CD – 7 tracks
Track list:
1. Wholesome
2. Museum
3. Wipe
4. Bush Hum
5. Now You Can Let Go
6. Some Pennies
7. Veil
“Johnny Mathis advances the art of remembering” (Mort Goode 1972)
… points of origin slip into areas of acceptance then long listening eliminates any worries about that acceptance and parts the normally tightly bound, throwing seldom acknowledged emotions through newly opened doors…
British musician Philip Jeck’s life work is with sounds, and how they may be transformed in random and unexpected ways. For instance, a needle stuck in a record’s groove is a source of consternation for most people. Jeck, on the other hand, is eager to let the diamond ride a while because the repeated passage becomes an object for study and transmutation. His artform is an otherworldly sound world of pops, clicks, and crackles, mostly built up from dusty vinyl dug up from junk shops and outdated phonographic equipment no one would cast a second glance at in this day and age. Transcendent and mysterious, 7 is a set of pieces created with a sample keyboard, and a trove of his beloved old vinyl. “Bush Hum” extends the enquiry further by looping the harmonic buzz of an old Bush record player into a polychromatic, shifting swarm. The music is enveloped in a patina of dread and beauty, something that’s remarkable considering how immiscible these two qualities normally are. But Jeck plumbs it with masterful verve. “Now You Can Let Go” references the echo of dub, “Museum” blends a brass fanfare with a mordant groan; “Wholesome” is anything but, considering its skeletal, arpeggio-tinted construct.
Reviews:
His Voice (CZ):
almost (USA):
I’ve been listening to Philip Jeck for some time now and he’s been winning me over a little more with each release. 7 might very well be his most accessible (ie least noisy) release, but it’s also one of his best-constructed in terms of sepia-tones soundscapes that he’s so good.
and from the same magazine:
I’ve stated it before in reviews that I’ve written that sometimes I feel that artists simply let noise and filters get the best of their work, ocassionally obscuring the best parts of it. Like his labelmate Christian Fennesz, the releases that I’d heard previously (including the near-excellent Stoke) from Philip Jeck had largely fallen into that category. Although I liked some of what he was doing and certainly respected his tactile craft (working from numerous turntables run through pedals), there were moments in many of his older releases that simply turned me off.
That is very rarely the case with 7, and in addition to easily being his most accessible work to date, I feel that it’s also his best. With 7 tracks running nearly 50 minutes, the release exudes a pastoral calm most of the time that is amazingly beautiful. The opening track of “Wholesome” is a perfect example, mixing soft washes of sound with what sounds like filtered chimes before slow, heavier melodies plod in and make their mark like the first footprints through a freshly fallen snow. The track builds ever-so-slightly in intensity by the end, but even the feedback is subdued, and if the middle part of the track is footprints being made, the closing is them being swallowed up by blowing snow again.
“Museum” starts out lovely as well before it is swallowed by overdriven noise, but somehow the woofer-wobbling noise is never too harsh while an almost classical melody rises out of the redlined beast towards the end. “Now You Can Let Go” is one of the least drifting tracks on the disc as it sounds like several different short loops get stuck in an almost glitchy way as slide guitar and maybe even a loop from a musical toy with one another before boat calls sound out and the track slides through even more sections. It’s the most frenetic (if you could call it that) track on the release, and a beat even makes its way into the mix towards the close.
Following the gritty looped feedback of “Bush Hum” (the only track on the album that steps over the noise threshold), the former track makes the middle of the album a slight high before the disc again quiets down. The closing track of “Veil” is a 10-minute narcotic knockout punch as it creeps along with a building filtered string loop that plays over a dark drone. It’s one of the best things that Jeck has done to date, and in addition to the other tracks on the release, it makes 7 one of the better ambient releases I’ve heard this year. If you’ve wondered about Jeck in the past but haven’t sought him out, this is the album to find first. With his methodical process, he turns the work of typical turntablists and DJs on its head and creates something unique and often moving at the same time.
Rating: 8.25
betamusic (singapore):
2004 best albums:
8 Philip Jeck-7 (Touch)
British musician Philip Jeck’s life work is with sounds, and how they may be transformed in random and unexpected ways. For instance, a needle stuck in a record’s groove is a source of consternation for most people. Jeck, on the other hand, is eager to let the diamond ride a while because the repeated passage becomes an object for study and transmutation. His artform is an otherworldly sound world of pops, clicks, and crackles, mostly built up from dusty vinyl dug up from junk shops and outdated phonographic equipment no one would cast a second glance at in this day and age. Transcendent and mysterious, 7 is a set of pieces created with a sample keyboard, and a trove of his beloved old vinyl. “Bush Hum” extends the enquiry further by looping the harmonic buzz of an old Bush record player into a polychromatic, shifting swarm. The music is enveloped in a patina of dread and beauty, something that’s remarkable considering how immiscible these two qualities normally are. But Jeck plumbs it with masterful verve. “Now You Can Let Go” references the echo of dub, “Museum” blends a brass fanfare with a mordant groan; “Wholesome” is anything but, considering its skeletal, arpeggio-tinted construct.
ie (USA):
The turntable is an instrument that confounds the easy assignment of the charge of “appropriation”. When the turntable – and here Jeck uses a number of obscure turntables, as a means to hear the particular ways of drifting through the grooves of wax afforded by technology – is made the object of attention, subject to modification, preparation, and effect, the ownership of the music in question becomes more fluid. Or at least, in the case of Jeck, beside the point. Hearing the intricacies of the final result is the aim of Jeck’s meditative gathering of vinyl, cutting of loops, reassembling of orbital collages and use of effects. On 7, the turntable itself is processed as instrument, with the line hum of a Bush record-player providing the sustenance to the delay pedal of “Bush Hum”, clocking Jeck’s plunderphonics to the tune of Martin Ng’s precise experiments with humnoise. Overall, Jeck differs from Ng as much as from Martin Tétrault’s wild excursions into strange objects and impulsive improve, and Janek Schaeffer’s custom turntables and self-pressed vinyl, through the primarily unaltered performance on the wax itself, save for the loops, simple mixes, and mild effects. This is Jeck’s greatest attribute as a sonic impressionist, an honest ear into the othersounds, and yet for some, the binds of his art. Jeck’s gentle demeanour is evident in the movement of his hands – on every Jeck release, there occurs the drop-out, the cut, the fade, the warble, the pitch-shift, the effect change, all performed with the hand. With “Bush Hum”, Jeck pinholes into areas that call for further, subtler exploration in a way only Jeck can do – with a cinematic drift, a rough and gritty nostalgia, a dirty wax of ages that renders “ambient” simply too atmospheric, missing all the dust and detritus of spin. [Toby C. van Deen]
Dusted (USA):
Philip Jeck creates hisbetamusic (singapore):
2005 best albums:
8 Philip Jeck-7 (Touch)
British musician Philip Jeck’s life work is with sounds, and how they may be transformed in random and unexpected ways. For instance, a needle stuck in a record’s groove is a source of consternation for most people. Jeck, on the other hand, is eager to let the diamond ride a while because the repeated passage becomes an object for study and transmutation. His artform is an otherworldly sound world of pops, clicks, and crackles, mostly built up from dusty vinyl dug up from junk shops and outdated phonographic equipment no one would cast a second glance at in this day and age. Transcendent and mysterious, 7 is a set of pieces created with a sample keyboard, and a trove of his beloved old vinyl. “Bush Hum” extends the enquiry further by looping the harmonic buzz of an old Bush record player into a polychromatic, shifting swarm. The music is enveloped in a patina of dread and beauty, something that’s remarkable considering how immiscible these two qualities normally are. But Jeck plumbs it with masterful verve. “Now You Can Let Go” references the echo of dub, “Museum” blends a brass fanfare with a mordant groan; “Wholesome” is anything but, considering its skeletal, arpeggio-tinted construct. music using discarded mid-twentieth century record players and a mostly indistinguishable assortment of bruised, scraped, unclean old records. Utilizing homemade lock-grooves, the speed-control settings on his old turntables, a delay pedal, some sort of Casio sampling keyboard, a mixer, the occasional mini-disc player and a hefty dose of random-factor, Jeck creates a dimly-lit, slow-motion world of grimy orchestral sounds, off-kilter rhythms, and warm analogue crackle. The machines and materials he uses, the process by which he creates, and the resulting music are entirely inseparable from one another. The methods he has devised and honed over the past two decades result in music that is unmistakably his own, and is deeply emotional while also fulfilling the conceptual goal of realizing new musical possibilities in machines and artifacts long left to rot in the backwash of history.
7 is, appropriately, Jeck’s seventh solo album. To anyone familiar with his previous work, in particular 2002’s Stoke, the limitations of his highly personalized idiom will become apparent quickly. For the most part, 7 is not a step forward conceptually – the materials and procedures are pretty firmly in place, and Jeck sounds comfortable and assured within his sound world. What makes 7 more enjoyable than Stoke is the heightened degree of focus and control with which he shapes his compositions. Where the element of chance seemed to be the dominant force on Stoke, the pieces on 7 seem to be based on a loosely predetermined sense of direction. Wobbly loops still arise suddenly, in sharp rhythmic contrast to their surroundings, repeating until their asymmetrical rhythms start to make sense; the lovely crackle and hazy edges of battered vinyl are still central to the overall sound. What is different is the vague song forms that emerge from several of the pieces on 7 – the fuzzy, spacey melancholy of the intact chord progression on “Wholesome,” the short, repeating melody buried beneath static and moans on “Some Pennies,” or the perfectly-timed entry of a bluesy harmonica snarl, echoing its way out of the ancient, lopsided ragtime dub of the album’s highlight, “Now You Can Let Go.”
Two of the pieces on 7 (“Wipe” and “Veil”) are pure ambient drones, very soft and airy. There is a sense of calm and distance here, yet the music does not shed the eeriness that is present throughout nearly all of Jeck’s work. Though the sounds he produces from recordings made by others may reveal only the tiniest traces of their origins, the sadness of forgotten dreams is always present, wafting through the layers of dust and neglect that coat these objects once left for dead.
Only one track, “Bush Hum,” finds Jeck focusing directly on the conceptual framework of his art. Here he forgoes his old records, instead applying his delay pedal and primitive sampler directly to the amplified hum of one of his Bush record players. In so doing he pushes his concept to a certain limit, tapping the very electricity which gives life to his art, finding musical potential in the seemingly most unwanted aspect of his ailing machine. It is a fine statement – this static buzz which once drove man to improve his technology now becomes the focus of a creative effort, something beautiful. As a piece of music, “Bush Hum” is interesting enough, but in its abrasive repetitions, it is far from the highlight of an otherwise strikingly beautiful album. For this reason, it is probably a good thing that Jeck has seemingly settled comfortably into his well-defined method, opting not to push conceptual boundaries but instead to plumb the emotional depths of his craft, to see what unknown feelings and memories lay hibernating in the dustiest corners of our minds. [Jesse Serrins]
Grooves (USA):
With this latest release, turntablist Philip Jeck takes up where he left off with last year’s ‘Stoke’. And yet, while ‘7’ is still very recognisably Jeckian – slow wavering loops culled from choral, blues and god-knows-what records, crackling viny, oneiric pacing – it also marks a further step forward, as Jeck experiments with new techniques while not wholly abandoning the old. Here he relies far more on work done at home than he did on ‘Stoke’, where he relied almost exclusively on live edits, which he stitched together in the studio. Many of the pieces here consist of a single specific phrase of a dramatically slowed record, such as on the opening and closing tracks “Wholesome” and “Veil”. These pieces contrast with his more thickly layered live work, exemplified by tracks such as “Now You Can Let Go” or “Some Pennies”, on which a variety of textures, samples and themes emerge and recede over time. At one time, Jeck departs from his trademark distresssed vinyl, something new for him as far as I know, and uses only the feedback hum of a Bush record player and a delay pedal to create the intense drone throb of “Bush Hum”. Though in many respects it’s not as a coherent a statement as ‘Stoke’, this record has stuck in my brain even more insistently. More importantly however, it’s a record that points towards new horizons for Jeck himself. [Susanne Bolle]
Seattle Weekly (USA):
THE ONLY REAL silence is the silence of a moment after it’s passed, and for the last hundred years or so, there’s been a way around that: recording. But you can’t record a sound or play it back without altering it irreparably. The machines that do the work refract what they capture and repeat. Joyce knew that, rocking toward and away from the microphone as he read “Anna Livia Plurabelle”; Defever knows that, reconstructing the parameters of the recordings he loves. And it’s the main point of Philip Jeck’s work. The British artist’s music is built around the sound of recordings and their players – not the performances stored on them, but the baseline noises of the material objects themselves. Often, bits of music stick to them, like shreds of meat on a bone. Jeck’s new album, 7 (Touch), is a set of pieces made with old record players, vinyl, and a sampling keyboard. “Bush Hum,” for instance, has nothing to do with the White House: It’s the harmonic buzz of an old Bush record player, cranked up high and looped into a throbbing electric swarm. The album closes with “Veil”: a few notes that might once have been from strings or a piano but were definitely from a not-quite-immaculately recorded piece of vinyl, progressively stretched out on the sampler until their digital grain, or analog cracks, comes into sharp focus. Through those uncertainties and gaps, you can hear the blood and breath of recording, the failures of perfect reproduction that are its signs of life.
Microview (USA):
One of today’s most revered turntablists, who uses and defines the intersection of analogue and digital technologies treats his listenership to a world of variant layered tones. On 7 Jeck has remodeled his talent in a way that defines the essence of what has become refreshing in sound today. By offering long, harmonic passages that are both mysterious and somewhat uncharted he has permeated hi-fidelity by using an equivalent of found objects (mature German turntables). His records crackle and bend and fade, though for the most part he uses them with such technique that you may confuse him for using sound samples and field recordings, the traditional sound of the classic DJ is virtually absent and this puts Jeck clearly in a category alone. What is produced in this meticulous production builds more like a crossbreed of sounds you might hear from Organum or John Duncan. Jeck is also one of the few active 50-somethings (like Asmus Tietchens) in a field where most of those performing are a few decades younger and strictly using digital means and apparatus. 7 could be one of the surprise discs of the year in its casual way of presenting what might happen if you pummeled through a living room with a locomotive-sized batch of angry Victrolas leashed by a soft spoken man who surpasses the ferocious humor of it all. With the collision of big band era cartoons and lapping Maui rhythms, the beat is plausible enough for further mixing. There are rasping wheels, troubled tubas and lots of make believe making this one of my favorite spins of 2003. [TJ Norris]
Aquarius (USA):
‘Tis the season for Philip Jeck, it seems! This UK sonic experimentalist is a big fave ’round these parts, so it’s been a festive month indeed with the recent release of a live recording (reviewed 2 lists ago) and now this brand new ‘studio’ album, AND a reissue of Jeck’s seminal, long out of print album Surf, reviewed nearby. Hallelujah. Jeck is simply a wizard with the turntables, not in a hip hop DJ sense but as a sound sculptor, making ghostly slow motion looping drones and beats with crackly old vinyl and the phonograph mechanism itself. Listening to his music is to submerge oneself into a mysterious, evocative realm of sound that capitalizes on the claustrophobia of the locked groove, that dwells on the dusty textures of vinyl as if examined by a field recordist, rather than the usual needle, tone-arm, pre-amp, speaker method of sound extraction. 7 is certainly a strong Jeck showing, lacking naught for crackling, glacial drone and ominous background melodies stolen from another time and place. It’s really amazing that it’s a turntable (or turntables) making possible Jeck’s music, which ranges from the very physical sounding action of a track like “Museum” to the simple haunting whoosh of “Wipe”. Track four, “Bush Hum” deserves special mention as it’s constructed soley from the “amplified hum of a Bush record-player and delay-pedal”. With those tools – no records – Jeck creates a totally electronic sounding track of buzzing rapid rhythmic noise, loud, grinding like a swarm of robot insects. The very next track, “Now You Can Let Go” takes the opposite approach, where there are indeed LPs on Jeck’s turntables, and you can actually catch traces of actual music being “sampled”. Squawks of big band jazz, a bluesy lick, warped exotica – but usually nothing really recognizable. It’s almost like modern electronic dance music at moments, but worshipping the skipping LP not the digital glitch. But it’s really Jeck’s compositions with even less overt ‘musical’ content that we prefer, and 7’s final track “Veil” delivers on that score with ten minutes of wonderfully droned-out sombre beauty, with no skips or scratches to interrupt its windswept trance… Of course, recommended!
The Wire (UK):
Philip Jeck may have been inspired to take up the turntable by Grandmaster Flash, but the origins of the sounds on 7 – his seventh album, running to seven tracks – would stump even the most dedicated sample magpie. A figure from a hi-fi enthusuast’s worst nightmare, Jeck scours junk shops for old record players, on which he plays vinyl straight from the 10p box, looping and mixing it at variable speeds – the more dusty and scratched, the better. Perhaps coloured by the neglected and unloved status of his material and equipment, much of 7 is overcast by a sense of foreboding. It all starts innocently enough, with ‘Wholesome’, where tumbling arpeggios evoke the optimism of sunrise – imagine the dawn scene in a nature documentary. Yet its crackly patina of nostalgia gives way to a distant melody that evokes a sense of unsettling and change. ‘Museum’ suggests similar images of loss, as a brass fanfare wavers and stutters befoire beig replaced by a desolate beat, half muffled funereal drum, half mournful groan. Even at its most minimal, Jeck is still inventive. Featuring no records at all, ‘Bush Hum’ is worked up from a hum of a Bush record playerand a delay pedal. Switching between the the octaves on one note is nothing new; however he creates a sense of urgency and menace, buzzing the rhythm between the speakers with even more complex variations. In contrast, ‘Now You Can Let Go’ takes the familiar – the retreating echo and stabbing horns of dub music – and distorts still further, increasing dub’s sense of elastic time and creeping paranoia. Or at least they nsound like they were once dub records: one of 7’s many joys is how its musical sources are so unrecognisable that they open up each track to the listener’s own bank of songs, images or memories. [Abi Bliss]
tinymixtapes (USA):
In an age when most music meddles around in an ostentatious swagger, it’s good to know that there are artists like Philip Jeck out there. Rather than worrying about flashy apparel and explosive, catchy choruses, Jeck worries about subtle dynamics and disparate textures. His approach is subtle but direct, repetitive but interesting, mainly executed by an assortment of record-players, a minidisc player, and a Casio keyboard. On 7, Jeck continues this bold quest of avant-garde turntabalism, creating a multi-faceted affair that is both dynamic and restrained. Of course, comparing Jeck’s music to braggadocios rock is trivial; what really matters is its comparison to previous efforts. Perhaps most noticeably different from 2002’s more well known Stoke is that 7, which was created by editing home and concert recordings, is a bit more accessible and catchy. It’s no pop album, to be sure, but it does have a quality that enables listeners to immediately identify the tracks. Ranging from abrasive electronics (“Bush Hum”) and Lynch-esque droning (“Some Pennies”) to eerie contrapuntal crackles (“Museum”) and eight-minute ruminations on static and manipulated guitar (“Wholesome”), Jeck massages every possibility out of his musical tools. The album is even more stimulating when he appropriates and recontextualizes melodic lost sounds (i.e. old records) by either juxtaposing or superimposing them with his created sounds (“Now You Can’t Let Go”).
In the end, however, it is Jeck’s deft approach and execution which makes this album so successful. The years he spent practicing his art saran-wraps every note, and not a moment goes by when his acute compositional skills are questioned. Naysayers may argue that Jeck’s 7 veers toward accessibility to appeal to the hipsters, but my ears tell me that 7 is a sonic documentation of an artist who has honed his craft. Although Host (released around the same time) is decidedly more experimental and daring, that doesn’t mean that 7 has an underlying intent of streamlining for the trucked-capped.
Stylus (US):
With each new album he puts out, British experimental turntablist Philip Jeck seems to be progressing closer and closer to his own warped conception of a kind of vinyl heaven: a place, perhaps, where forgotten records slowly dissolve into space, leaving only a vapor trail of their music hovering in the atmosphere. It’s there, to be sure, in the ghostly chorale of “Wipe” from his new album 7, which contrary to the title is his sixth solo disc, and fourth for the Touch label. The ghostly choir humming wordlessly seems to be soaring, reaching, desperately, sadly grasping for something, but what that something is can never be named without words; the choir has been made ineloquent, but the emotion of their vocalizing seems to gain an unearthly power and beauty even as it loses its specificity. As with the looped soul singer on “Pax” from last year’s Stoke, the loss of context—placing the disembodied human voice in a sea of vinyl crackles and shimmering noise—produces a profound sadness and tugs without melodrama at the heartstrings.
7, like all of Jeck’s albums, is dominated by this melancholy mood. He has increasingly focused his pieces—especially the shorter ones as featured on Stoke and this album—on a minimum of sources and ideas, developing and stretching each sonic shard into its own miniaturized world. “Some Pennies” revisits a wavering guitar loop that first appeared on theVinyl Codas, but relocated in a new context, amid a burbling mess of watery surface noise and distant percussive clattering. Even Jeck’s own work is not safe from re-contextualization; he has frequently explored the same sounds multiple times on different works, each time granting a new emotional tenor to the sounds due to their new surroundings. Here, his music has a newfound urgency and forward drive that was virtually unknown in the locked-groove meditations of his previous work.
Just as the end of “Some Pennies” submerges into an unexpected stew of gargling, harsh noise before sputtering out, “Bush Hum” uncharacteristically abandons records altogether, focusing instead on the amplified hum of the record player itself, manipulated with a guitar effects pedal. It’s a move that’s already been taken by turntablists prior to Jeck—most notably Martin Tetreault, who now focuses exclusively on improvising with whatever sounds he can wring from a bare turntable—but Jeck’s experiment yields some interesting and surprising results. “Bush Hum” has an entirely different character and mood from the rest of the album, comprised as it is of propulsive, guitar-like riffs of whirring feedback. Here, this track stands out too conspicuously and disrupts the album’s otherwise solid flow, but it nevertheless results a fascinating departure that Jeck could potentially incorporate into his future work.
Interestingly, “Bush Hum” is immediately followed by another uncharacteristic piece, “Now You Can Let Go.” With a greater emphasis on rhythm – of a conventional kind, as opposed to Jeck’s usual preoccupation with the inherent looping rhythm of a spinning record – and more recognizable sound sources, Jeck has created one of his oddest, most memorable, and most fun pieces yet. Bits of funky horns, cut-up and looped, disrupt the solemnity, and a homey harmonica solo unexpectedly cuts in, even as drums pile up in jittery drum-n-bass spasms.
The rest of the album expands upon the subtle grace of Stoke with small gestures and gorgeous melodies obscured by crackling static. The opener “Wholesome” is a layered exploration of arctic freeze, and the closer “Veil” provides its even more tranquil counterpart, an extended ambient wash that bears passing resemblance to the recent work of Touch labelmate Biosphere. If these tracks don’t expand Jeck’s palette quite as much as “Bush Hum” and “Now You Can Let Go,” there is still plenty of evidence here that Jeck is indeed moving forward. His music is more refined than ever, his engagement with his vinyl much more visceral and profound, resulting in an album that is more affecting than ever, but also more varied than any of his earlier releases. [Ed Howard, January 2004]
Pitchfork Media (USA):
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 C*A*G*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!” [Mark Richardson, January 13th, 2004]
Aquarius – record of the week (USA):
‘Tis the season for Philip Jeck, it seems! This UK sonic experimentalist is a big fave ’round these parts, so it’s been a festive month indeed with the recent release of a live recording (reviewed 2 lists ago) and now this brand new ‘studio’ album, AND a reissue of Jeck’s seminal, long out of print album Surf, reviewed nearby. Hallelujah. Jeck is simply a wizard with the turntables, not in a hip hop DJ sense but as a sound sculptor, making ghostly slow motion looping drones and beats with crackly old vinyl and the phonograph mechanism itself. Listening to his music is to submerge oneself into a mysterious, evocative realm of sound that capitalizes on the claustrophobia of the locked groove, that dwells on the dusty textures of vinyl as if examined by a field recordist, rather than the usual needle, tone-arm, pre-amp, speaker method of sound extraction. 7 is certainly a strong Jeck showing, lacking naught for crackling, glacial drone and ominous background melodies stolen from another time and place. It’s really amazing that it’s a turntable (or turntables) making possible Jeck’s music, which ranges from the very physical sounding action of a track like “Museum” to the simple haunting whoosh of “Wipe”. Track four, “Bush Hum” deserves special mention as it’s constructed soley from the “amplified hum of a Bush record-player and delay-pedal”. With those tools — no records — Jeck creates a totally electronic sounding track of buzzing rapid rhythmic noise, loud, grinding like a swarm of robot insects. The very next track, “Now You Can Let Go” takes the opposite approach, where there are indeed LPs on Jeck’s turntables, and you can actually catch traces of actual music being “sampled”. Squawks of big band jazz, a bluesy lick, warped exotica — but usually nothing really recognizable. It’s almost like modern electronic dance music at moments, but worshipping the skipping LP not the digital glitch. But it’s really Jeck’s compositions with even less overt ‘musical’ content that we prefer, and 7’s final track “Veil” delivers on that score with ten minutes of wonderfully droned-out sombre beauty, with no skips or scratches to interrupt its windswept trance… Of course, recommended! [Billy Kiely]
Earplug (USA):
Philip Jeck is not your typical turntablist. Like his sometime collaborators Christian Marclay, Otomo Yoshihide, and Martin Tétreault, Jeck attends not to beats, breaks, and scratching but rather to the massing of sound, looping and layering scratchy old vinyl until it settles into a kind of rich humus of hiss – fertile soil for the flowering of unexpected melodic shoots. Using vintage Dansette players, a rudimentary Casio sampler, and effects, Jeck isolates tiny fragments of songs – often slowed down to 16 RPM, they’re rendered utterly unidentifiable – and assembles them into dense, shifting structures as inviting as Op Art’s moiré patterns. His seventh (not including numerous collaborations) solo LP, 7 – like all of Jeck’s work – is nominally ambient, in that it opens up sprawling, immersive worlds best explored blindfolded. Individual moments blur and dissipate, and you’re left with the sense of having inhabited a vast, harmonic field where all possibilities co-exist at once. [PS]
Bad Alchemy (Germany):
PHILIP JECK hat sich, ähnlich wie Christian Marclay, als bildender und Konzept-Künstler in die >Broken MusicMythologies of Noise, Destructed Sound, and Electronic Music<, jedoch sind Jecks Vinyl-Loops so lärmig und opulent wie selten zuvor. Die meist auf Flohmärkten und im Ramsch herausgepickten Scheiben rotieren auf alten Plattentellern mit all der Patina und dem Staub, der sich in den Jahren angesammelt hat. Jeck benutzt gern ‘Records without a cover’. Was zählt, ist der Materialaspekt und der Dreheffekt, die Schichtungen, Überlagerungen, Verdichtungen und Verzerrungen der musikalischen Fetzen. Die dumpfen, kratzigen Echokaskaden von fragmentierten, komprimierten Orchesterstimmen lässt Jeck diesmal bis zum kakophonen Krescendo aufwallen. Statt High Fidelity und musikalischer Andacht herrscht die direkte Faszination durch die Magie der Klangspurenlese, die schon Milan Knizak gepackt hat. Wie aus den Fingerabdrücken der Recording Angels in schwarzem Plastik wieder His Master Voice erschallt und uns späte Ohrenzeugen mit archaischem, stampfendem Ritualgetrommel und Geisterchorstimmen im gyromantischen Wirbel überrollt, das zelebriert Jeck mit einer Intensität, als ob er mit seinen audioklastischen Mixadelics in den Partykellern von London und Brüssel einen neuen Voodookult schüren wollte. Gedämpfer ging Philip Jeck dann bei 7 (Touch, TO:57) zu Werk. In staubigen Rillen konservierte Vergangenheit ballt und verdichtet sich zu loopenden, eiernden Spiralnebeln einer Kunst der Erinnerung. Sieben Wendeltreppen führen hinab in von Patina überkrustete Archive, Lagerstätten abgestorbener Gefühle, die zu nebulösen Clustern eingedickt sind. ‘Veil’ nannte Jeck eine seiner Zeitreisen, ‘Museum’ eine weitere, ein verstottertes Zurücktasten entlang der Brailleschrift von Vinylscheiben mit Orchesterklängen, von denen nur noch runzlige Falten zu ertasten sind. Die aufgesuchten, wieder erweckten Tonwelten sind wie verschleiert von Jahresringen des Vergessens. Aber einmal erweckt und in Rotation versetzt, beginnt so ein Brummkreisel lärmig und wirbelnd den Raum zu besetzen und seinen Leck geschlagenen Speicher zu leeren, mit verstolperten Sprüngen und hakenden locked Grooves. ‘Now you can let go’ hält dieses Rauslassen im Titel fest und spielt dabei gleichzeitig auf ein psychologisches Loslassen an. Der Abschied, der erst möglich wird nach der Wiederbegegnung mit dem Verdrängten.