Liverpudlian Philip Jeck studied visual art at the Dartington College of Arts in Devon, England. During the early 80s, he drifted from painting and sculpture to music, and began working with old and discarded turntables. Though he's roughly a contemporary of Christian Marclay, recognition for Jeck came much later, beginning in 1993 with his massive installation "Vinyl Requiem", which incorporated 180 record players and multiple film projections. Since then, he's released several solo records for Touch and the German label Intermedium, and has collaborated with Otomo Yoshihide, among many others.
Much of Jeck's solo output is culled from edits of live performances. Using a number of battered turntables, a Casio keyboard, and a CD player or minidisc, Jeck creates dense, pulsating sound collages from the grooves of ancient and forgotten records. Like Yoshihide and Marclay, Jeck is no DJ. Though he stands over his decks with headphones on, his intention and methods with records has nothing to do with beat-matching or spinning tunes. Records are truly just sound sources for Jeck, raw material to be shaped via mixer and effects into his ghostly compositions.
Listening to his most recent album, Stoke, it's hard not to think about Jeck's background in visual art, and how it informs his audio work. There's something very cinematic about these pieces, though the music sounds nothing like a soundtrack. Some of the visual referencing could come from the regular pops and scrapes in the vinyl, which are reminiscent of the sound of a spool of film being fed into a projector. Jeck's endlessly rotating platters, like the whirr of moving film, serve as a constant reminder of the time-based nature of the medium. These pieces happen, and all you can do as a listener is try to extract information before they fade back into nothingness. You have to listen close and listen often.
Stoke finds Jeck more in the realm of focus and refinement. While the tracks in his "Vinyl Coda" series (worth checking out, by the way) ranged from 20 to 60 minutes, the seven distinct pieces here average less than eight. The relatively tight construction of the tracks means that Jeck can hone in on a single sonic idea and amplify it, extracting the maximum amount of emotional material from a few grimy loops. "Pax" is an uncharacteristically minimal piece combining a simple organ refrain and slowed-down vocals, possibly from an old gospel 78. The keyboard is very clean-sounding and might not be sourced from a record, but it perfectly complements the churched-up feel of the warped vocal, stretching the anguish of the indecipherable lyric to its breaking point.
"Close" uses ancient recordings of sacred music from another culture to beautiful effect, this time the ringing sounds of Indian classical. The undisciplined hiss of a loose sitar string is clipped to ribbons, then looped and recombined to sound like a warning, some indeterminate alarm sounding through a Himalayan valley. The piece takes a stunning left turn in its final quarter, turning to a loop of surface noise with an echoing and unbearably lonesome vocal floating on top.
"Lambing" is Jeck in drone mode, patiently adding and removing layers of sound and noise whose vinyl sources remain a complete mystery. The style on "Lambing" could be considered Jeck's signature, and it's amazing what he accomplishes through additive processes. There's something wonderfully machine-like about the operation. Since Jeck has the entire world of sound at his disposal, he has to figure how much of it to let in at any given moment, like mixing air with fuel inside a carburetor. Stoke proves him a master mechanic.
