CD – 10 tracks
Track list:
1. Casio
2. Anatomy
3. Louie’s Riddle
4. Ulster Autumn
5. PS One
6. Harry and Krishna
7. PS Two
8. The Christian Sink
9. The Frequent Pool
10. Incassum, Casio
On Loopholes, his impressive solo debut CD, Jeck uses tape loops and a cheap Casio keyboard to create a lo-tech jungle without the breakbeat – a collision of sources rendered unrecognisable through speed changes, short loop lengths and distortion. The progressive degeneration of material through successive re-recordings is celebrated in Jeck’s blissed out, textural aesthetic. For the Loopholes CD artwork, Touch label partner and graphic designer Jon Wozencroft creates a neat visual analogy to the music using photographs of VHS playbacks of images generated by camcordering TV pictures. The medium loops back on itself and enhances its own idiosyncratic qualities. “Its similar to the way I’m working with sound: just textures and landscapes. You’re not quite sure what they are and it doesn’t matter,” says Jeck. “I’m not brilliant at keeping time with tunes or whatever”…
Reviews:
The Wire (UK):
“The loop ‘n’ scratch method Jeck made famous in his Vinyl Requiem installation for 180 Dansette players has more than mere novelty value. The music rising out of the method affords a glimpse of the future through prisms of past records. The advantage that obsolescent avant gard tricks for tape and vinyl have over sample loops is their very unreliability. Tape loops eventually stretch out of phase, antique record player speeds are apt to falter. Jeck brings such flaws into play as an extra chance element in pieces already abounding in pleasures and surprises from the way he resolves the textural and timbral clashes of his various mismatched sound sources.”
Philip was also interviewed in the same August 1995 edition:
“On Loopholes, his impressive solo debut CD, Jeck also uses tape loops and a cheap Casio keyboard to create a lo-tech jungle without the breakbeat – a collision of sources rendered unrecognisable through speed changes, short loop lengths and distortion. The progressive degeneration of material through successive re-recordings is celebrated in Jeck’s blissed out, textural aesthetic. For the Loopholes CD artwork, Touch label partner and graphic designer Jon Wozencroft creates a neat visual analogy to the music using photographs of VHS playbacks of images generated by camcordering TV pictures. The medium loops back on itself and enhances its own idiosyncratic qualities. “Its similar to the way I’m working with sound: just textures and landscapes. You’re not quite sure what they are and it doesn’t matter,” says Jeck. “I’m not brilliant at keeping time with tunes or whatever,” Jeck continues, outlining his idiosyncratic and primitive approach to sound construction. “With looped records or looped tapes the rhythmic structure looks after itself. I listen to the sound and change the tone controls actually on the record players. And I really only use two effects – an old cheap reverb which goes wrong occasionally and a guitar delay pedal. I just fiddle around with the controls until it sounds right.”
Jeck trained in the visual arts at Dartington College and moved on to performance work in the 1970s. For a short while he was in demand as a DJ at warehouse parties imitating the innovative turntable techniques he’d heard coming from the States on records such as Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s Adventures on the Wheels of Steel. But it was during a five to six year collaboration with contemporary dancer Laurie Booth, which took him all over Europe, when he developed his own particular style on stage in front of an audience, tailoring his aesthetic more to the manner of performers like Paul Burwell and Max Eastley…Besides his ongoing work for dance companies (including a forthcoming BBC Dance for Camera programme), Jeck also works with the song-based group Slant. Meanwhile, Jeck’s biggest project, the 180 turntable audio-visual collaboration Vinyl Requiem, starts a European tour at this year’s Hamburg Summer Festival. Jeck’s listening habits are wide-ranging and eclectic, including Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys, Sinatra’s Capitol recordings, John Cale and Nico, God, Material/Bill Laswell, fellow turntable manipulators Christian Marclay and DJ Krush, and the obligatory Bristol trio of Massive attack, Tricky and Portishead. For performance purposes, however, Jeck prefers the records he finds in car boot sales – records otherwise destined for obscurity.
Among the minimal information on the Loopholes CD booklet there’s a Latin quote: Versa est luctum cithara mea… “That’s from a piece of music I really like,” explains Jeck, “a funeral motet by a Spanish composer, Victoria. It means, “My harp is tuned to mourning”. And I am in mourning about a lot of things in this world, in this country.”
Remix (Japan):
Loopholes was in Yamatsuka Eye’s top five CDs of 1995…
On Magazine (UK):
“A textbook example of how to make influential and stimulating music without playing a note. Taking old dansette record players, tape machines, a battered casio keyboard, and adding a sprinkling of good old fashioned creativity (no Akai samplers here…), Philip Jeck has fashioned a record of mesmerising depth and quality. From the opening tinklings, one is struck by the complexity of sound generated from such a limited arsenal, and the work’s ordered appearance, despite the inevitable contribution of chance to the project. With nods in the direction of Oval’s CD eccentricities, dubs’ exploration of echo, distortion, and speed manipulation, and even the underlying properties of a marching band (on the chilling Ulster Autumn), this is probably one of the few recently released avant-garde efforts with the potential to cross over into the domain of the more adventurous ambient explorer. A low-fi classic for the electronic generation, and another quality contribution from the invariably impressive Touch label, straddling the tightrope between indulgence and inspiration with some skill (check out their Ash 1.9 Runaway Train for one of the most ludicrously enthralling recordings you’ll hear all year).” DJ 4 minutes 33
The Empty Quarter (UK):
“I feared the worst when I heared the tinkle of toytown bells on the opening Casio and thought this was going to be a general piss-take. But no, the second Anatomy added meat immediately through a looping of static charge. Philip Jeck uses old equipment rather that being a resident of the digital domain, not that you’d realise this by listening to Loopholes. Perhaps this is why there’s a scratchy aura surrounding the recordings. He utilises vinyl discs which offer an authentic outmoded (in these times) feel. Long tracks reel around the speakers as rhythms fuse the tonal repitition into accessible pieces of music. Louie’s Riddle might even be viewed from some techno chart of one sort or another, such is the easy nature of Jeck’s work. Definitely one for those who are a little afraid to dip their toes into experimental waters.”
CMJ (USA):
“PHILIP JECK, of the British group Slant, plays turntables and tape-loops (and makes some particularly inspired use of the usually banal Casio) on his superb solo album, Loopholes (Touch (UK), c/o Dutch East India, 150 W. 28th St., Ste. 501, New York, NY 10001). His loops and spinning records create musical whirlpools from lush orchestral fragments, unnerving marching band drum cadences and strange, unidentified percussive sounds. These varied sounds vie together well as an album through their similarities of movement and a very interesting wobbly character produced through turntable speed manipulation and cheap reverb.”
i/e (USA):
“Sometimes, sampling just means plunderphonics – vaguely altering the original’s sound source and using it for dubious means – and sometimes it’s used in a particularly novel manner, as Philip Jeck offers on the gangly Loopholes. Using just a single Casio keyboard, plus vatious tape-recorders and record-players, Jeck conjures up everything from systemic beatmusic (“Louie’s Riddle”) to aliens in the bush speaking in tongues (“PS Two”). Seemingly ‘simply’ constructed, in reality these arresting pieces form a complex and highly individualistic mosaic of sound.”
EST (UK):
“He really needs to be seen live, but Loopholes by Philip Jeck [Touch] has its own mild-mannered appeal. Jeck takes existing vinyl and creates artificial lock-grooves, looping and cycling and mixing several records at once (plus occasional similar tape manipulations). The obvious comparison, Christian Marclay, seems to lack Jeck’s rhythmic mesmerism. The hypnotic side of Jeck’s music is to the fore here, often at the expense of internal variety. That said, most tracks show subtle development, and the atmosphere created is often pleasingly surreal (e.g. on the estimable Louie’s Riddle, with its insistent drum loop; or on the ominous shriek and martial drums of Ulster Autumn).”
Tango (Lithuania):
“Sis darbas pirmiausia i aki krinta novatorisku ir originaliu priemoniu panaudojimu, nors idejiniu aspektu jam galima papriekaistauti… Kitas, ne maziau intriguojantis leidinio aspektas – procesas, kuriuo realizuojamos idejos. Stai siame santykyje ir rutuliojasi kompozicijos priemonemis, turi savita skambesio charakteri ir apskritai daro idomaus ir intriguojancio leidinio ispudi.”