Philip Jeck

I started playing 45's at 16 rpm and suddenly entered a whole new world of sound.

WHAT WONDERFUL THINGS CAN HAPPEN

PHILIP JECK

Courtesy of Cracked Machine - © Graeme Rowland

Most people get annoyed when the needle sticks in the groove of their records because of dust or dirt and they have to get up to clean the record or budge the stylus on a little. Philip Jeck is happy to let the diamond ride a while and has turned such locked grooves into an artform all his own. His is a transcendent soundworld of clicks, crackles and repetitious shifting mutation, where worn out junk shop records are transmogrified into evocative otherworldly atmospheres often a far cry from their original composers' intentions. His Loopholes album on Touch was a lo-fi rhythmic tour de force but it was the long awaited follow up Surf, also on Touch, which really punctured space/time and let alternate memories filter up from degraded old vinyl. The album stayed on a repeating loop for a whole day here, and after a huge amount of listening time has yet to relinquish its mysteries.

Its creator on the other hand was very forthcoming about his working methods, history and individual approach to sound exploration and exploitation when I spoke to him before a collaboration with stick wielding dancer Laurie Booth at Manchester's Green Room.

"To put it very crudely, it's taking people on a journey through a landscape of sound. People can travel with me on the journey that I take."

Lets rewind to the start of that journey! Philip had collected records from the age of twelve. He'd played a little guitar but didn't feel it was really for him. The door opened into a world of sound manipulation and reconstruction when he heard early hiphop pioneer Grandmaster Flash. He bought a second turntable and a little mixer and started trying to copy those first scratch records.

When Philip did sound for an American theatre company in the early eighties he was lucky enough to hear Christian Marclay, the New York turntable maverick whose anything goes attitude made him realise he could tear up the rulebooks and throw caution to the wind.

"I'd only just started using turntables and he really opened my eyes to lots of different ways of using records. I think what I do is pretty different to what he does but he is certainly quite an influence."

Both of them had studied visual arts rather than music and the new life they breathe into old vinyl platters is imbued with this sensibility. One major difference in their technique is that Philip makes frequent use of loops, creating locked grooves by putting stickers on records, whereas Christian Marclay tends to avoid long repetitious elements. Both favour old obsolete record players, although Christian uses Califones and Philip goes for Dansettes.

Philip studied art at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, and also worked one day a week in the theatre.

"I think that opened me up to doing work that wasn't on paper or pieces of sculpture. Stuff that was ephemeral, in the moment."

In the early eighties he moved to London and DJ-ed at private parties but soon got bored of playing dance records, especially when the odder elements he threw into the mix drove people off the floor. He started to meet improvisers involved in the London Musicians Collective and played out with guitarist and instrument maker Max Eastley and drummer Paul Burwell. He also introduced turntable material into the songs of violinist Sianed Jones and clarinetist Cris Cheek in a band called Slant. They released a couple of CD's in the early nineties (Slant and The Canning Town Chronicle on Sound Language).

"Occasionally we'd improvise to find interesting sounds then perhaps they'd write some words around that and we'd work on it and make a song. We did a fair amount of live work and usually we'd expand it to a band, augmented with a guitarist, a bassist and a drummer. They live a long way from me now so collaborations are hard to do. They're a couple and they live together so they're still doing stuff together."

Most of the records he uses are cheap junk shop finds and his sound emerged from a chance encounter with an old record player in a junk shop.

"I saw an old sixties Dansette record player for a couple of quid. I bought it because it had a 'tape out' which meant I could put it through my mixer. It had 78, 45, 33 and 16 rpm speeds. I've never seen a 16 rpm record. It must've been a format that didn't take off. The sound would be very low fidelity at that slow a speed. I started playing 45's at 16 rpm and suddenly entered a whole new world of sound. I've still got a couple of modern players with varispeed but I don't really use them. I only use these old players."

It would be possible to customise the turntables to play at different speeds by replacing the metal spindle which turns the drive belt with different sized home-made spindles, not that Philip has ever done that.

"I feel I still haven't explored fully what I can do with the speeds they have already. I customise the records with stickers to make them stay in one place. Sometimes I'll let a record play through a little bit before jumping, perhaps really slow. I do customise the record players when I use them in installation work. In the past you could stack up a dozen records and they would drop one by one, so the arm will reject and come back. You can jam that so it drops on and stays on and when the cut ends it comes up and goes back on. There's a little screw under the arm that you can use to get it to drop wherever you want on the record. Also some of my record players have their own random varispeed because they're faulty. They'll always do something I'm not expecting. The arm won't move where it should be or the speed will change and, because some of them are valve, when they get too hot the sound really changes. Suddenly you'll get these intermittent bursts of sound. Also if the cartridge is faulty, the leads are a bit wobbly, you'll get little cut outs of sound."

He leaves all the records out of their sleeves so that they gradually deteriorate and accumulate their own individual personality of crackles and scratches. All of these effects mean that it is nearly impossible for him to play the same thing twice using only records. This became a slight problem when he began collaborating with the experimental dancers who practiced next door to the low rent warehouse by the Thames where he used to live. It was here that he first met Laurie Boothe. Philip developed his turntable technique by touring with Laurie for about four years. The need to develop set pieces for choreography led to the use of back-up tapes and tape loops on reel to reel machines to allow him to repeat performances.

"I picked up a couple of old ex-Radio Stoke Uhers at a carboot sale. They're these portable tape recorders from the sixties but I don't know how they managed to lug them about because they're huge! They're really good because they've got four speeds."

The tape machines allow him to make loops of longer duration than one revolution of a record. He also uses a couple of primitive Casio SK1 samplers which will only hold one sample at a time.

"In performance I sample what I do as I go along just to build up another loop. Once you record another one it's gone - you can't retain them. You can never quite get the same one each time and I find that exciting."

The sampler also mutates the sound.

"It isn't very high fidelity in its sampling. It gives it quite a distant, ghostly quality every time it samples anything, so you can separate the sample from the original. It sounds further away, although I can boost the volume so it comes into the foreground."

He also uses a couple of guitar effects pedals, a delay and an equaliser.

"The equaliser boosts different frequency bands so I can boost the bass or the treble. It's quite a crude one so it degrades the sound even further but I quite like that because it takes it a little bit further from its original source. Actually there are plenty of effects on the records already. The sounds have been treated in a studio so there's tons of production on them already so it instantly sounds finished no matter what you do. It might not sound very good, but it sounds finished! And they probably payed thousands to be in that studio."

Some of his work for dancers has made it to disc, although often he'll edit these pieces or mix in extra textures so that it stands up as sound experience in its own right. Anatomy from Loopholes was the first piece he made for the Anatomy dance company.

"The record I used on that was Cosi Fan Tutti by Mozart. That's one of the few times where I've been asked to use a specific record, because before I started working with them they were rehearsing to Cosi Fan Tutti. So I went out and found a secondhand copy of it and used very small cut ups of it. Rather than loops on the record, most of that track was done on the four track just using a delay pedal straight from the record player. Then I turned it round so it's backwards."

In fact its gut rumbling opening is more Cosey Fanny Tutti than Cosey Fan Tutti. Rock me Amadeus!

A remarkable early rehearsal tape for a dance piece was one of the highlights of the third Touch sampler, on which Bruce Gilbert also appeared. Much of Bruce's early solo recordings were originally made with dancers in mind and occasionally Philip's work has been atmospherically reminiscent of the more abstract side of his oeuvre, particularly Music For Fruit, although the way they approach the physical processes of making sound is very different. Demolition, the opening track from Surf started life as a dance piece and is Jeck music at its most visceral - grinding away like a more lo fi mid period Gilbert perhaps. Philip puts any similarity there down to the fact that he was using exclusively guitar records slowed down to 16 rpm for that track, although Gilbert's fruit music isn't heavily guitar based. Again, perhaps any similarity comes down to the fact that both of them share a visual artist's approach to sound. Gilbert has described his work as "a bit of sculpture" and Demolition has a very rough hewn carved feel to it.

"There were four records playing at once on the original performance, although there are two copies of the same record. I overdubbed a little bit so there are six records playing at once and also the sampler is playing as well. It's called Demolition because while the dancers were dancing there was a very slowed down film of a block of flats being blown up in Glasgow. What took probably thirty seconds to happen was slowed down to the length of that track, about eight and a half minutes."

This demolition image forms a neat visual reflection of the processes of gradual decay and transformation which Philip subjects discs to form new sound worlds.

"I felt a real affinity to that piece of film. In some of my solo performances I've used projected video. I've done a video of record players which I've mutated. I just took a minute of an overhead video of a record turning, with a sticker on it. Then I played it back on a TV and revideoed it and did that to about thirtieth generation. Each time I turned the colour and the contrast full up. Then I put all of those together so it disintegrates from a record turning to blobs of colour turning."

Jon Wozencroft provided a similar image, of TV feedback, for the cover of Loopholes, and these visual mutations again reflect the fact that the original recorded sources of Philip's soundworld are often completely unrecognisable. For instance, on Blast First's excellent back catalog cut up Deconstruct compilation (on which he shared disc space with other renowned record reconstructers such as Christian Marclay, Bruce Gilbert, John Oswald and Stock, Hausen and Walkman) his tracks were the only ones where it was impossible to spot the sample. Two exceptions appear on Surf - some cackling courtesy of Woody Woodpecker, and a sympathetic spectral treatment of Suicide's Cheree on Spirits Up.

"I slightly changed the speed and some of it is backwards as well. I was a bit wary that people would recognise it. I hope I've not upset them. They were a real inspiration to me in the past and it's a homage to them. I really love that first album. They're a homemade sort of band as well, just one guy on a keyboard and a singer."

Spirits Up forms the eerie centrepiece of the album and, along with the minimal voice based closing track I Just Wanted To Know from which slow reversed beats eventually unwind, outlines the most mysterious sonic adventures he's yet recorded. The latter has a transitional quality, as if someone was dying or preparing to die. Benign but ghostly voices with a far away quality mutter - "Oh she admired your spirit" etc

"There is only one record on that last track. I did it on two Casios and the speech is all from a film that was on television one afternoon. It was a slightly crappy film but I really liked this dialogue so I recorded the second half of the film. When I was working on a piece for a dance company I thought it would work well right at the end of the piece. So I started doing edits and cut ups and slowed the voices down. The drone that goes through it is a little bit of keyboard sound I sampled from the film. It was a film about somebody dying. I found it strangely moving. It had a lot of crap in it as well but I just wanted to take the things that did mean something out of the film. You can almost take it as a joke but I wanted it to be on that edge of 'Well, is this a piss take or is it for real?'"

These sonic evocations have an almost magical dimension to them...

"When I perform it's a transcendental experience for me. I am taken into another world. One of the things I try to do is let the sounds I'm using come out so that I can work with them rather than really trying to push them or mould them. I try to find some resolution out of the sounds I'm using so that they work together."

Philip strives to create sounds that reach beyond mere entertainment.

"To put it very crudely, it's taking people on a journey through a landscape of sound. People can travel with me on the journey that I take. Perhaps they'll have a different journey or a parallel one and hopefully it'll evoke an emotional response or trigger some memories, in the same way that someone will look at a painting and get something from that, something that's not just on the surface. Some live performances have been fantastic like that - I've felt that the audience has been with me, tapped into something. I do feed off the energy that comes out of the audience. It's a collective experience. It's not just the performers but everybody in that theatre is taking part."

In performance he'll switch between very conscious direction of the sounds and more automatic, improvised responses.

"Sometimes I'll be thinking really hard about how to make a transition but other times everything almost plays itself - I'm just a conduit for it. Improvisation is like that - it goes from one extreme to the other, from where you really exert control to when what you're doing takes over and you're almost a bystander."

Of course things can go wrong, but one mark of a good improviser is the ability to take advantage of errors and malfunctions.

"If wires come out and suddenly all the effects go quiet it puts you on your mettle! One time when that happened I turned the volume up on the record players and turned the mixer down so all the sound from the stage was coming out of the two speakers on the record players. Since then I've used that quite often. It's a really wonderful dynamic change from hearing this big meaty sound on the house PA to these tinny little speakers, a nice evocative sound."

Vinyl Requiem, his ambitious multimedia project for a hundred record players, was executed without a PA.

"It was like an orchestra of record players. One of the things I liked about it was that when it went down to just three or four record players you could pinpoint the sound, like if you had an orchestra and it went down to just a violinist and a pianist. You really get a spatial sense of the sounds."

As the record players were switched on and off, the sound could be moved horizontally or vertically across the scaffold on which the turntables were set up. Stockhausen used a similar idea for Gruppen, in which three orchestras interact so that sound moves from one side of the concert hall to the other.

"It was a huge piece of work and it took several years to get the money together to do it. We performed it in London, Belgium and Hamburg. I only appeared in it for fifteen minutes and did a couple of solos on six record players at the front. There were three other people who I trained to operate all the record players up on the scaffold - they had three rows each to go along. It was scored quite tightly to be in synch with the film and projectors. They were painted white and their operators were wearing white so it was like a cinema screen."

Switches enabled twenty record players to be turned on at once and although they were all preset the operators had to walk around resetting them, illuminating their way with small miners' lamps. Philip has tentative plans to release recordings of Vinyl Requiem as a double ten inch in a box full of photos of the installation and stills from the films used. All his solo releases to date have been CD only so some vinyl would be most welcome - maybe then people could start making loops -from the grooves in an endless sea of revolving re-evolving sticker transformations. In fact Philip's quite interested in having his work remixed if anyone's up for it. He's also enthused by the idea of collaborating musically with people who would perhaps have no idea where he's coming from.

"I'd like to work with somebody from a completely different field - a church organist or a pianist - somebody who plays Bach in a church! How could we possibly meet? What could we do? Or somebody from another world like Arvo Part or Gorecki - somebody who's got to have an orchestra at hand."

Maybe even more unlikely would be a collaboration with reclusive perfectionist Brian Wilson, whose compositional approach on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Smile had a profound influence on Philip.

"The way he would record people singing at the top of their voices over a very quiet celeste and then in the mixing that celeste or organ is brought right up front even though it's very quiet. Then these loud singing voices are mixed right back which creates a strange kind of tension. It's a very odd thing to do. He was one of the earliest people to really work with the studio, constructing these short symphonic pieces. In a very conventional pop format he was doing really quite odd things - very evocative sounds. I think his sound compositions are absolutely fantastic - genius!"

In fact the album Surf and two of its tracks, Spirits Up and Surf Finger, are titled in tribute to the Beach Boys' Surf's Up, one of Philip's all time favourite songs. Although no Beach Boys records appear on Surf, he has mixed them into his live sets occasionally. Quite a few of his track titles offer cryptic clues to some of the records or processes he's used on them.

"Tiltimg is from 'tilting at windmills' because it's from a Don Quixote record by Strauss. On Box of Lamb I miked up a music box and made a tape loop of it then played it backwards and slowed down. So that's the 'box'. Originally I had some early choral music in there which was a song about the 'Lamb of God.' In the end I left it out but I left the title as it was."

1986 (Frank was 70 years old) was edited together from two pieces originally used in dance work, and one of these was made when Frank Sinatra was indeed seventy years old. This collides with a newer piece made from a heavy metal single and Woody Woodpecker's chuckle.

"Some of the source material is from a Frank Sinatra Christmas record. He's not actually singing on it, it's some backing thing. I forget which song it is now."

In the same way, one might forget a song and then hear it later in a new context and it might bring back memories.

"You might not actually recognise the records I'm using but I think they do stimulate some memory of some sound in some subconscious way. They're all like little stored pieces of memory."

Rebecca Wright's grainy photos from which Jon Wozencroft designed Surf's insert seem to play on this idea of partially faded memory. Monochrome snapshots of distant times and places show figures fractionally out of frame or half submerged in the sea, powerlines swinging above trees at dusk, an empty abandoned chair, shadowy trees growing in straight groves, a street lamp glow refracted through a window into a dark room. The front cover image looks like a great wave breaking against a seaside promenade but could just as easily be a fiery explosion.

"I've not met the photographer who did those. She's a friend of Jon's. When he sent the proof of the cover to me I thought it was brilliant! You can almost relate some of the photos to actual tracks. They've got that grainy, fuzzy, distant, old look. Sometimes it's not even whole photographs, just a little bit, like something found torn off in a junk shop. And that's the way that I'm using the sound material. I buy records from junk shops and add little bits. Usually it's just an emotional response to what's happening with the sound. I'm not worrying about whether the records are in time or in tune with each other. I'm thinking of pushing emotional levels further, making particular feelings stronger. There is no record that isn't potentially usable. A lot of them are really obscure records that were not hits. I'll end up finding ten copies of the same record for 10p each...

What's in those records is just so endless."