Preplexed
May 1st, 2008 Posted in music
Ever wanted to hear around 1000 bars of 80s-90s pop arranged in increasing tempo for 18 minutes? Well today is your lucky day! Just have a clicky over here. As the quoted quote puts it:
Imagine playing “name that tune” at 5 times the speed of your ears’ ability to recognize familiar sounds.
This all comes out of a piece called “Plexure” which was put together by a guy called John Oswald in which he strung together all of these snippets into a coherent whole. That ended up getting released in 1993. However, part of his process was to arrange all of samples together in BPM order, and he apparently always kind of liked the acceleration and rawness of that library. This is the edited version of it, tweaked so that it makes aural sense.
I love it, in spite of (or perhaps because of) it sounding slightly like having an epileptic fit while tuning the radio. It’s interesting how when songs you know appear it suddenly sounds more jagged. Your brain is completely amazing at recognizing pieces of music, but the time it take you to consciously work out what you are listening to is way longer than the samples in that piece last for, which I think makes it feel particularly weird when you hit a bunch you recognize.
