CD – 7 tracks – 53:32
Track list:
1. Above
2. Lambing
3. Vienna Faults
4. Pax
5. Below
6. Open
7. Close
Reviews:
The Wire (UK):
With its acrobatic athleticism and penchant for charming gimmicks, in all likelihood HipHop will indefinitely dominate the field of turntablism. Even record-spinning abstractionists like Christian Marclay and Martin Tetrault, who may not always share HipHop’s necessity for the beat, put on flashy demonstrations that engage the machismo of technique, alongside their critically minded recombinations of cultural readymades. While Philip Jeck’s performances, installations, and recordings have centred around his arsenal of turntables (at last count, he was up to 180 antique Dansette record players, though more normally he performs on two or three, and a minidisc recorder), he isn’t terribly interested in the contemporary discourse of turntablism, preferring to coax a haunted impressionism with those tools. However as a calculating improvisor, he shares affinities with the turntable community. Once he is in control of the overall context of the music, he leaves much to the spontaneous reaction towards sound at any given moment.
A typical Jeck composition moves at an incredibly lethargic pace through a series of looped drone tracks caught in the infinities of multiple locked grooves. As he prefers to use old records on his antique turntables, the inevitable surface noise crackles into gossamer rhythms of pulsating hiss. Occasionally, Jeck intercedes in his ghostly bricolage with a slowly rotated foreground element – a disembodied voice, a melody, or simply a fragment of non-specific sound – which spirals out of focus through a warm bath of delay. For almost ten years now, Jeck has been developing this methodology, building up to Stoke, his strongest work to date. Its opening passages are on a par with his Vinyl Coda series, with Jeck effortlessly transforming grizzled surface noise into languid atmosphere.But Stoke really gets going with the breathtakingly simple construction of Pax, upon which Jeck overlays an aerated Ambient wash with the time-crawling repetition of a single crescendo from an unknown female blues singer. By downpitching her voice from the intended 78 rpm to 16 rpm, he amplifies its emotional tenor by making her drag out her impassioned declarations of misery far longer than is humanly possibly. The effect is just beautiful. Philip Jeck has always been good, but Stoke makes him great. [Jim Haynes]
k-punk (UK):
Jeck’s Stoke, which I recently – and belatedly – discovered courtesy of Touch’s Jon Wozencroft, is another oneiric drift through the archives. Listening to the record – or rather gradually being possessed by it – over the course of the last few weeks has confirmed my initial impression that any serious discussion of sonic hauntology cannot ignore Philip. His sound could be characterized as a dyschronic, disembodied hip hop (a dream hop?) – Jeck ‘started using record players in the early eighties after hearing mixers like Walter Gibbons and Larry Levan and Grandmaster Flash’ – produced using dansette turntables, FX units and records found in charity shops. (Imagine what you thought middlebrow mediocrities DJs Shadow and Spooky sounded like before you actually heard the records). But Jeck’s methodology – he composes his records largely from edits of live performances – makes it equally plausible to describe him as a junk shop counterpart of Teo Macero, the legendary sonic sorcerer who conjured wondrous unlive collages from Miles Davis’ studio playing. (It’s not at all coincidental that Eno mentioned Macero on the sleeve notes to On Land.) Both the hip hop DJ and the studio remixer are experts in the necromantic art of manipulating sonic unlife: the DJ performs live manipulations of Read Only Memory recordings, whereas the remixer takes a live performance out of the lived duration of so-called real time into the unlive no-time of the studio. Like sonic hauntology in general, Jeck – a steampunk surgeon of sound, a surfer of surface noise – is at the confluence of these two approaches. Stoke is often keeningly plaintive, although there is an impersonal, mechanical quality to the melancholy, almost as if it belongs to the aged machinery and the recovered objects themselves. Philip refers to the sonic sources he uses as ‘fragments of memory, triggering associations’ but it is crucial that the memories are not necessarily his; the effect is is sometimes like sifting through a box of slides, photographs and postcards from anonymous people, long gone.
In his excellent review of Stoke for Pitchfork, Mark Richardson drew out the virtual-visual dimension of Philip’s work (remember that Jon W always insists that Touch is an audio-visual label):
“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.”
Grooves (USA):
In this technology-happy age, English turntablist Philip Jeck is a bit of an anomaly. After all, electronic musicians are some of the most ravenous consumers, searching for ever faster processing power, whiz-bang features, and higher fidelity in their quest for the state of the art. With his willfully antiquated equipment – Dansette turntables, a couple of basic effects pedals, and a cheap Casio keyboard – Jeck flies in the face of present tech-fetish fashion, constructing his hazily oneiric, undulating music out of a stack of crackling, resolutely imperfect vinyl. “I started using record players in the early eighties after hearing mixers like Walter Gibbons and Larry Levan and Grandmaster Flash,” he wrote via email, when asked to explain the origins of his interest in working with turntables. “I bought a second turntable and a mixer and at first tried copying them.” His present method of working with turntables emerged out of this stint as a hip-hop deejay, playing extended rhythmic breaks at dancehalls and clubs.
Besides Grandmaster Flash and other hip-hop deejays, Jeck’s primary formative influence was Christian Marclay, who, in Jeck’s words “showed how big the possibilities were.” Not that Jeck ever aped Marclay’s distinctive, collagist style. Instead he developed his own, idiosyncratic way of working, making extensive use of longer loops, locked grooves and queasy repetitive elements, techniques that are very different not only from those of Marclay, but also from other experimental turntablists like Japan’s Otomo Yoshihide and Montreal’s Martin Tetreault. While their styles might be quite different, like Marclay, Jeck favors vintage equipment. In his case his player of choice is the Dansette, a most unusual turntable that plays records at four speeds, rather than the typical two or three. His predilection for Dansettes was born while he was still doing dance gigs in the early eighties. “I had some old 78 rpm shellac records I wanted to play,” he says, recalling his introduction to player of choice. “I found an old player in a record shop that played at 78. But when I got it home, I found that it also played at 16. Playing records at that speed is great.” The gradual evolution of his style began with his growing fascination with the possibilities engendered by antiquated equipment like the Dansette, but he also notes another key factor in the emergence of particular style. “I also, throughout the 80s, worked a lot with the dancer Laurie Booth,” he explains, “doing improvised performances all over Europe (and New York). I developed my way of playing through this, using any kind of record that I found, not for any purpose other than finding sound that had an emotional impact on me.”
Beyond this emphasis on repetition and the emotionally evocative, what distinguishes Jeck’s approach from that of other turntablists is the way that he uses popular music in his work. This goes beyond the extended woozy blues excerpts and snippets of half-familiar tunes that he incorporates into his work, which function as much more than cleverly ironic references within a larger, abstract sonic collage. As he explains it, his intention is to generate a feeling similar to that created by a classic pop song. “My inspiration is from all sorts of musics, especially popular music,” he says. “In my head, as I am playing, I search for the same emotional impact as the first exciting records I heard (Elvis, The Beatles, etc.), and then try to expand those moments.”
This emphasis on emotional effect is contingent not simply on the listeners’ recognition of particular recordings that he uses – only a scant few of which are immediately recognizable anyway. His is not an exercise in abstracted nostalgia, though there is certainly an element of such longing. The use of vinyl is itself evocative, especially given the highly distressed state of the records that Jeck uses – to put it mildly, he does not treat his vinyl stock with an audiophile’s care, instead aging his records with a hefty dose of studied neglect, as well as preparing them with tape, glue and a scalpel to create lock grooves. Enveloped in a haze of static-filled crackles and the hurdy-gurdy sound of warped vinyl, the listener seems to experience Jeck’s work as if through the distorted lens of memory. “Each fragment of sound is like a stored memory,” he explains, “triggering associations, sometimes nostalgic, but often not quite clear, but still adding to the overall emotional feel.”
The size of Jeck’s set-up can vary from just two to three players plus effects boxes, samplers and Casio to any number of players (as he puts it, it all depends on the budget). Undoubtedly, Jeck’s most ambitious work to date is 1993’s Vinyl Requiem, a sprawling multimedia piece that employed 180 record players. While a version of the Requiem has yet to make it to record or CD, a number of Jeck’s long-form improvisations have been released, most famously the Vinyl Codas I-IV, which appeared on two separate CDs on Intermedium. In addition to the four Codas, his more recent collaborations with German turntablist Claus Von Bebber (Intermedium) and Danish musician, Jacob Kierkegaard (Touch) provide further glimpses of Jeck’s live performance with their cyclical, slow evolution and queasily hypnotic atmosphere.
His most recent solo release, last year’s magisterial Stoke (Touch), was constructed primarily in the editing room, as Jeck fashions shorter pieces using elements culled from a variety of live performances. The tight control of the studio stands in sharp contrast to the risk that is an essential ingredient in Jeck’s live set-up: “Spontaneity and unpredictability are the things I use to keep me mentally awake and in the moment when I need to be,” he says. “The equipment I use is old and can always go ‘wrong’. A record player can start to play at a different speed or even vari-speed, changing the ‘feel’ of the sound, causing me to react and make sense of the change. It keeps me on my toes!” [Susanna Bolle]
The Sound Projector (UK):
Jeck, Lord of the ‘art’ turntable, Duke of the Dynaflex and Denizen of the Dansette, hits town with his latest worn vinyl-fest, all ‘edits’ captured from his international live performances. Seven honey-drenched and richly saturated tracks spread thickly over 53:32 minutes. As always, here be lots of loops, lots of layers, lots of chance events creating fortuitous musical moments, yet Jeck always leaves his fingerprints on every second. Voices and musics are set off in constant circles, yet never quite repeating the same patterns twice over. Distressed surface noise also becomes a part of the overall tableau, and is transformed into sweet music. Ambiguity turns into certainty, as Jeck forces the hand of chance. ‘A glimpse of the future through prisms of past records,’ is how The Wire describes his work; I like the idea that you can see the future through listening. Perhaps Jeck is a magus, casting the runes, throwing the Tarot or spinning the I Ching, with all the mastery of a mystic adept. The chance shuffles of his vinyl Tarot deck will always reveal a credible configuration of future events…he releases all the untapped energy of a precognitive dream. His loops and repeats will send you into a trance, in which state you will babble in tongues and reveal the secrets of the world beyond. Jeck speaks of ‘the combination of a half-remembered noise and the nostalgia of a room..expressing the thoughts that at one time slip into every home.’ Like Soaked, this CD is heavy on nostalgic experiences and sad, weepy evocations of loss and tragedy. ‘Pax’ is a real standout cut here, with its trembling, slowed-down voice moaning against an organ music backdrop, and is probably one of the most affecting things you’ll hear, enabling contact with a buried part of your own humanity you had thought was long lost. Then again, ‘Below’ has a slightly more aggressive edge, a chaotic centre that might result from the tension of doing it live. Oddly, though, it’s hard to imagine Jeck’s private and intimate work in the arena of a public venue. The recorded results always seem to be beyond mass communications, instead speaking to the listener directly. [Ed Pinsent]
Pitchfork Media (USA):
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. [Mark Richardson]
Aquarius (USA):
Compared to the recent release of the collaboration between avantgarde turntablists Philip Jeck, Otomo Yoshihide, and Martin Tetreault, Jeck’s solo production receives the superior packaging job — not only with the normal sized digipack (and not that stupid ‘super jewel case’) but also with the beautiful design from Touch’s Jon Wozencroft. Furthermore, Jeck’s album clocks in nearly 20 minutes longer and is two bucks cheaper. OK, so it looks good, but what does it sound like?, you ask. The AQ verdict is — it sounds wonderful! Philip Jeck’s take on turntable experimentation involves using multiple turntables and scratchy old records to create blissfully beautiful surface-noise looping. His largely improvised compositions make the most gorgeous, repetitive, droning use of good old-fashioned record crackle and hiss. Jeck takes great care to allow for scraps of melody to emerge from the original music on the records with snippets of piano, sitar, and slow-motion vocals, popping out of crackled loops and often recalling the height of the Robin Storey era Zoviet France in the late ’80s. What differentiates this new album from the previous excellent ones in his ouevre is its dynamics (perhaps due to the fact that these were all live performances?) — the music is more active in terms of the elements used and their resulting emotional power. In fact, the first track “Above” is the creepiest composition I’ve ever heard from Jeck. The dynamism is also evident in that he uses more individual sounds that unfold over time but *not* necessarily being looped. It’s nice to hear him trusting the sounds to stand on their own rather than needing the looping effect to make them beautiful. Highly recommended!!
The Wire [UK]:
With its acrobatic athleticism and penchant for charming gimmicks, in all likelihood HipHop will indefinitely dominate the field of turntablism. Even record-spinning abstractionists like Christian Marclay and Martin Tetrault, who may not always share HipHop’s necessity for the beat, put on flashy demonstrations that engage the machismo of technique, alongside their critically minded recombinations of cultural readymades. While Philip Jeck’s performances, installations, and recordings have centred around his arsenal of turntables (at last count, he was up to 180 antique Dansette record players, though more normally he performs on two or three, and a minidisc recorder), he isn’t terribly interested in the contemporary discourse of turntablism, preferring to coax a haunted impressionism with those tools. However as a calculating improvisor, he shares affinities with the turntable community. Once he is in control of the overall context of the music, he leaves much to the spontaneous reaction towards sound at any given moment.
A typical Jeck composition moves at an incredibly lethargic pace through a series of looped drone tracks caught in the infinities of multiple locked grooves. As he prefers to use old records on his antique turntables, the inevitable surface noise crackles into gossamer rhythms of pulsating hiss. Occasionally, Jeck intercedes in his ghostly bricolage with a slowly rotated foreground element – a disembodied voice, a melody, or simply a fragment of non-specific sound – which spirals out of focus through a warm bath of delay. For almost ten years now, Jeck has been developing this methodology, building up to Stoke, his strongest work to date. Its opening passages are on a par with his Vinyl Coda series, with Jeck effortlessly transforming grizzled surface noise into languid atmosphere.But Stoke really gets going with the breathtakingly simple construction of Pax, upon which Jeck overlays an aerated Ambient wash with the time-crawling repetition of a single crescendo from an unknown female blues singer. By downpitching her voice from the intended 78 rpm to 16 rpm, he amplifies its emotional tenor by making her drag out her impassioned declarations of misery far longer than is humanly possibly. The effect is just beautiful. Philip Jeck has always been good, but Stoke makes him great. [Jim Haynes]
Splendidzine (USA):
Before diving into Stoke, it’s best to acquaint oneself with its composer and his unusual musical convictions. While Jeck utilizes multiple turntables for his musical expression, he is not a DJ by electronic or hip-hop standards. With a fondness for scratches, dust particles and other physical vinyl deformities, Jeck is the record collector’s absolute worst nightmare. In order to maintain his impressive instrumental arsenal, Jeck purposely leaves his vinyl out of its sleeves, encouraging environmental deterioration for the sake of creating a one-of-a-kind sound bank that no keyboard could ever match. Consequently, Jeck’s instrumentation is always in a state of flux and he can never perfectly reproduce a composition in its entirety. And while certain musicians deemed “composers” by the listening public are generally classified under a broad “experimental” label, Jeck’s unique, and at times absolutely bizarre presentation leaves him in a genre all his own. Jeck’s instruments of choice on Stoke consist of Bush, Fidelity and Philips record players, a Casio keyboard and an Alba portable CD player. Together, this peculiar collection coalesces into a layered fabric of cyclical waves, ambient textures and distinctively inimitable orchestrations that fall somewhere in between an old Nurse with Wound release and the bleeding edge of musical composition. Six out of the seven tracks here are edits of live performances recorded in such varied locales as Liverpool and Osaka; “Lambing” is the sole home recording, created for a Lucy Baldwyn film. Oddly enough, each mechanized composition has a peculiar movie-score quality to it; Jeck’s jangles either settle quietly in the background, subtly altering moods, or swoop abruptly to the forefront, picking at your wits like a ravenous vulture. “Vienna Faults” brings to mind an electronic pet store, complete with chirping birds, whirling fish tanks full of tropical exotics, and plodding lizards, modestly surveying the surroundings. South Asian flavors dominate “Below”, as haphazard sitar notes precariously wobble through textured record-hissing. The corresponding sister tune, “Above”, has a more organic feel, as DJ Jeck manipulates his turntables’ pitch, cascading unexpected sound effects over nameless artists’ deconstructed tunes as if echoing a cryptic Future Sound of London track. It’s a bit much sopping up everything on Stoke in one sitting, as the muscle behind the discordant drones and fugacious changes is exposed only after several headphone-led excursions. Taken in small doses, however, Jeck provides some immediately appealing and innovative work that shouldn’t be overlooked by any musical thrill-seeker bored with the stagnant state of rock ‘n’ roll. Thankfully, Jeck’s combination of three turntables and a (possible) microphone doesn’t translate into being “where it’s at” on the alt-rock scene; instead, he strives to push the definitive boundaries of 21st century music. [Andrew Magilow]
Brainwashed.com (net):
Philip Jeck always seems to surprise and surpass expectation every time I hear him perform. I’ve heard him spin out haunting loops for avant garde dancers to strut about to in art spaces. I’ve heard him spin stickered platters alongside guitarist Vergil Sharkya and fractal videographer Gerd Willschvetz in an underground car park in Liverpool. I’ve heard his scaffolded ranks of old car boot turntables mash up crackly memory traces from worn needles bumping into wires and stickers in a London gallery. I’ve heard him go walkabout at a festival opening, cutting up dictaphone recordings with the pause button. After his ambitious quartet of lengthily (r)evolving ‘Vinyl Codas’ released by the Intermedium label, he returns to Touch with seven shorter live excerpts from performances in Liverpool, Manchester, Osaka, Tokyo and Vienna. With only a single sample Casio keyboard to aid the junkyard turntables spinning varispeed deteriorating vinyl, he necessarily limits his options but unlocks endless potentials from abundant alternate histories coded in the grooves. When he loops records at low speed, worn old cliches morph into haunting new textures. A phantasmal keyboard hoot that forms the bedrock of “Pax” sounds like it might’ve morphed slowly from a cheesy old J. Geils Band charity shop hit. “Above” cuts scratchy old vinyl into train chug clunks and chicken squawk with some slowed speech narration to explain what exactly isn’t going on. “Lambing” is a home recording, soundtracking a film by Lucy Baldwyn, and wouldn’t sound out of place on his previous Touch CD ‘Surf,’ with groaning ghost vox repeating an eerie refrain over the crackle’n’drone spin, until slowly a sunrise glow cracks dawn beneath the locked groove rhythm faultlines. “Vienna Faults” waltz around like a music box in a tumble dryer. There’s some crazily mangled sitar “Below,” reversing into hollow metal hammering, cut dead by a sudden descending blues guitar riff. “Open” seems to rework familiar noises from ‘Surf’ into a noisier delayed clatter. “Close” does just that, with some more sitar loops, more meditative but just as playful as before. Stray starry plucked fragments drop in at odd angles until a loop locks and deteriorates to a stutter as a single piano note bashes to infinity. A ghost choir of Hamaiian folk singers emerges from the vinyl crackle fog to bid a fond farewell. If you haven’t heard Philip Jeck before, this is not his most immediate recording and ‘Surf’ or the ‘Vinyl Coda’ series might be better ports of entry. He has not yet left the building. [Graeme Rowland]
Portugal (net):
“The combination of a vaguely remembered noise and the nostalgia of a room…”. What Philip Jeck proposes, then, is a mnemonic exercise, of a “homemade” or “domestic” essence, resorting to no less handmade equipment, such as old record players, a lo-fi sampler, a dictaphone and a CD player likewise in need of retirement, in the aural search of some paradis perdu of the vynil era. At the extreme opposite of a turntable virtuoso and the fragment aesthetics of Christian Marclay, of Martin Ttrault or the Japanese Otomo Yoshide, Philip Jeck’s third CD is most likely closer to the nostalgia of Pierre Bastien. But if Bastien looks for “trance” through the repetition of sound fractal molecules, spinning our memory in an endless loop of quotes – “belle epoque” or more traditional jazz, Jeck blocks those same loops, covering and uncovering, making a mess where Bastien had applied the detergent. The result is abrasive, industrial, composed of accumulation of residues out of which strange lithurical atmospheres emerge – such as in “Pax”, a gospel lament that evokes the more intellectualised manipulations of Carl Stone or Ingram Marshall, smashed by a misplaced couch. [Fernando Magalhes] Translated by Heitor Alvelos
Side Line (Belgium):
P. Jeck brings experimental back to its most natural form: a point from which you have to progressively explore the infinite universe of sound sources. This is an exploration throughout diversified spectrums, covering different styles like ambient, industrial and pure experimentalism. “Stoke” is a very bizarre entity for the diversified sounds we aren’t really used to. P. Jeck sounds closer to a sort of noise-scientist than a musician does and he therefore may remind of the early pioneers of electronic music. I personally prefer the last tracks, “Below”, “Open” and “Close” for being a bit more elaborate. This album goes crescendo, like he first had to find the raw materials to finally conceive a final product! This is an essential record for the lovers of meaningful experimental and ambient stuff! (DP: 6/7) DP.
XLR8R (USA):
Turntablist Philip Jeck is no garden-variety DJ. Armed with a coterie of vintage Dansette phonographs, a slew of used records, a keyboard and a CD player, Jeck fashions his enigmatic music out of hazy, off-killer loops and crackle, snatches of sepiatoned melodies , and distorted vocals. Like much of Jecks work, many of the seven pieces that make up. Stoke possess a distinctive, ominous quality to them, even at their most beautiful. Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of Jeck compositions- such as “Lambing” with its plaintive howls and soft staticky pops or the oneiric blues of “Pax” – is that they are both mesmerising and profoundly unsettling. Very highly recommended. [Susanna Bolle]
VITAL (Netherlands):
To be very, very honest: turntable players are usually not my cup of tea – and I don’t know why. Maybe it has to do with the superstart status some DJs have acquired over the years, so that they are the rockstars of the millenium (as far as we know it). And why? Because they play a few pieces of vinyl and get the crowd cheering? But there is also a group of people using turntables like rock artists who use a guitar: as an instrument. Here too I sometimes have problems, certainly when the played records are easy to be recognized. No such thing however in the work of Philip Jeck. Stoke, his third full length for Touch, was recorded at various concerts and uses besides various record players, also a simple casio keyboard and a CD player. With these relative simple means, Jeck sculpts his music. Building it layer by layer, adding slowly more pieces. Of course there is a rhythmical aspect to this dark music, but hey we’re talking extensive use of vinyl here. As said none of his sources can be recognized, but I guess they are pretty much old 78 RPM’s. Highly minimal music, that is also highly fascinating. The repetitiveness of the music lulls you into a hypnotic state, but one that is different from the minimal techno boys. Fascinating music. (FdW)
Bad Alchemy (Germany):
Jeck ist der Minimalistischste unter den DJ-Knstlern. Strker als Marclay, Tetreault oder Yoshihide vermeidet er Zitat oder Collage, er lsst die Geruschwelt einzelner Plattenrillen in sich kreisen, er feiert den Loop als Ouroborosschlange, zelebriert schwarze Messen mit Vinyl und CD-Black-Boxes. An Stelle des Schnittes herrscht die kleine Verschiebung, die progressive Selbstunhnlichkeit, die Ununterscheidbarkeit von Wiederholung und Variante. Dennoch, die weniger restringierten Passagen, etwa die verrauschten Sitars bei ‘Below’ und ‘Close’ oder das Geschepper von ‘Open’ sind emotional natrlich effektvoller. Die gespenstischen Slowmotion-Field-Hollers von ‘Pax’, wie unter Wasser gespielter Pierre Bastien oder Gavin Bryars’ ‘Sinking of the Titanic’, gehen als ultimativer Blues absolut unter die Haut.
and Mark Williams in the City Newspaer, Washington DC (USA), writes here
Radio Alligre, Paris:
A great album from this british turntablist. Ghoost music from the country, reminescent of Richard Thomas but with an amazing attention to sounds and harmonics.
Pitchfork (USA):
Loop after loop and a hundred patterns in, it’s clear that minimalism is alive and skipping on Stoke. Jeck, along with Fennesz, Ekkehard Ehlers and Otomo Yoshihide, exposed the relatively untapped possibilities of gorgeous sound produced merely from a phonograph plexus caressing aged vinyl. The music on Stoke wasn’t so much a mantra as it was a microcosmic sample of the beauty of a passing moment: “Vienna Faults” evoked the never-changing landscape of wintry Europe, viewed from the passenger seat of a bullet train; “Below” captured the distant toll of a church bell (transposed from a hobbled sitar sample), and fractured vocal transmissions; “Pax” isolated the underwater croon of a blues singer as he drowned under the clang of the earlier train and his own morose helplessness. If half-remembered imagery of dreams is the closest we can get to the next world, Stoke provided fleeting notes of the trip. [Dominique Leone]
Stylus (USA):
The record spins slowly, wobbling on the turntable, emitting crackly waves of virtually unrecognizable music, the melodies inalterably splintered and the rhythms disrupted. The warped, slowed-down voice reverberates from the speakers through a haze of static; its warbly tremor exudes sadness, like a lonely drowned ghost singing wordlessly from the bottom of the ocean. Philip Jeck’s albums-constructed almost entirely from old, worn-out, warped, and broken records-are explorations of just such beaten-down territories. Jeck is a DJ in one sense: a crate-digger and vinyl fetishist who collects interesting sounds and juxtaposes them in unique and (hopefully) compelling ways. But the results of his music, and the types of sounds he seeks out, place him so far from the realm of the traditional DJ as to be in a totally different genre.
Jeck’s compositions, mostly created spontaneously in a live setting, are arranged around loops of warped vinyl, molding a beautiful, ever-changing collage of sound from music long-abandoned. With his Vinyl Coda series, he crafted long, slowly mutating pieces which drifted along on a constant wave of static, incorporating new ideas over time on an epic scale. These mammoth improvisational pieces often used as many as 20 turntables at once, and Jeck’s largest installation, his early piece “Vinyl Requiem,” included over 180 turntables spinning simultaneously. But in recent years Jeck has been paring down his set-up, using less and less record players and honing in on his ideas more carefully to create minimal, tightly focused compositions.
Stoke, Jeck’s fifth solo album, is the direct result of this new approach. Recorded, like the Vinyl Codas, during live appearances, the seven pieces on Stoke are very different from the British turntablist’s past work in every other way. For one thing, these compositions have been edited down from longer works, resulting in shorter running lengths for most of the songs. Each piece generally explores a single idea, building up and creating tension within a four-to-eight-minute block. On past albums, each of these songs would have been just a part of a larger piece, a patch in a drifting, massive quilt. It’s clear that the editing work here consciously limits each piece to a coherent sound or style, and the result is an album that’s just as varied in the moods it evokes as any of Jeck’s more monolithic compositions, and yet it somehow works better as an album than anything he’s done before.
Stoke also contains some of Jeck’s most beautiful single moments ever. The best aspect of his music has always been its capacity to isolate individual moments in music and recast them in startling ways. Such moments-like the emergence of a Christmas carol amid the spooky mid-section of Vinyl Coda IV-can chill you and break you out of the sometimes static stretches that occasionally marred Jeck’s past work. This time around, the music is composed almost entirely out of those kinds of moments.
On “Pax,” Jeck re-imagines the role of the soul singer. Over a wavery organ loop that gently builds then fades away amid a wash of echoes, a singer slowly groans out a wordless lament. Jeck’s slowing down of the already distorted vocals draws out the emotion and sentiment of the singer while obscuring the words-in effect, isolating emotion from lyrics. “Close” is centered around a very simple guitar motif, repeating ad nauseum and very slowly incorporating minor changes in its twangy, slightly exotic style, but the beauty of it is its very simplicity. The track builds patiently, picking up speed and adding elements as it culminates towards a gorgeous finale. When, halfway through its 15-minute length, there’s a changeover from a chaotic guitar-based jam to a more subdued, bass-heavy groove, it’s marvelously affecting. For the song’s second half, a lovely voice echoes through crackling surface noise and a slow rhythmic framework that’s nearly submerged beneath the static. The piece seems truly alive by this point, full of competing tensions and ideas, and the result is jaw-dropping in its raw emotion and beauty.
Throughout this album, it’s impossible to describe exactly how Jeck’s relatively simple music can have such a devastating effect. Perhaps it’s a part of the inherent mystique of vinyl, something embedded within that hissy, ever-present crackle that comes from playing a well-loved album over and over again. Or maybe it’s the element of surprise, the beautiful feeling of not knowing what to expect bubbling out of the mix next. Whatever the case, Jeck clearly has an even firmer grasp of these concepts than ever before, and Stoke is a monumental work in an already great career. He manipulates pure sound, the discarded remnants of past musics, into a compelling work of art that is alive with the ghosts of the past while being firmly entrenched in the moment. [Ed Howard]
Disquiet (USA):
Best of 2002:
Turntablism employed toward abstraction rather than percussion, texture rather than beats. Imagine Oval’s affection for the introspective quality of CD dysfunction, but applied to vinyl.