpt from a turn of the century interview with Oswald by Norm Igma:

o—Plexure is another angle on plunderphonics altogether. In this case i'm once again an outsider: no one is inviting me or permitting me to do this. In Plexure i'm not picking on a singular performer. I'm scanning a whole genre. And i'm not providing references to all sources, for two main reasons: one: pop is so rarely original that a reference is usually a subreference to some antecedent which is in turn... somewhat infinitely.

i—But there are a finite number of quotations in the piece. You've said there are about a thousand.

o—There are approximately a thousand songs being referred to. There are several thousand morphs; each with reference to a composite of pop hooks. These are based on correspondent similarities among various pieces. The reference game is potentially an infinite genealogy. Plexure-bits are references. Each source fragment has been blended with other similar fragments. The spectre of appropriation amongst the quoted material is rampant in these aggregates. Perhaps this is a practical fail-safe mechanism. Any perceived infringement is embedded in the proof of its dire lack of originality.
So, anyway, what you hear are not strict electroquotations. In fact there are some hand-drawn waveforms in there, which are like tracings of a sound.

i—How do you do that?

o—A sonic snapshot of a sound can be reproduced as a printout of an intensity-by-time graph. These are like 2 single-line worms across the page (the left and right components of a stereo image). These drawings can be placed on a tablet-like surface. .A waveform can be traced accurately, or transformed in some aspect by a pen which has a function similar to the more conventional computer mouse. The waveform can be made sharper or smoother — harmonics, for instance, can be given a different emphasis. This type of coloring is not integral to the compositional intent of Plexure, but it was an early way of attempting sonic-image transformation. It's a method which is only practical for very brief durations of sound. Initially i drew a hyperrealistic image of a sung word, sort of a Chuck Close-like sonogram, just for the satisfaction of having done it. This was before i got Larry Polansky's Spectral Mutation function (3) which enables something analogous to the sort of visual morphing you see in motion pictures in which there is a transformation which convolutes between a recognizable initial image and a recognizable final image. So there are at least a thousand songs being directly referred to. Although in preparing a database for Plexure i directly cloned about 12 hours of fragments of commercial pop CDs, each a few seconds long, these exact facsimiles have gone through the sender bender blender by the time they get to the end listener.

i—So instead of Bruce Springsteen you get Bing Stingspreen...

o—Yes, a fictional frankenstein-like assemblage of raw parts. These credits concocted of plunderphonies are, by-the-way, a further red herring; so you won't find anyone related to, for instance, Mariane Faith No Morrisey on the track of Plexure which is thusly credited.
With this constant morphing going on you hear pop music in a constant upheaval of novelty, which is contrary to the way pop music is usually presented. Most pop music is about 70 to 90% redundancy. All the information in your typical pop song can be packed into less than 1/2 a minute. Although the average pop song has increased in length from 2 to 4 minutes over the last couple of decades, that doesn't mean you get twice as much information. There are just more repeats of the same information. Plexure has low fat content — very little redundancy and lots of hooks, each one an attractive musical entity.
This brings up the question of value of information in music. The cost of a CD, unlike many computer programs is not dependent on production costs. A CD which had an initial recording budget of $50. will cost a consumer in a store approximately the same amount as a Michael Jackson CD with a $5,000,000. production budget. Also a CD with a few variations of a few loops played over and over, will cost approximately the same as a recording of a hundred people in a symphony orchestra playing thousands of notes, which in some cases is then pieced together with a thousand edits. The price is flat, independent of the production costs. The price only varies dramatically according to format (single, EP, or album, or reissue) which in all cases can be provided on exactly the same 5 inch disc. The manufacturing costs are the same.
Any attempt at standardizing a sample clearance rate would, i suppose, necessarily consider how long the sample is and how often it is repeated. It should also (but probably won't) consider the depth of the mix. Something plexure-like could be a sample concentrate — it would be much denser and info-rich than another piece where someone talks over one repeating loop. So far, concentrated music has not been demonstrably marketable as an acceptably pricey item, like concentrated detergent. I'm surprised when people complain that the Plexure disc is only twenty minutes long, given how much happens in that 20 minutes. It's music concentrate (12 songs, 24 subtracks, a thousand references, thousands of hooks) in which the prominence of any particular reference is diluted.

i—How do you define a hook?

o—Any point in music in which you feel like you've arrived at a place of relief or well-being or familiarity or all of these. A place like home. I'm not an avid radio, jukebox, disco or MTV listener but there are often bits of these songs which will immediately, psychoacoustically meld with my nervous system. The reason may be melodic, timbral, rhythmic, textual, dramatic, or even just temporal, but the hooks are where the hits hit. My referent at Billboard magazine has a tendency to utter the cliché "there's a reason you can hear why each of these songs became hits." I think its true. Each really successful song, above and beyond marketing insinuation, has sonic viral elements, or hooks, which get inside you and stay there and become part of you. The virus is emotionally-laden information. When you hear one of these elements again you get emotionally engaged and your body sings along so even if some sociologically-oriented part of your mind is saying "i hate this song", your body will ecstatically sing along with Debby Boone in "You Light Up My Life".

i—The word 'plexure' is a relatively archaic term for weaving.

o—From the latin 'plexura': a plaiting or weaving together. "An intruding rose has stolen a nest among the plexures of the vine."(4) And it also is a homonymic graft of 'pleasure' and 'texture' as in "plexually seizing". The word has more recently been used in a renegade tangent by a new age philosopher named Zindell to mean "the ability to see knowledge as through different lenses"(5); but i just recently heard about this nonsense. It has nothing to do with my use nor the traditional meaning of the term.

i—It could be construed as referring to how different listeners will hear Plexure differently.

o—I think it's more interesting to consider similarities in the habits of listeners based on a common background of exposure to the sources and some basis of bias to these pop sounds. The major distinction among listeners is degree of recognition. Some people have listened to more pop music than others and some of them have a greater degree of reconnaissance-confirmation than others. Jim O'Rourke for instance says he can identify 340 sources (although i have yet to see his proof of this). I can't identify this many from unaided listening, and neither can Phil Strong who categorized all the song fragments for the tempo map. Everyone who has listened to the first version seems to recognize and identify at least one source. I've consequently made the most often recognized references more obscure in subsequent versions. This positive I.D. function is somewhat independent of recognition overload, which seems to happen to almost everybody. This is a state of recognition without the ability to identify or put a name on something, which is immediately superseded by further recognitions which in a sense mask the previous memory tendril by writing over one's short-term mnemonics. This is the nagging riddle flavor which constitutes the nature of the piece.
Anyway, getting back to plunderphonic viability strategies, the facetious one for Plexure is that it's got everyone in pop music on it so no one act should consider themselves the focus of appropriation. No one is being particularly quoted because everyone is being referentially treated. Plexure is a crowd shot, or let's say a panoramic view. You can't see the trees at this resolution for looking at the forest. The boundary of this forest is the first decade of the CD era, 1982-92, from a Euro-American dominant perspective, which is the way it is in pop music, 'pop' being defined as music that is popular. Beethoven is pop music and cool-period Miles Davis is pop music, and both of these are pop music on CD in the eighties, and both Elvis and the Doors were million-sellers in '92; but i've limited the scan to music generated during that decade, so the piece will eventually have a period flavor, although when i was first working on it, some of the sources were absolutely current, and nothing sounded really old, even though some songs were released prior to '82; i included them if they didn't remind me of the '70's — if they were in a sense still percolating through the fads of current musical culture in '82.

i—So what is the definition of 80's pop?

o—Oh, i have no idea. There were a variety of tangents and a few marriages of hitherto disparate streams, like funk and metal, but categorizing any period would be too much of a generalization; and categorizing any particular example is something i've found difficult to do. Phil and i thought about trying to tag each song to keep track of what we had, but i for one couldn't do it. In a record store the categories are all based on race, gender, and geopolitical distinctions, none of which describe the music. A black man in Jamaica might produce a reggae tune, but so might a white woman in Finland. For a while almost everyone did at least one quasi-reggae tune, but other non-rhythmic influences would make all this reggae less than homogeneous.
What i find i do in trying to organize relationships is to make a hypertextual web. One selected song might be related to another in its anomalous use of flute as a soloing instrument which has a melodic shape similar to another song in which the singer affects the mannerisms of the singer of another popular song which is in a particular tempo pocket.
Tempo in the end became the pervasive organizing element. Very little of the music from this period was tempo nebulous, or in free time. So we could measure tempo as an absolute rational value which we could apply to all the pieces. At worst there would be a choice of a tempo harmonic — a doubling or halving of the sense of the beat, depending on what rhythmic element was pushing forward in the mix to establish the pulse; and there was the odd piece that wasn't in 4/4 which wouldn't fit comfortably in our rhythm continuum, but given the overall parameters of selection, tempo was a useful organizing device which eventually became the prime structural factor.

i—Why have you continued to work on Plexure?

o—1992 has come and gone. When i first worked on Plexure it felt like i was doing something contemporary. Most of the plunderphonic work has an historical perspective. Now, even though it's only 3 or 4 years later, Plexure has an historical perspective too. Also, the selection process back in '92 was a bit too arbitrary: i found all the material on CDs from a friendly alternative radio station and a friendly used record store. I knew there were some very apparent hits that i didn't have examples of, but given the wealth of material i had that didn't feel like a problem. My historical perspective is that now it does feel like a problem, and so i've done a much more thorough search for a couple of hundred pieces which i missed the first time around which according to my statistics of sales, international charting, and my personal hook meter, are essential. The great thing about the most magnetic songs is that i need much less of their essence to make their presence be suspected in the mix, than i would require of less popular items. And of course this additional material is what is being used to mask/morph those quotes which have been persistently too obvious. Plexure in a way is like a garden which i'm now weeding. In the past i always considered that through my recordings i was attempting to create masterpieces — in other words pieces which would not need to change; their existence would set an historical precedence, and any further modification would undermine their effectiveness. Listeners might change but there is no need for the composition to change. Plexure has such a complex relationship with listeners, including myself, that i haven't yet been able to pin down its masterpiece potential. I may be misguided in thinking that adding to its comprehensiveness is going to help, but, whatever the outcome, i enjoy weeding the garden.

i—So the weeds are the recognizable electroquotes?

o—Exactly, especially if its viability as a marketable item is to be considered in the equation. That's the nice practical consequence to the prime concern of maintaining the threshold of recognition.

Tracklist

2.	plexure	18:01

Credits

from plexure '24, released May 3, 2024

License

CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.