When I saw this at Idolator yesterday I knew I had to file it away along with my other turntables: the artist Simon Elvins has made a turntable entirely out of paper. You have to turn the crank manually to make the record move, and the paper cone serves as both needle and speaker.
City of Sound has a great post up on the work of Len Lye, an experimental film artist working from the 1930s through the 1980s. Rather then doing traditional animation using stop photo techniques, Lye drew, stenciled, or etched directly onto his film.
According to the wikipedia entry on Lye,
His 1935 film A Colour Box.... was made by painting vibrant abstract patterns on the film itself, synchronizing them to a popular dance tune by Don Baretto and His Cuban Orchestra. A panel of animation experts convened in 2005 by the Annecy film festival put this film among the top ten most significant works in the history of animation (his later film Free Radicals was also in the top 50).
In Free Radicals [1958, revised 1978] he used black film stock and scratched designs into the emulsion. The result was a dancing pattern of flashing lines and marks, as dramatic as lightning in the night sky.
Here they are together, thanks to youtube:
CoS has one more, Rainbow Dance. Meanwhile here's a third, Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1940):
Aside from Mingering Mike, the other bit of turntable-related posting I’ve been meaning to do concerns Sean Duffy. Back in November I did a post about one of Duffy’s pieces (above left), which as you can see is a turntable with three tone-arms. In that post I mentioned Janek Schaeffer, who has also been using tri-tone arm turntables for ten years now. Here’s the relevant bits:
…I hope Duffy [is] familiar with Janek Schaefer, a sound artist/DJ who has been using a Tri-Phonic Turntable (above right) since 1997. Two of the tone arms on Schaefer's turntable face one direction and the third plays in reverse; he can also reverse the direction of the turntable itself and therefore invert the 2:1. What's more, he can stack records on top of each other, playing three records simultaneously on one turntable.… I'm not familiar with Duffy's work, and a cursory google seems to point to many other projects (turntable-related and not), but this one, at least, has been done (and better). Duffy's looks better, but on a purely functional level Schaefer's is far more interesting.
Well, two months after that post, Duffy came across it and he emailed me. With his permission—myself two months late!—here is his response:
Yes, I know who Janek Schaefer is. I discovered his work a year or so after I made my first turntable in 1999. Although I've never see it in person, it looks interesting. And I agree his work is definitely more functional and mine looks better.
I don't know who else knows about Schaefer but it seems like every time I show one of my turntables someone brings up a different person whose done something along these lines. Maybe it'll become a movement all it's own.
Well, I’ve now made three posts about turntable art—so you may be right! I hadn’t realized that Duffy had been making his turntable pieces for such a long time. And we both agree the purpose of Duffy’s work is very different from that of Schaefer. Duffy also pointed out an error in my post: just because one of Schaefer’s tone arms is reversed does not mean that the sound comes out reversed. My mistake. And that wasn't all! He continued to school me.
The multi-tone-armed turntable goes back to the 1940s when people would put extra tone-arms on their turntables for different cartridges (78, mono and later stereo). Most radio stations had them and some companies manufactured them. Actually most audiophile turntable made today are set up to use more than one tone-arm. I first played with one of these machines in the 1980s.
Here are a couple of photographs of these turntables. 
Duffy pointed also pointed me to this website. Thanks Sean for the response. Those of you in Arizona can see Duffy's installation, The Grove, on view at the ASU Nelson Fine Arts Center beginning June 2.
Speaking of Steve Roden, he’ll be presenting a new sound work at the MOCA Gallery at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood this weekend, January 20 and 21. The piece will only run for the weekend, and accompany the Rothko show currently on display there (also closing this weekend, so all the more reason to go down and check it out). Roden and Rothko seems like a natural fit, to me. If you’ve not experienced Roden’s work before, you can head over to the brilliant Ubuweb to hear a five-hour piece he improvised at the 2005 Soundwalk in Long Beach.
There is a reception at the PDC MOCA on Saturday, January 20, from 6–8 pm, including a talk with architect Michael Maltzen. Whatever day you decide to go, admission is free.
Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes has a chat with Stephanie Hanor, a curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, about artists on the museum's wishlist. Among others, she mentions Sean Duffy, who did this "turntable piece" (above left). That's all well and good, but I hope Hanor, Green, and Duffy are familiar with Janek Schaefer, a sound artist/DJ who has been using a Tri-Phonic Turntable (above right) since 1997. Two of the tone arms on Schaefer's turntable face one direction and the third plays in reverse; he can also reverse the direction of the turntable itself and therefore invert the 2:1. What's more, he can stack records on top of each other, playing three records simultaneously on one turntable. More about Schaefer's turntable here. I'm not familiar with Duffy's work, and a cursory google seems to point to many other projects (turntable-related and not), but this one, at least, has been done (and better). Duffy's looks better, but on a purely functional level Schaefer's is far more interesting.
Pitchfork has a fascinating and deeply depressing article up today about Malachi Ritscher, a Chicago free jazz musician who set himself on fire on November 3rd in protest of the Iraq war. necessarily lefties. Ritscher's protest should, at the very least, remind those of us that are against this war and against this administration to remain vigilant and tenacious.
Mentioned but not linked in the Pitchfork article are this blog entry at the Chicago Reader, which was the first place to break the news and which as of now contains nearly 200 comments, including posts by Ritcher's son (and links to the pertinent pages of Ritscher's own website); and Richard Roeper's column in the Chicago Sun-Times.
When I was thirteen years old, I was just beginning to learn the guitar. I was also a recent devotee to Metallica. I remember getting the tabs for “Master of Puppets” from Guitar magazine, and carefully placing my fingers on the proper frets and strings, as instructed: leave the low E open; first finger on the second string, seventh fret; third and fourth fingers on the ninth fret, fourth and fifth strings; let your palm mute the remaining strings. The result, I hadn’t yet understood, was a four-note chord, three of which are octaves of E.
I had my amp cranked, distortion on. I hit that chord for the very first time and it sent a shockwave through me. Power! I’d played a regular old E chord before, but it was nothing like this. Discovering the might of this octave-heavy power chord was akin to learning just what happens when you masturbate for the first time—sure, you’ve played the thing before, but it’s never done this. This is truly a moment that I think every guitar player can relate to: learning this particular chord for the first time. I think it’s positively Jungian. Hell, it’s even been captured on film—what chord do you think Michael J. Fox is playing at the beginning of Back to the Future? [okay, I just watched the clip, and in fact he doesn't play this chord, but in fact a totally weak A. Note to Bob Zemeckis: this scene could have been better.]
As I got older and my tastes grew away from metal and toward indie rock, I still found that octave chord, attacked at maxed-out volume, to be the epitome of power. It was embodied by the most brilliant band on the planet, Drive Like Jehu, who seemed to play nothing but octave chords. There’s something primal, unfuckwithable, about octaves. Especially loud ones.
Little did I know that Metallica, Marty McFly, and Jehu are mere monks compared to the Pope of the Ear-Shattering Octave, Glenn Branca. Last night at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, as part of the Minimalist Jukebox series, Branca presented his Symphony no. 13, “Hallucination City,” for one hundred electric guitars. A hundred guitars. A guitar orchestra. A guitorchestra. It was brilliant. Breaking things down, actually there were eighty guitars and twenty basses, all tuned at octaves. Each guitar is strung with two pairs of three strings an octave apart, and the 100 guitars are further divided into either E, B, or G. Maybe I’m getting a little too nitty gritty here, but the point is that the octave is king—no, the octave is queen. The king is volume.
“Hallucination City” shifted between two levels: loud and impossibly louder. It was never—never—quiet. The first movement began with a steady, marching beat, as the harangue of guitar players furiously strummed at their instruments in polyrhythmic sound clusters, creating a massive swirl of noise. I’ve heard of a wall of sound, but the music here was so loud and so dense yet always moving, it was like an instrumental gas giant. The density of the layers created something that sounded almost like a vortex. As clusters of guitarists shifted their speed and volume, the sound seemed to move left to right, front to back across the stage, like an animal or spirit.
The second movement was fraught with tension. From the first few seconds the sound conjured a balloon expanding beyond its abilities, and as the volume and density increased the sound took on the form of a jetliner perpetually preparing to rise off the runway. Somehow, despite the fact that the piece started loud, the tension continued to rise and rise and rise. It was the defining element of the symphony—a parody-free embodiment of Nigel Tufnel’s claim in Spinal Tap: “most amps go to ten, but this one goes to eleven.”
By the fourth and final movement, I was overwhelmed and nearly exhausted. But hearing all one hundred guitars begin that last piece on the same note was like a second wind. Exhaustion became exhilaration. Octave is power! It was really the first time that the instruments sounded "musical," in the pedestrian sense of the word. Until now, a word like "melody" had no meaning, and even now it was only moments before the sound mass returned. Throughout "Hallucination City," the music erupting from the stage resembled anything but a song, or even the sound of a guitar; I heard airplanes, I heard shattering glass, I heard hurricanes whipping blaring fire engines into erupting volcanoes. As the fourth movement progressed, the note grew into a cacophony, then into an über-cacophony! Yet for all the volume, it was never so simple as noise. People in the concert hall were rising out of their seats. The din was both deafening and mesmerizing, traumatic and cathartic.
And then, it got still louder. Some of the guitarists literally couldn’t contain their inner Pete
Townshends as they held their guitars aloft or stabbed down at their
amplifiers. And like a magician pulling the cloth from a Thanksgiving table, the conductor made an abrupt signal and suddenly everything was hush. Everyone in the audience—and a couple of the guitarists on stage—bolted upright in applause. It was absolutely fantastic. Branca received a standing ovation. As we spilled out of the auditorium, you could see a certain thrill in everyone's step. "Hallucination City" was pure exhilaration.
This weekend I toured a number of galleries around Los Angeles. Over at the Mary Goldman Gallery were photos by Miranda Lichtenstien. All of the photos were somehow about meditation—a woman in a bathtub, a man with his eyes closed at a desk, and so on. Fine photographs, sure, but the one that grabbed me the most was the above, Anechoic Chamber. It’s a great photo, but I think that’s due in large part to the space itself. I’ve never heard of an anechoic chamber before, so home to google I went.
Anechoic means “without echo.” These chambers exist all over the country, many used as chambers in which to test antennae or electronic systems, as they have no ambient sound whatsoever. Hence they make powerful meditation rooms as well, as the only thing you can hear is the sound of your own body—and absolutely nothing else. According to wikipdia, one of these chambers inspired John Cage's 4'33", after he spent some time in one and listened to his own blood flowing through his body. More chambers below, though to Lichtenstein’s credit, none as beautiful as hers.
Yesterday I booked a trip from Buenos Aires to Sarajevo, with stopovers in Montreal, Antwerp, and Vientiane along the way. A little circuitous, sure, but it was free and it only took about eight minutes! I booked it via SoundTransit, and there are plenty more options. Pick your departure and destination points and how many stopovers you’d like in between. SoundTransit will give you your itinerary and present you with field recordings strung together from each location.
The field recordings are supplied by locals; if you’d like to supply a recording of your own city, you can contribute to the site and they’ll add your location to future itineraries.
