DIY styluses for playing mangled-up records
I was asked recently for some advice about turntable styluses for playing broken and mangled records. Flo from Plattenbau Kru – who use stickers, scratches, cracks and breaks to modify their vinyl – said the ‘project is using up A LOT’, as might be expected. Offering a couple of suggestions led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, thinking about how people use alternatives to standard cartridges and needles to generate different effects.
Flo mentioned John Cage’s cactus stylus, which is something of a legend. In fact I’m not aware of him using it to play back records (though I could be wrong). There is some great footage of Cage playing the cactus as an instrument, and I believe that the amplification is provided via turntable cartridges (as opposed to contact mics as might be expected nowadays). A similar approach – replacing the needle in the cartridge with different material – is used by Andrea Borghi to play stone and marble disks. Borghi uses a piece of wire, with a physical twist and a fork like a snake’s tongue (as pictured on the front page of his website), to enable him to read the rough textures of the different materials, creating crackling and ever-changing textural soundbeds. Certain of his other compositions use close-miked crackling fires and other parallel pointillist sounds. Recently doing the rounds online have been clips of Leonel Vasquez’ Canto Rodado sculptures: rotating stacks of rocks with acoustically amplified scraping styluses, creating multi-pitched drones with some textural clattering. I can’t quite tell whether there’s some digital augmentation to the sound too, the output is so smooth and melodious.
Records can really be used to vibrate or activate any material that’s small enough to fit in the groove and light enough to be moved by it. It’s particularly satisfying to listen to a record acoustically via a paper cup with a pin attached to the bottom of it. Michael Ridge has used a plastic bank note to play sounds acoustically (amongst loads of great noise experiments on his youtube channel). One of my favourite explorations of acoustic activation is by Sseeaan Rroowwee, who uses screwed up balls of paper on a pair of decks, like in this live set. The sharp corners can contact the records at multiple points, generating sound from different parts of the record at the same time. Multiple balls of paper can create an extremely quiet cacophony, many tinny sounds playing concurrently. Physically manipulating the paper changes the contact points and hence the grooves – it’s an incredibly subtle and engaging performance. At the other extreme of multiple, changing points of contact is Evicshen’s stylus glove – fingernails made from styluses which provide a direct and tactile interface with her cast and modified disks.
An invaluable resource for turntable experimentation is the catalogue to the Broken Music exhibition in 1989, edited by Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier. A quick glance through brought up Laurie Anderson’s turntable violin with stylus bow (a precursor to her perhaps better known tape bow violin); Joseph Beuys’ 1958 Stummes Grammophon (with a bone in place of the tone arm) and 1969/81 untitled gramophone with an amplified sausage attached to the soundbox; and details from pieces by Mauricio Kagel’s works including a dining fork and a sharp metal finger attachment being used to play records.
My own solution to playing mangled and abrasive records has been to use contact mics attached to a headshell, with screw mounts for different materials. There’s a similarity with gramophone needle attachments, which has reminded me that for acoustic shellac record players, alternative materials could be used to change the tone and volume of the playback. Steel gramophone needles are available in different loudnesses (presumably relating to the stiffness of the material) and sometimes bamboo needles were used for quieter playback. With my own headshell I’ve generally used cocktail sticks, kebab skewers, wire, springs, and plastic strimmer-blade line.
Most recently I wanted to play back a ‘tone’ record with lots of raised stickers on it, so didn’t want something that would damage the disk – fishing line proved very effective and also solved the difficult issue of making both sides of the stylus the exact same length to make contact with the record at the same time.
There’s lots more to say about alternative styluses, so this might be the first in a series of posts. And that’s before considering alternatives to turntables, alternatives to records, and other ways to read inscriptions by tracing a line.
Broken vinyl, record crackle and turntable contraptions in films and TV
Record players and other audio technology often crop up in feature films. My favourite examples are those when they’re essential to the plot. Like the secretly-taped confession at the end of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil – a small portable tape recorder being somewhat of a rarity in 1958. Or the lathe cutting / record skipping plotline in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (different in the book and the film), written when recording your voice to disk was a novelty accessible on the pier for a few pence.
One example I found particularly intriguing recently was watching It’s A Wonderful Life over Christmas. Somehow I’d never got round to watching it before. In a scene towards the end, the lead couple set up a romantic scene in a derelict house with no electricity: a portable wind- up gramophone is used to turn a chicken on a spit in front of a wood fire. As someone so invested in extending the mechanical capacity of turntables through silly mechanisms I nearly jumped out of my seat. There’s a nice record-smashing scene earlier in the film too. I’ve had a half-hearted idea of documenting such instances for a while, not for any specific research purpose but more as a fun side project. The first instance of this sort that set off the idea was a scene in the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly. In an act of bullying coercion, a copy of a Caruso shellac record is snapped in two. “That’s a collector’s item,” the villain states before breaking it. I mentioned these both on Mastodon in December and was helpfully pointed to this lovely web1.0 page, Phonographs in the Movies: Movies with phonograph scenes and machines. As is often the case on the internet, someone else got there first – their list doesn’t include the Caruso snap though. I never got round to such a formal and organised list, but might highlight a few examples on here as and when they come up.
I don’t go to the cinema particularly often but both of the most recent films I’ve seen have had very minor turntable errors, which I don’t think most people would notice, but I couldn’t help but pick up on. I’m not relating these here in a smugfaced ‘continuity spotter’ mode, more to highlight instances of old technology used as a signifier without the filmmakers minding too much whether they were using them properly – I think it’s quite an interesting phenomenon. (One of my favourite vintage audio gear youtubers Techmoan mentions some examples in a recent video too) Getting it Back: The Story of Cymande was a brilliant portrait of the black British funk band that were shunned at home, broke big in the US, were forgotten for years before being rediscovered through play at early New York loft parties and copious sampling on various hip-hop tracks. I genuinely enjoyed the film, but the b-roll footage of a close-up cheapo Crosley turntable used as an apparent zoom shot of someone playing a record on a 1210 irked me. I also finally got round to seeing Openheimer this week. Early on in the film is a closeup of a gramophone platter in action – which is spinning in the wrong direction. I wondered whether there was some allusion to turning back time (putting the genie back in the bottle?) but it didn’t seem a deliberate move in context with the rest of the film.
David Lynch makes use of vinyl several times in Twin Peaks. Audrey Horne dancing to the jukebox in the Double R Diner. The repeating record in Jacques Renault’s cabin in the woods, “where there’s always music in the air.” And the awful scene in the Palmer house where Leyland attacks Maddie – soundtracked by the runout groove of the record. Another subcategory of the broader ‘turntables on the screen’ umbrella is the use of record crackle as sinister sound effect. Often signifying the inevitable, the relentless advancing of the timeline to an inevitable conclusion, we know it’s unstoppable. It’s like a ticking clock, an endless countdown and a repeating cycle. Bjork’s Scatterheart from the soundtrack to Dancer in the Dark follows in the aftermath of another upsetting and violent scene, with record crackle underpinning the tragic song as the rhythm.
I’ve come to the end of the examples I had listed now, but don’t really want to end the post on such a miserable note. Perhaps also worth mentioning the various physical media artefacts represented in Minecraft. ‘Music discs’ look a lot like vinyl records, and are playable in craftable jukeboxes. The records are usually found in loot chests in various structures out in the world. Most are whole discs but there’s a broken one to collect too. The introduction of the Deep Dark biome in Minecraft 1.19 was particularly of interest to me: shards of broken records could be uncovered from beneath the earth, and pieced together again to form a unique, playable music disc. As someone who did basically the same thing for an artist residency in 2010 – excavating broken shellac pieces from an industrial site and setting them back together into a new record – I was over the moon.
Studio Visit: Furrowed Sound’s live vinyl tattooing
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.
February’s radio show – tracks in focus
My radio show Fractal Meat on a Spongy Bone used to be fortnightly, live and in-person. Some guests either to play live or have a chat with, and a selection of tracks which I’d usually introduce and occasionally give a bit of info about. With experimental music it often helps to have a bit of context. Chaotic clattering is all well and good, but it can hold more intrigue if you know it’s a recording of a sound installation, or a location recording, or a live set or whatever. I switched to pre-recording a few years ago. For a while I kept the track intros in, but after a while that lapsed, in part because it doesn’t feel the same editing intros into a prerecording, as opposed to doing it all live. And to my ear always sounded a bit forced. This new blog feels like a nice platform to reintroduce some of that contextual information. The full tracklist for tonight’s show is on the show blog here, and you’ll be able to listen to the archive soon via this page. Below, some info about a few of the pieces in particular.
Renata Roman – Imensa
On their track from the Amazon Reimagined release, the Brazilian artist uses calm electronic tones and single piano notes alongside a soundbed of rainforest sounds: hissing insects, numerous birdcalls and other unidentifiable creatures. There’s a clear distinction between the played instruments and the field recordings. Whilst the latter have been edited and at points layered, they don’t appear to be processed much. The bandcamp page describes the project in a bit more detail: the sounds were recorded several years previously, between 2006 and 2011, in different areas of the Amazonian rainforest, and by several different people. I find this kind of time- and space-dilation appealing, bringing together potentially disparate sources into one imaginary soundscape. Steve Roden has used the term ‘possible landscape’ to describe his compositions1, which feels appropriate here. It’s a speculative soundscape, perhaps a snapshot of something that never really existed, which feels tragic with the knowledge of current and ongoing deforrestation.
Minimal Tears – Passing Back Into Light
Nadine Smith’s recent article about the changing way the major label music industry has embraced sampling gave me food for thought on the extent to which sampling as a process can be considered subversive. Most electronic musicians I know wouldn’t generally seek clearance for samples – the turnover is so low that most releases are likely to go under the radar, and in a scene where almost every break, synth sound or drum machine voice is already familiar, and part of what characterises certain genres, sampling feels like the raw material that makes up most of the music anyway. If sampling as appropriation without permission isn’t the straightforwardly political act it once was, perhaps sampling can work to build scenes and strengthen communities.
Maya Bouldry-Morrison (aka Octo Octa)’s Minimal Tears project is refreshing as it actively invites remixing, sampling and reuse – with explicit permission. The front page states clearly: ‘There is no copyright on this audio. Every part of it can be taken, used, edited, released, etc all without credit!’ In fact the release is under the CC0 Creative Commons licence, meaning the work is effectively in the public domain. There are complete tracks, their stems, and a collection of free samples to use too. The tunes are varied in genre, including synth-based ambient music, deep house and some with an electro feel. I chose one of the more abstract pieces for the radio show as it fit better with the rest of the stuff I wanted to include. The project continues to the positive and encouraging work both Maya and her partner Eris Drew do through their label T4T LUV NRG – check the main page for free pdfs of DJ tips, a guide to setting up a home studio, and a downloadable zine on grooveboxes.
Shirley Pegna, Emma Welton, Paul Whitty – Double-bass with Vibrating Soil
This kind of ‘does what it says on the tin’ track title is often my favourite kind of thing to include in the radio mixes. It’s a short track in comparison to the other pieces on the release, which feel more like straight up field recordings. On listening through, it’s still not entirely clear how the soil was deployed, or indeed whether there is a double bass involved at all – the liner notes on the bandcamp page list the instrumentation used as violin, field recording, objects, glass, and transducers. The title, and the release’s cover image, suggest to me a playful exploration of sound, literally out in the field.
Stephan von Huene – Totem Tone #4
Pipe organs are fascinating machines. I was lucky enough this weekend to witness a brilliant rendition of some baroque pieces on the free-to-use pipe organ at London Bridge station. Part of the joy for me is the deep, rich sub bass they can generate – I often daydream about how awe inspiring it would have been to hear such a thing hundreds of years ago, way before electronic sound reproduction.
Stephan von Huhne’s Totum Tones sculptures were built between 1969 and 1970. Each consists of a number of large, square-section organ pipes on a plinth containing an air supply and control mechanism. This recording of “Totem Tone #4”, from a 1975 LP, was made at the Vancouver Art Gallery – judging from the images on the sleeve, a large white cube space. The music itself has a lot of character. The tempo varies and the rhythm patterns don’t feel robotic, almost as though the pipes are being worked by a human player. Dispute the information on the artist’s website, including some closer images and (slightly vague) descriptions of the mechanisms, I couldn’t work out exactly what’s happening. There are sections where the pipes begin to overblow, and what sound like beat-notes at times – again, characteristics which I’d associate with nuanced human playing rather than programmed control.
Michael Ridge – Mutant Flexi Cut-Up #2
Another self-descriptive piece, here Michael uses cutup felix-disks recorded to dictaphone cassettes, for double grunge noisy clatter. We’ve been in touch online for a few years, having some crossover in our turntable practice, and general lo-fi / hardware hacking stuff. I’m hoping we can meet in person at the weekend, as he’s due to play a show at Hundred Years Gallery (London) on Saturday evening. [Edit – no he’s not! turns out the gig is actually 24th March, not February. Hopefully can catch him next time.] One of the other things I miss now I’m pre-recording the radio show is to be able to preview and promote gigs and things happening locally. This show is organised by Mouth In Foot, who had asked if I’d give the gig a mention. I can’t find it on the venue website yet but will be heading down – a lineup of turntablists and tape manglers, including Michael Ridge and Eggblood.
Brötzmann / Bennink – Schwarzwaldfahrt Nr. 1
A different approach to combining live instrumentation and environmental sound, here Peter Brötzmann and Han Bennink duel on wind instruments in the Black Forest. This release has been on my mind recently as I was co-writing a paper about the way improvisation works when using a system with unpredictable elements. Considering the environment itself within the ‘performance ecosystem’2 as a contributing factor not just to the sounds captured on the recording but also as something the players might respond to or be influenced by. Here the saxophonists appear to be moving around the woods, their cries becoming increasingly birdlike, fading with distance and giving way to more delicate birdsong from the local species. I’ve been lucky enough to visit the Black Forest several times, on tour and an artist residency, in Sankt Georgen im Schwarzwald, which is also home to the German national phonography museum. It’s quite uncanny how evocative the sonic space feels listening to these recordings from nearly fifty years ago – the particular reverberance that seems coloured by the canopy and the floor thick with pine needles.
Chloë Sobek – Thrall
Michael-Jon Mizra – Framework
One of my favourite recent compilations, LOLTRAX001, I’ve played tracks from it in the last few episodes – this tape keeps on giving. Diverse approaches to computer music with live coding featuring heavily. Both of these pieces include drones and glitchy click-crackles, both feel equally futuristic and sort of biological.
As this selection perhaps illustrates, I don’t generally program the radio show by theme or genre, but there do tend to be threads that connect many of the tracks. I enjoy including audio that might not otherwise get much airplay, or listening time, so particularly the sound installations. I enjoy playing very recent stuff and try to feature new releases amongst older pieces and material by more established artists. Hopefully it’s of interest to read a bit more about some of the work.3
- Steve Roden ‘what are you doing with your music?’ in Brian Marley & Mark Wastell (editors): Blocks of consciousness and the unbroken continuum, 2005. ↩︎
- Simon Waters – ‘Performance ecosystems: ecological approaches to musical interaction’ in EMS: Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (2007): 1-20. ↩︎
- I wasn’t planning to be rigorous about referencing etc on the blog, as it’s here mainly for me to practice at writing and hopefully get quicker and more confident with it. But it feels necessary when mentioning specific concepts like these, and again it might come in useful to someone reading. ↩︎
How a venue sustains communities
Living in London sometimes I feel spoilt by the amount of music, art and performance on offer. It’s often more a case of choosing what you have to miss out on than struggling to find good things to see. There are loads of venues that support experimental and electronic music of different shapes and sizes, from international touring artists to local free improv linchpins to wild DIY noise. One venue hosted all of the above, and has been central to various scenes for a decade. But sadly, Iklectik Art Lab, at its home near Waterloo anyway, closed its doors for the last time at the start of 2024. The former hospital building on the edge of parkland has gone the way of many before it and been sold off for development. Despite a well supported petition and even requests to the Tory cabinet, which at one stage seemed promising, the site owners refused to renew any of the businesses’ leases, and the land will now be unoccupied and unused until development begins.
Undaunted, Isa and Edouard have big plans to set up a new Art Lab, and are crowdfunding for their first six months’ rent on a new space, plus soundproofing and other setup costs. If you can spare a bit of money, even a few pounds, the crowdfunder page is here. The new project sounds really ambitious and exciting, so I hope they can make their (equally ambitious) target – they’re currently ⅔ of the way there which is a good sign.
Iklectik really felt like a central hub for various interconnected groups or scenes of experimental music. Longstanding events, sometimes based around a concept, other times around a group of people, which found a home at the venue and built a community around them. As well as advertising the crowdfunder I wanted to talk a bit about some of my favourites.
Apologies in Advance is Tom White’s event series, with the explicit aim to give artists a platform to try new ideas, take risks and push their work. Although some of the shows happened at other venues, Iklectik felt like the series’ home base. I took students from my old Experimental Sound Art evening class to one edition in 2018, including many people who had never been to any sort of experimental music gig before. A huge highlight was Lia Mazzari & Sholto Dolbie’s set which took place outside the building, the artists behind a fence just inside the neighbouring park. Sholto moved air pumps around blowing reed pipes, whilst Lia made sharp cracks with a whip, the sounds ricocheting off the neighbouring buildings. With a minimal turntable set from Hannah Dargavel-Leafe, featuring field recordings from aboard a ship from her Fore Main Mizzen release, and a chaotic, noisy collage-improv set from I DM THEFT ABLE, stopping off on an international tour, it’s fair to say that minds were blown. The students got loads from the event and it really showed in the work they made later in the course. Seeing artists taking risks and exploring new ideas in a positive and receptive setting really set the students up to confidently push themselves too.
Boundary Condition is an ambitious audiovisual event ran by Alaa Yussry, aka Cerpintxt. With some events running all day, the lineups were often huge, ranging from film screenings and live soundtracks to improv sets, live electronics and dancefloor focused stuff. As such the event reflects Alaa’s own interests and approaches, and indeed she often performed at the night. Again, as a prolific promoter, she programmes shows at various other venues, but the large and bright projector with its full-wall resolution, plus the full surround soundsystem gave lots of options for AV works to be presented in a great context. An edition I attended in 2023 featured performances by nine artists including: the premiere of a film shot in remote settlements in Tajikistan by Carlos Casas, live soundtracked by Cerpintxt (who also did a completely different collaboration with pianist Rueben Sonnoli later); a chaotic improvising electronic quartet Infinite Monkeys, whose all-round-the-table setup felt like a surreal conference meeting; and Robin The Fog‘s live set as Howlround, coaxing drones, screams and throbbing bass rhythms from old BBC tape machines.
Hackoustic is a showcase of instrument makers, hardware hackers, installation artists and other musical experimenters, brought together by Tom Fox and Tim Yates. Another event series which very much feels like a community, it’s not unusual to see previous presenters amongst the audience. Hackoutik feels like the sort of event which has the capacity to facilitate real-world meeting of people from an otherwise fairly online scene. As a maker it can sometimes feel quite isolating putting together a project. The hours spent in the workshop are usually alone, compared to, say, a band working on new material. Using the instrument at a gig, or exhibiting an installation, or whatever, doesn’t always afford the opportunity to share the thinking behind the work and connect with people in that way. We’re all busy squirrelling away in our workshops and chatting online but rarely meet in person. I’ve been pleasantly surprised several times to see familiar faces at the events. Arlene Burnett came down from Birmingham to show her sound-generating plants modular system; Gordon Charlton presented his compositions based on sonifying various mathematical formulae. Both people I’ve encountered over the years but not been in regular contact with, lovely to see them again in London.
This post is getting somewhat long now so I’m not going to go into too much more. I wanted to talk about The Horse improvised music club, Robin’s annual Fog Fest, Club Integral, Exploding Cinema, Sonic Garden… the list goes on. Not to mention all the labels who launch releases at Iklectik, events by affiliated uni courses, one-off shows by promoters like Baba Yaga’s Hut, and all the in-house events too. On a personal level Iklectik has meant a great deal to me. In the spirit of the above nights I’ve tried loads of new ideas and debuted new projects at Iklectik, including:
— playing halflife with all the sounds replaced with rave samples (for Apologies in Advance) [video]
— turntable and electronics duo with Cath Roberts (for Overtones & Undertones) [video]
— modified turntable duel with DJ Food (for Fog Fest) [video]
And loads more.
It’s really sad, then, that Iklectik has closed its doors for good at the Waterloo space. But hopefully Isa and Eduard can move on to bigger and better things and continue to maintain the various communities they’ve worked so hard for. If you can, please contribute a few quid to their crowdfund.
Quietly launching
Over the last couple of years I’ve made various attempts at reducing my tendency towards doomscrolling. I left both facebook and twitter in part due to the negative impact it had on my wellbeing, and the inability to mitigate the constant feed of frustrating and upsetting political articles. At one point I switched to reading actual news sites instead, without feeling any better.
Looking for something less miserable to read in moments of downtime I initially tried the reddit app and a joined a few subreddits related to my interests – starting quite broadly with music, climbing, specific TV programmes and computer games, and fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. I quickly tired of the (often quite depressing) chat on the techno and electronic music production boards. Outside of my old twitter echochamber – musicians and producers I liked and mostly knew, quite a diverse bunch and generally pretty right on – the wider electronic music community on reddit was blokey, entitled and often argumentative. Bouldering subreddits were usually too technical and dry. There are only so many Half-Life memes I want to read on a daily basis. So I eventually gravitated towards the D&D boards, finally narrowing down to one of the DM forums. A good balance of in-depth answers to obscure questions about lore; agony aunt style threads on problem players and how to deal with out-of-game social interactions; and useful tips for running a game. As with many things on the internet nowadays, and this may be a topic I return to, enshittificaion reared its ugly head. Changes to the back end of reddit meant moderators’ jobs would become exponentially more time consuming, and various boards were set to private, essentially going on strike to protest the profit-driven changes negatively affecting the communities.
I spent some time working though daily crosswords, and had a bit of a self improvement drive on duolingo, before deciding to try an older approach to sourcing bite-sized reading material, the RSS feed. I use an Android app called Feeder which is simple and handy, allowing copy-pasting of a URL to look up a feed to add. It took me a while to find blogs I wanted to follow – and I had lots of help from folks on Mastodon with some great recommendations. I’m finally at the stage I have an app I can open to read stuff I’m interested in, that’s not trying to sell me anything or start an argument. Reading blogs about people’s niche interests is incredibly satisfying. This morning in the dentist’s waiting room I learned all about the workings of a mechanical aircraft computer. The blogosphere feels like a wholesome space to visit in periods of downtime, to me. I find people’s enthusiastic posts encouraging. I like having a feed of bits of info about new weird music releases or new synth modules and software.
I’m currently in a position where I’m doing a lot more writing than I’ve probably ever done. I’m in the second year of a PhD, which is a practice-research project looking at the affordances of my extended turntable system. There’s lots of practical work, spending time building new interfaces and soundsources, making and recording music, collaborating with other artists, and performing live. But there’s a lot of writing too. I’m keeping notes relating to most of my activities in regular reflective journals. Writing notes and ideas as they occur to me. Paraphrasing other writers’ concepts to help me make sense of them. Plus the various administrative documents, literature reviews and reports that the study requires. So far in 2024 I feel as though I’ve spent most of my time writing, having finished co-writing an article for a journal, completed a paper for a conference and written another abstract. The process is new to me, and I’ve found it quite difficult – in part due to feeling quite unconfident, due to my inexperience.
So here we are, at my decision to begin blogging. I’m posting for these reasons: to contribute something back to the community that is the blogosphere, and to give myself more practice writing and putting it out there. I’ve been inspired by recent posts on blissblog and disquiet and it feels like now is as good a time as any.
Previously I used the feed on my website for news updates, posting for every single gig, release, radio broadcast and mor. There were nearly 500 posts on here, mostly of a couple of lines of info and a link. I stopped doing that during the Covid pandemic, and in setting up this blog I’ve got rid of those articles. The past posts I have kept are ones where I’ve written a bit more, both selections of music for quest mixes: a podcast about turntablism and a radio show about mechanical music. Going forward I’m aiming to post a couple of times a week with thoughts related to sound and music, things I’m working on in the studio, recommendations for books, podcasts and music and whatever else might be seem relevant. It’s likely this blog will take a while to settle into its groove, but I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.
poumons-punaises, Internet Public Radio, Tracklist
A guest mix I put together for Boris Allenou’s radio show on Internet Public Radio. Broadcast on 21st November 2022.
Link: [mixcloud]
Tracklist
Tom Ward – Transient Signalling At A Distance – Lullaby
shawné michaelain holloway – XXXSTINCTIØN – XXXST1NCT+1ØN.SØC1Ø- 20151129 2329.wav
Bone Music – Live Trash – Heritage
Dunning & Brosamer – Glocken – Underlandet (live with Lisa Schlenker)
Amselysen – Organe Solaire – Solarize (Ketamine)
African Ghost Valley – CRWL – CARON COR
Elif Yalvac – L’appel du Vide – Desynthesization
Shit Creek – Magnetic Garden – Magnetic Garden 7
Yuma Takeshita – semi-automusic 4 – untitled4-1
These Are The Breaks – podcast interview and mixtape
Mariam Rezaei interviewed me about using turntables to make music, for her podcast These Are The Breaks. Listen to the hour long chat here, which is followed by an hour of turntable music. Below is a tracklist for the mix and some links and info about each of the pieces I chose.
TRACKLIST:
Chin Weeper – Virucidal
Bredbeddle – Feely
Sculpture – Projected Music (‘Tom Richards – Comma and’ remix)
Andrea Borghi – Superelief 6
eRikm – Rose
Hannah Dargavel-Leafe – Fore Main Mizzen part 1
Maria Chavez – New Sounds presents Maria Chavez video edit
Copper Sounds – Side
Thomas Brinkmann – 0111
Ian Watson – Only Surface Noise Is Real
Faith Coloccia & Philip Jeck – Myconbiont
Marina Rosenfeld – Hard Love
Myriam Bleau – coastin
Institut Fuer Feinmotorik – Ohne Titel
Pure Rave – Pure Rave vol 3 (edit)
Graham Dunning – not yet titled (MottoMotto, forthcoming)
Eris Drew – Hold Me (T4T Embrace mix)
Putting together this mix I uncharacteristcally spent a lot of time on preparation, and as a result ended up with far too many tracks to comfortably fit into an hour. As such I’ve left our far much more than I’ve included. At one point I remembered the story of Jeff Mills mixing over 50 records in a half-hour Radio 1 set, and as I wanted to mention his incredible DJ performances as a point of influence anyway, considered doing something along the same lines. In the end I’m glad I didn’t as it would, as I’m sure you can guess, have turned out rubbish. Instead I chose a smaller bunch of tracks for how well they would work together, and have given them a bit more time to hear them properly. Some notes below about each and why I’ve chose them.
Chin Weeper – Virucidal
GRIPE 01 / Gripe Records
Glitchy vinyl cutups rom a new label based in Lancashire releasing lathe cuts and sound collages using anti-records. I like it with a track like this where I can’t quite work out how it’s been made – it has some of the feel of a cutup record but more deliberately pieced together. The label is run by Paul Nataraj (whose PHD was on his practice of etching text into vinyl records) and Daniel Watson, who collaborated on this release.
https://www.paulnataraj.uk/
https://www.instagram.com/defectiveobjective/
https://griperecords.bandcamp.com/album/gripe-01
Bredbeddle – Feely
Stackes / Fractal Meat Cuts
Using looping records and careful combinations of sounds from Rebecca Lee’s music collection, I like the unusual joining of recordings from different times and places, unexpected meetings. It’s sampling on a macro level, stripped of the technical purely technical apsect that that approach ususally favours.
Fractal Meat Cuts is the tape label I run releasing mine and other people’s music, some of it made with turntables.
http://www.rebeccalee.info/
https://fractalmeat.bandcamp.com/album/stackes
Sculpture – Projected Music (‘Tom Richards – Comma and’ remix)
Projected Reworks / Psyche Tropes
This remix came with a release in the format of a five inch picture disk with a series of locked grooves of music by Dan Hayhurst – the zoetrope animation cells on the disk by Reuben Sutherland, the other half of the duo Sculpture. Their live shows are amazing hands-on AV happenings, with Reuben’s turntable animations and Dan’s psychedlic playback-media collages.
Tom’s remix here uses his signiture homemade drum machines and synths alongside his voltage-controlled turntables, which he can sequence and animate in sync with the mix.
https://plasticinfinite.bandcamp.com/album/projected-music
https://psychetropes.bandcamp.com/album/projected-reworks
Andrea Borghi – Superelief 6
Superelief / Hemisphäreの空虚
Expert in textural sound, Andrea’s compositions are rich, dense soundscapes of atomised, pontillist noises. He uses modified turntbales to play discs made of things like marble and carved granite, alongside recordings of already intricate sources like crackling fires.
https://andreaborghi.com/
https://hemispharenokukyo.bandcamp.com/album/superelief
eRikm – Rose
L’art de la fuite / Sonoris
This is from an album of turntable bedroom-recording compostiions made in the mid-90s. Recorded using three second hand decks, direct to four-track cassette and mixed on hi-fi speakers, it has a warm, flattened sound. Short loops become a drone and the fast rhythm becomes hypnotic.
https://erikm.com/
https://erikm.bandcamp.com/album/lart-de-la-fuite-1995
Hannah Dargavel-Leafe – Fore Main Mizzen part 1
A sound piece made of recordings on a ship (hence the name referring to its three masts), this composition isn’t strictly a turntable piece, but it was released as an artist edition on vinyl. Hannah’s live performances relating to this work used a simple two-decks-and-mixer DJ setup with two dubplates of the composite sounds. Limiting the options for the performance to two sounds at a time, volume and EQ per channel, plus manipulations on the decks (speed, direction etc) leads to intersting choices of combination and a minimal, uncluttered soundscape.
I was also pleased recording this record to my computer to put into the mix that the record skipped at the end, looping itself especially for this mix.
https://www.hannahdargavel-leafe.co.uk/Fore-Main-Mizzen-edition
Maria Chavez – New Sounds presents Maria Chavez video edit
This audio is from a short performance Maria did to camera, following an interview for New Sounds. Unlike many live performers Maria doesn’t release recordings of her shows – the live sound sculptures she creates are meant for the audiences experiencing them and don’t trasnlate in the same way to fixed media. As such it’s a bit unfair of me to include an edit in this mix so I hope she’ll forgive me. Here Maria is playing broken record pieces using The Rake double needle, Invented by Randal Sanden Jr.
Seeing Maria perform a handful of times and learning more about her work has made me rethink lots of assumptions about music, performance and sound art, far beyond the use of the turnable.
http://mariachavez.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruDZM-mrTpA
Copper Sounds – Side
A Regular Pattern A Regular Pattern / Fractal Meat Cuts
The Bristol duo play copper disks, ceramic pots, etchings and dubplates on their multi-turntable setups. The turntable’s inherent rhythm generating and looping are a the fore in a lot of their work, with all the mess and noise that comes with it. To quote their website: “Realising that if you put anything on a record player it sounds (good).”
This is another tape I put out on Fractal Meat.
https://www.coppersounds.co.uk/
https://fractalmeat.bandcamp.com/album/a-regular-pattern-a-regular-pattern
Thomas Brinkmann – 0111
Klick / Max Ernst
Full album of record crackle rhythms made from slicing patterns into records and playing them on the decks. I love the bare-bones approach on this record, focusing on the physicality of the modified records rather than the sounds recorded on them.
http://www.max-ernst.de/
https://www.discogs.com/Thomas-Brinkmann-Klick/release/34167
Ian Watson – Only Surface Noise Is Real
Only Surface Noise is Real / artist edition
An artist edition of a 7″ single-sided, etched resin record, with a warning label that its likely to damage your record player. The edition comes with a photo-book showing the process of making the disk and a CD of what the content of the record would sound like without the surface noise.
https://linktr.ee/ian_watson
https://ianwatson.bandcamp.com/album/only-surface-noise-is-real
Faith Coloccia & Philip Jeck – Myconbiont
Stardust / touch
A collaborative project of recordings and remixes exchanged remotely.
“cassette recordings from 2015-2018 remixed using dubplates of Faith’s mixes and additional recordings by Philip Jeck in Liverpool, UK, 2020.” Philip Jeck’s live sets are magical, dusty, ambient trips, using crappy pedals and keyboards alongside portable record players and disks. This collaboration for me demonstrates the intimacy that can come from working with recorded media, even across continents.
https://philipjeck.com/
https://philipjeck.bandcamp.com/album/stardust
Marina Rosenfeld – Hard Love
Pa/HardLove – Room 40
In performances Marina uses dubplates of her own recordings, manipulating the sounds via the turntbales. This piece features Warrior Queen (Vocals) and Okkyung Lee (cello) as the album version of an installation project by the same name. Some of her other works use choirs of teenagers, or women playing guitars with nail varnish bottles. Here the live sound and electronics create a chasmic/cosmic dancehall atmosphere which is both cleanly melodic and tactile with its deep subs.
https://www.marinarosenfeld.com/pahard-love
https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/p-a-hard-love
Myriam Bleau – coastin
Lumens & Profits / Where To Now
This peice uses Myriam’s multiple 12″ spinning tops which trigger samples she’s collated and loaded. Whilst there’s no actual stylus, tone arm or platter, the spinning disks are manipulated by hand and create tactile, sample-based sound collages. So it’s nearly the same. Mariam’s work referneces hip-hop sampling and turntable, tactile beat making made abstract.
https://wheretonow.bandcamp.com/album/lumens-profits
Institut Fuer Feinmotorik – Ohne Titel
Various – Staubgold / Staubgold
One of the groups people kept telling me about but it took ages to track them down, they use multiple turntables with no records, instead using the mechanics of the decks to twang elastic bands or play the platter to create rhythms and grooves. This is sort of brash but fun at the same time, reminds me of a contraption that might turn up in an episode of Magic Roundabout.
https://staubgold.bandcamp.com/album/staubgold
Pure Rave – Pure Rave vol 3 (edit)
Pure Rave Vol 3 / self release
Early albums are mixtapes of live jams, with multiple overlapping loops, driven by rhythm. Some of their newer relases are remix/rework collabortions. Forcing the records they play to loop with steel bowls on the decks, they use the turntable’s capacity to make rhythms and loops with the semi-random sampling it brings. One of my favourite turntable projects at the moment.
“Pure Rave, a collective based in Detroit, Michigan, is an ongoing experiment in “chance dance”. Using various prepared turntables, “damaged” records, the occasional drum machine, the effect is an indeterminate arrangement of patterns and rhythmic sonic collage.”
https://purerave.bandcamp.com/album/vol-3
Graham Dunning – [not yet titled]
MottoMotto, forthcoming
A mechanical techno tune recorded in the studio – part of a series where I was live streaming the whole recoring process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmstjNFeQxQ
Eris Drew – Hold Me (T4T Embrace mix)
Eris Drew & Octo Octa – Devotion EP / Naive Trax
Included here really for her refreshing approach to DJing (also its a great tune). Scratching for house and techno DJs seems to have long since fallen by the wayside, but Eris Drew happily drops scratch sections into her vinyl only sets. The recent B2B fabric compilation with Octo Octa has tracks equally drawn from the 90s and now mixed in together and this seems to me one of the exciting things about the way dance music is constantly recycling itself and drawing on its own history to make new paths. Also a story Eris recounted in an interview about playing a vinyl set and the tone arm skipping all the way to the label of the record, making an abrupt, abrasive roar – it should have been a disaster, the last thing you’d want to happen as a Dj – through the huge club PA it sounded like thunder and the crowd went wild.
https://naivetrax.bandcamp.com/album/eris-drew-octo-octa-devotion-ep
https://ra.co/features/3352
The noise of the machine itself: mechanical music and the avant garde – radio show for RTM.FM
Twang Achoo Clang Oooff is a regular broadcast of artist radio shows on RTM.FM: RTM is a radio station based in Thamesmead, SE London, run by the artist space TACO! as a platform for community-produced culture, debate, art and music.
My show The noise of the machine itself: mechanical music and the avant garde is a meander through strange and unusual mechanical music over the last 100 or so years. Full info about each of the pieces below, with bandcamp links to the newer releases.
Tune in on Saturday 13th June at 8pm at https://rtm.fm/
—
Full show now available to listen to here: [mixcloud]
The noise of the machine itself: mechanical music and the avant garde.
With the invention of recorded music, machines which played the instruments themselves – such as fairground organs, player pianos, music boxes and barrel organs – went quickly out of fashion. Through the 20th century as music had the opportunity to become avant garde, the music machines were left behind. Where gramophones, tape recorders and turntables had an important role to play in the development of experimental music, there are fewer examples from the world of the fairground organ. This mix brings together various flavours of unusual mechanical music from the last 100 or so years up to today.
1. The Mighty Marenghi Fairground Organ – I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman
From the 1970 album The Mighty Marenghi – Fair Ground Organ
“In this age of space travel and televised entertainment the simple pleasures of the old fashioned fairground seem remote, but the nostalgia of its magic glitter, its noise and bustle, the clatter of the machinery of its rides and its sham opulence which gave endless delight and pleasure to crowds, is immediately awakened when we hear the music of the traditional fairground organ.” – album liner notes
Fairground organs were always set up to play popular songs of the day – it was unusual for music to be composed specifically for the instruments. The instruments were designed to be loud, brash and draw attention to themselves. There’s an odd layering of nostalgia and novelty in this track – the song playing here was only released three years previous to the recording, so not contemporary with the 1903 build of the machine, though with its reference to WWI it is itself nostalgic. A novelty song played on a novelty machine.
2. György Ligeti – Musica ricercata: No. 8, Vivace – Energico (Adaptation for Barrel Organ)
from the album György Ligeti Edition, Vol. 5 by Jürgen Hocker, Pierre Charial, Francoise Terrioux
Written in the early 1950s and typical of Ligeti’s later frenetic sound, this adaptation for a mechanical device brings precision to its playing. A rare setting of an avant garde piece on a mechanical instrument.
3. Conlon Nancarrow, Study for Player Piano No. 21 (Canon X)
Youtube video by Juergen Hocker, May 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gVhBxwRqg
“Recorded with the Ampico Bösendorfer Grand in the possession of Juergen Hocker, which was restored under the supervision of Nancarrow.”
Nancarrow used player pianos in order to compose pieces which would be impossible to play for a human pianist. A player piano is programmed using a piano roll – a roll of card with holes punched in it, which allow pneumatic switches to play piano notes. As such it’s a fully acoustic instrument. Most piano rolls include a green line to tell the operator when to change the master tempo, as such meaning there is some playability in the instrument, it’s still not entirely automated and the operator can introduce some character.
4. Mikael Ericsson playing the Millophonia
youtube video by Graham Dunning, uploaded 8th July 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm23yms8BcI&t=1s
The Millophonia is an experimental pipe organ built into a 100 year old windmill in Sweden by the artist Mikael Ericsson. The machine itself is bespoke, built from parts from old dismantled pipe organs and player pianos. The millophonia has no keyboard or accessible player controls, instead Erikson plays the piano roll itself – shuffling the timeline back and forth like a scratch DJ with a turntable, or covering and uncovering the organ pipes’ mouths to start and stop their sounding.
https://www.harpartlab.se/kvarnofon1_eng.html
5. Mammoth Beat Organ – Song for Chimney Stacks
from Dunning & Underwood – The Blow Vol.5 released by Front & Follow, February 2019
https://fandf.bandcamp.com/album/the-blow-volume-5
Mammoth Beat Organ is a modular, mechanical music contraption, designed as a two-player, semi-autonomous musical instrument. It plays unusual, sometimes erratic compositions drawing on drone music, minimalist repetition and fairground organ techniques.
http://www.mammothbeatorgan.co.uk/
6. Aerodrones x Javier Bustos – (frag CICLO P#1 Casa Abasto 07/6/2015)
youtube video, uploaded june 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRhitGoTm_Q
Aerodrones is a large instrument using balloons and a footpump to play reeds and pipes, shown as a sound installation and a playable instrument. “Balloons, valves, bellows and hoses make up a musical machine that requires the performer’s body to function as both a motor and an operator. ”
Javier Bustos is a sound artist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
https://javierbustos.com.ar/Aerodrones
7. Marcel Duchamp – Sculpture Musicale (Musicboxes version by Petr Kotik)
“According to Arturo Schwarz, the piece was written sometime during 1912 – 1920 /21, although 1913 is the most probable year. The Musical Sculpture is similar to the Fluxus pieces of the early 1960s. These works combine objects with performance, audio with visual, known and unknown factors, and elements explained and unexplained. A realization of such a piece can result in an event / happening, rather than a performance.”
http://www.ubu.com/sound/duchamp.html
8. Rie Nakajima – Bells
From the album Fusuma, released November 2019 by Tsss Tapes. https://rienakajima.bandcamp.com/album/fusuma
Simple machines made of things like motors pinging bowls and slowly circling whistles that grind around the floor. Single devices become a swarm as the artist introduces new units – they behave like micro-bots, organisms each making their own path.
http://www.rienakajima.com/
9. Tim Shaw – Gorky Park Carillion – Moscow, Russia
From the album of field recordings, Impossible Music: https://timshaw.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-music
Mechanical bells rung daily from the church in the famous park.
https://tim-shaw.net/
10. Sarah Angliss – Needle
From the album Air Loom:
https://sarahangliss.bandcamp.com/album/air-loom
Sarah makes music using various home made instruments including the “robotic carillon, an instrument she devised and built to play bells at inhuman speeds, creating a haze of delicate, metallic sound.”
https://www.sarahangliss.com/
11. Sarah Farmer – Organised sound (by Gloggomobil, record player, timers and found objects)
Sound installation: Youtube video, uploaded July 2010
“The Gloggomobil functioned as programmable barrel organs, triggering a hammering action which hit the objects (glasses) and therefore made them resonate. The adapted record player acted as a wet finger to a wine glass, again causing the object to resonate at its natural frequency. A motion sensor timer switch caused the electronic objects to stop and start, adding a rhythmic structure to the sounds, which were partly arranged by the artist following existing musical and mathematical systems, and partly dictated by the technologies used.”
http://www.sarahmfarmer.co.uk
12. Jean Tinguely – Sound Sculpture f
Mp3 from ubuweb sound
Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) made large scale mechanical sound sculptures including motors, pulleys, wheels and cogs. The complex systems were deliberately ramshackle and some were designed to fall apart and self-destruct.
http://www.ubu.com/sound/tinguely.html
13. Daniel Padden & Sarah Kenchington – Tapered Things
from the album The Bellow Switch by Daniel Padden & Sarah Kenchington
https://danielpadden.bandcamp.com/album/the-bellow-switch
“‘The Bellow Switch’ features the remarkable sounds of Sarah Kenchington’s mechanical instruments. All the instruments were played by Sarah, and the sounds were then recorded, edited and arranged by Daniel Padden.”
Sarah Kenchington’s contraptions form something between a fairground organ and a one-man-band setup; part pedal-powered, using pipes, buckets and a barrel sequencer to play a variety of musical instruments.
https://algomech.com/2017/artists/sarah-kenchington/
14. Pierre Bastien – Rail at a Liar
from the 2019 album Tinkle Twang ‘n Tootle
https://pierrebastienmarionette.bandcamp.com/album/tinkle-twang-n-tootle
Pierre Bastien uses mechano machines alongside homemade instruments and household objects to produce surrealist compositions.
15 . Ignacio Rodriguez Llinares & Raul Cantizano – Pelicano Mecanico & guitar on the streets of Seville
Youtube video from Juan Gonzalez, posted December 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG4aESU4dI4
Ignacio Rodriguez Llinares’ machine the Pelicano Mecanico makes flamenco rhythms mechanically. A series of 20 wooden beaters controlled by a series of cams, on a single rotating driveshaft. The player can add or subtract parts of the rhythm in order to intensify or simplify the pattern. The speed of the driveshaft is adjustable for master tempo. The combination of locked speed shaft and complex rhythms means the player can react and respond without ever going out of sync.
https://www.pelicanomecanico.com/
16. Remko Scha – Thrash
from the album Machine Guitars (1982)
Motors flicking pieces of rope against guitar strings, presented as performance-installations in the mid-late 1970s. Cited as an influence by New York no wave artists including Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth.
17. Rob Gawthrop – FREQUENCY (sound installation)
Algomech Festival DINA Sheffield 19th May 2019
“Frequency is a sound installation of two constructed single-string electric guitars with electric motors that tension and de-tension the strings very slowly. They are played with motorised spinning plectrums. Speakers to be positioned on opposite sides of the space. The ‘instruments’ at the front of the space. The work has a 19 minutes cycle. An installation of slowly shifting drone of harmonics, dissonance and beatings.”
http://www.robgawthrop.co.uk/
18. LORDxGONZO – RANDOM NOISE DRUMMING #1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=UalMOpWXtsU
Youtube video, uploaded 6th April 2020
A motorised hi-hat pedal loosely holds several drumsticks, hitting parts of a standard rock drum kit, sometimes shifting position to hit different drums. The player occasionally intervenes to move the sticks or add a cymbal to the surface of one of the toms. The overall effect is somewhere between a relentless mechanical rhythm and randomly shifting patterns – this could be a free jazz drummer’s intense solo set.
19. the VAPE – ETUDE 762220051
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMgOeXGqHGg
youtube video, uploaded 30th April 2020
Petr Válek creates haphazard mechanical sculptures to make noisy, rhythmical music. A prolific videomaker, posting several times per week, reveling in the absurdity of his creations with titles like HOMEMADE NOISE TUTORIAL EPISODE 20064 – his narration to the episode so overamplified as to become a layer of noise in itself.
ETUDE 762220051 features a contraption made of a motor, sticks and cans which flops and clatters around a metal plate on a wooden table. The relentless rotation creates harsh rhythms and an interplay of timbres. The short clip ends with the noisy buzz of the motor continuing to rotate after the assemblage has dropped to the tiled floor. All that remains is the noise of the machine itself.
Graham Dunning 