prePlex from plexure '24 by plunderphonics

more video slices @ https://www.youtube.com/@plunderphonics/playlists

Plexure is constructed entirely from brief fragments cloned from thousands of mostly pop recordings from 1982 1992, the first decade of the compact disc era. Most of the album is built on a structure that begins with the slowest songs from that time (mostly ballads and blues), and proceeds gradually to the fastest (bluegrass and speed metal).
One of the first steps in making Plexure was to arrange hundreds and hundreds of tracks of source material in order from the slowest to the fastest. Most of this work was done by Phil Strong, who in a time before BPM catalogs existed, measured waveforms and arranged bars of music both by eye and by ear. The original bar of each song version of proPlex was about 33 minutes long. A lot of this material was folded into the subsequent structure of Plexure,
Oswald found the relative simplicity of prePlex beguiling. But he thought there were parts that worked and parts that didn't. He wished he could hear a version that in some way swung all the way through, And so he re edited it, throwing out a lot of material. Phil Strong also took another stab at it,
But each time Oswald listened to the piece he ended up making adjustments. He couldn't listen to the thing right through without stopping the playback to change something
This process continued, very sporadically for over ten years. Other aficionados, particularly Wobbly aka Jon Leidecker, made suggestions.
In early 2006 Donna Summer aka Jason rorrest re-edited the piece a Uttle bit. Oswald incorporated a couple of his variations, but continued to work on adding to and subtracting from the composition, making changes with every replay ('the most insistently [or 'incessantly'] demanding piece I've ever worked on, he was heard to say)
Then, finally, more recently, he began playing back prePlex all the way through without stopping; and after a few minor adjustments, he decided it was working like accelerating clockwork, and ready to be heard by the
world
So now you also can try to listen to prePlex all the way through without stopping…

plunderphonics is the genre title coined by John Oswald to 'cover the counter-covert world of converted sound and retrofitted music, where collective melodic memories of the familiar are mined and rehabilitated to a new life. The blatant borrowings of the privateers of sound are a class distinct from common sample pocketing, parroting, and tune thievery.'

plunderphonics.com