Graham Dunning

The world of turntable experimenters isn’t particularly large, and we tend to gravitate towards one another eventually. I came across Furrowed Sound, aka Dylan Beattie, via instagram fairly recently, and it turned out we had some mutual connections already. In fact, my extended turntable collaborator DJ Food by chance met Dylan through Ebay, and another friend Tom Bench had recently booked him for the Flim Flam night (which me and Sascha had performed at in late 2022). I appreciate these kinds of connections, an entangled web of technology, gigs and shared interests. 

Furrowed Sound is a project which uses lathe cutting – the direct, real-time inscription of sound onto a disk – as a live performance practice. In effect, Dylan can sample live to vinyl, create physical loops on the fly, manipulate the sound by hand in the moment, and change and effect the playback during performance. The practice combines machine precision with human inaccuracy to create abundant opportunities for indeterminate outcomes.

Lathe cutting as creative practice has several precedents. Patrick Feaster’s essay on the often overlooked earliest sound recording experiments, “A Compass of Extraordinary Range”: The Forgotten Origins of Phonomanipulation, describes overcutting of grooves in Edison cylinders amongst other novel uses of the machines. Christian Marclay’s collaboration with Flo Kaufmann, Tabula Rasa, uses a back-and-forth exchange, with Marclay creating sound for Kaufmann to cut, which Marclay then plays back for further iterations. James Kelly’s thesis explored the lathe as a musical instrument, documenting and archiving examples of creative lathe-cuts, and creating new vinyl artefacts with which to record new compositions. Where Furrowed Sound differs is the live cutting and playback of records on a single machine, by the same performer: live sampling and loop creation with a very physical media.

Like me, Dylan is currently in the process of completing a practice-research PhD. He was kind enough to show me his setup and demonstrate the process, and even let me have a go at cutting some sound myself. 

The image shows the setup in action. A very stable platter, itself from a professional record lathe, is turned by an ancillary motor via a rubber belt. The driving motor is a stepper motor from an old printer, controlled with an arduino – this allows for preset speeds to be accessed quickly as well as manual control of pitch shifting. The deck has two tone arms with three headshells: one stereo and one double-mono, based on the The Rake Double Needle by Randal Sanden Jr (as used by Maria Chavez). As the grooves cut to the disks are rarely a regular spiral, the tone arms can be held in position with threads attached to ‘helping hands’ posable arms – in this way they can be forced to stay playing a specific part of the record, whilst also having freedom to jump tracks due to the looseness of the thread. Finally the ‘tattoo gun’, shown being hand-held by Dylan, which is the tracking arm from a hard drive, fed an amplified audio signal. I’m describing the setup in very broad strokes here. This is an intricate and carefully developed project and requires an attention to detail and technical rigour I’m quite astounded by. Cables are balanced, various failsafe measures are in place to mitigate voltage spikes from mechanical pushback of the drivers, vibration is dampened in various ways. 

Recently Dylan has collaborated in live settings with a cellist and trumpet player, and a live-looping vocalist. He also plays solo, using unfiltered tone generators and speech as inputs to the inscription needle. Various options present themselves during live performance. It’s possible to start with a ‘blank groove’, a locked cycle with no vibrational grooves cut into it, then add snippets of sound into and across it. Otherwise, a longer spiral can be inscribed, which the tone arm/s will follow, and end in a looping locked groove. In practice it’s difficult to be precise enough to make a needle loop by hand, so there will often be multiple interlocking spirals, loops, and scribble across parts of the surface – here the indeterminacy comes into play, the playback needles sometimes skating, sometimes holding, jumping in and out of grooves. A sense of rhythm is inherent to the system, like with many looping setups. Dylan demonstrated his skill in writing beats in real time, creating some wonky hip-hop rhythms out of bursts of pink noise. 

My own attempt at cutting to disk was somewhat less elegant. I began with all three playback needles in fixed positions close to the edge of the record. My aim was to add some short pulses of square wave tones, changing in pitch as I progressed, building up something like a random melody. In practice it took much longer than I expected to locate the right position to etch – within a few cycles the pristine disk looked totally ruined with intersecting lines wildly battering the needles around. I did manage to cut some tones to the groove, and explored moving the cutter forwards-and-backwards with the rotation, creating unexpected results: the pitch gave a satisfying vibrato bend, as I’d been going for, but the stereo field was wildly modulated too. I find stereo encoding on vinyl fascinating, and it’s difficult to conceptualise even when you know the technicalities of how it woks. Here I think the changing angle of the cutter was causing variation across the speakers, and it added a wide and complex stereo oscillation which wasn’t present at all with the head in a fixed position.

I found the visit incredibly inspiring;  from a technical perspective and through discussing some theory, but also down to Dylan’s enthusiasm for the project and generosity in sharing his ideas and process. Needless to say an exchange visit is on the cards, and we may even consider some collaboration in future. You can read more about Furrowed Sound on the website.