Vinyl Coda I-III

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An art school graduate, Liverpudlian Philip Jeck at some point developed an interest in creating installations examining the potential of analogue recording techniques. Collecting a staggering number of Dansette record players from the 1950s and 1960s - for the vast majority of us no more than quaint relics of a bygone age - he began teasing out the secrets ensconced in the orphaned vinyl he rescued from flea markets. As a disc jockey, his manipulations are far from the mad scratchathons of hip hop; and the textures he conjures forth are also much more than the dreary post-industrial landscapes to which one might be tempted to relate his aesthetic. Instead they are reminiscent of the crepuscular quietscape of Rapoon or the dub minimalism of the Chain Reaction collective. And yet Jeck creates so much more, too. As the apparatus are old and tired, they are apt to falter, and the records, scratched and dirtied by the years, are prone to wobble. All of which is incorporated into the soundscape on equal footing with the music contained within. Jeck can create a rhythmic loop of the dense scratches on an old LP that is sensual and tactile, downright physically appealing. On Vinyl Coda, a number of records are set going in loops (created by tampering with the discs themselves with exacto knives, glue or tape), whereafter Jeck seemingly leans back and listens to the sound unfold before judiciously overlaying another loop on another machine, or inserting a vocal or instrumental sample on still another - teacherly voices from instructional records, a Hawaiian luau, mad marimbas, Latin chanting, the audience whistling and applauding as some chanteuse introduces her next number in some basement club. No digital technology helps him - his only effects are an old reverb, a guitar delay pedal and the fingers with which he twiddles the dials of the record players. On all three pieces (roughly twenty, forty and sixty minutes long, respectively), the results are absolutely hypnotic. The title Vinyl Coda indicates that Jeck sees his pieces as the final bow for these albums, but the freshness and fascination provoked in the listener can only make one wonder if he´s only just begun to scratch the surface.