Graham Dunning

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