To my surprise, the phone call went well: I didn’t scream, cajole,
or otherwise rant. Instead, I just learned that the Seattle Local
76-493 of the American Federation of Musicians would “seriously
consider” extending membership to a musician whose sole instrument is
the record player. Ten years ago, the AFM told me—even after I
described the turntable explorations of John Cage, Pauline
Oliveros, and Christian Marclay—that “DJs are not
musicians. Anybody can play records” and that “the record player is
not a musical instrument.”
Who were the first musicians to use the phonograph as a musical
instrument? Chris Cutler, in his seminal essay “Plunderphonics,”
unearths proto-turntablist-cum-composers Paul Hindemith and
Ernst Toch, who collaborated on three recorded studies called
“Grammophonmusik” in 1929. A decade later, Cage included two
variable-speed turntables in the eerie Imaginary Landscape No.
1.
Since then, the turntable has remained a mainstay of musical
invention. In the late 1940s, Pierre Schaeffer stumbled onto
musique concrète by slowing down and speeding up recordable
phonograph records. Les Paul pioneered multitrack recording in
1947 by repeatedly (and cleanly) dubbing disc onto disc on several
tunes, notably “Whispering” and “Lover.” Milan
Knízák, and later Boyd Rice, sabotaged the
vinyl record: “In 1963–64, I used to play records both too
slowly and too fast, and thus changed the quality of the music, thereby
creating new compositions. In 1965, I started to destroy records:
scratch them, punch holes in them, break them. By playing them over and
over again (which destroyed the needle and often the record player,
too), an entirely new music was created—unexpected, nerve-racking
and aggressive.”
During the disco era, DJs strung together pop music and “Disco
Singles” into symphony-sized sets. Innovators DJ Kool Herc,
who beat-matched drum breaks, and scratching pioneer Grand Wizzard
Theodore instigated simple but powerful techniques that proved the
turntable could be a flexible, virtuosic instrument for live
performance. Don’t ask a Juilliard-trained violinist to roll off the
bass, match a beat, and hammer the fader for a lightning-fast segue
in under 10 seconds.
Felt (Jack Straw New Media Gallery, 4261 Roosevelt Wy
NE, 634-0919, Mon–Fri 9 am–5 pm, free, through Aug 21) not
only continues the tradition of turntable-as-instrument but lets you
try it yourself. Conceived by pianist Gust Burns and poet
Melanie Noel, the installation’s four turntables allow you to
mix four LP-like “dub-plates,” whose fragility degrades with each
play. Scooting from turntable to turntable, you can cue each disc in
different places, randomly intersecting Noel’s poetry (“I knew you as a
boy/I did not make you violent”) with enigmatic rasps and rattles
recorded by Burns. Inevitably, cadential pops and raindrop crackles
appear, creating beautiful music out of inevitable, autonomic decay.
