The inside cover of Philip Jeck's seventh solo album (typically great Jon Wozencroft design) contains a nice quote from critic Mort Goode: "Johnny Mathis advances the art of remembering." I don't hear Mathis on 7 (though he could be here somewhere-- with Jeck you never know) but I imagine these words appear because The Art of Remembering would be a great title for a Philip Jeck album. For most of the 20th Century, the phonograph record was the primary time-based storage medium. You could buy pre-made 8mm and 16mm reels, but home films never had the market penetration of recorded sound. Music, speeches, plays, sound effects, sporting events, even film storylines were preserved and sold on records.
The vinyl record was one of the primary devices for storing culture's collective memory. Hundreds of millions of these fragments were strewn all around the world. What happened to all these chunks of data? Most decayed or were rendered obsolete and were tossed out, but plenty are still in circulation, and a good number of them wound up in Philip Jeck's record collection. Jeck makes music by playing, mixing and processing vinyl records (mostly obscure ones), and on 7, he reflects our memories back to us in a profound and terribly exciting way. Here, Jeck is at the peak of his creative powers.
The first track "Wholesome" shows how damn pretty Jeck can sound when so inclined. You expect pieces built from old manipulated vinyl and loops to be prickly with a disturbing undercurrent, but "Wholesome", which isolates, stretches and repeats a Disneyfied swirl of night sky strings and impressionistic piano plinks, is like a flower in perpetual bloom. It gets distorted and blacker toward the end when Jeck rolls off the treble completely, but that's just the sun setting and, like e.e. cummings said, if it has to happen, this is a beautiful way. "Wipe" is just as lovely with a different feel, distant and lonely instead of warm and welcoming. It reminds me of Experimental Audio Research circa "Tribute to John Cage in CAG*E", music for drifting slow through space, a cold drone echoing in an asteroid's cave.
"Now You Can Let Go" is where Jeck robs the memory bank for identifiable fragments. He turns crackly loops of locomotive chugs into percussion, pushes corny three-note jazz phrases nicked from a Steamboat Willie short into a dub chamber, and keeps a recording of a lathe humming along to bind it all into a singular sound machine. "Some Pennies" is doubly referential, as the ghostly bass ostinato looping through was also the central element of (the even more powerful) "Vinyl Coda I", recorded in 1999. It's an ominous piece of music, but somehow never threatens; despite its bleak overtone, "Some Pennies" is subtle and invites intimate observation. You want to inch closer and pick the piece apart, each layer of sound folded inside, a world within a world.
I like to think of "Bush Hum" as a reference to our president and the violence that's accompanied his term in office, though the sleeve notes indicate that the sole sound source for the track is the ungrounded hum of a Bush turntable run through a delay pedal. Still, the abrasive, atonal buzz generated by Jeck's processed electrical circuit could stand in for the sounds of war. An atypical track for a man whose music always incorporates the friction of the physical, "Bush Hum" is nonetheless very effective. Closing the album is the 10-minute veil, a slowly evolving rumble of Wagnerian strings, the symphonic loops of Zauberberg Gas without the kickdrum. How did Johnny Mathis say it in 1957? Oh yeah, "Wonderful! Wonderful!"
