Philip Jeck & Hildur Gudnadottir live in London | February 2010
Arctic Circle - The Resonance of Music with Water
Kings Place, 80 York Way, London NW1
Wednesday 24th February 2010
Time: 20:00
Venue: Hall One
An Ark for the Listener, a new work inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem The Wreck Of The Deutschland.
"An aspiration in answer to an inspiration,
out of music shaped by all the sea has claimed,
as is the inevitable shipwreck of our existence.
Salvaged out of vinyl, by way of ear, hand and electricity."
"And I have asked to be... out of the swing of the sea." (G M Hopkins)
Thursday 25 February
Time: 20:00
Venue: Hall One
Hauschka with Hildur Guðnadóttir
Haushka is the alias of Dusseldorf keyboardist Volker Bertelman. His critically-acclaimed albums on the 130701 imprint evince a playfully accessible approach to the often austere realm of the prepared piano. Haushka is joined tonight by gifted Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir for a major new, aquatically-themed commission.
Friday 26th February
Time: 19:00
Venue: Hall One
Tickets can be booked here
Photos from Atmospheres 3
Philip Jeck wins Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers
Philip Jeck has won the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers 2009. A presentation ceremony took place at The Royal Institute of British Architects, London, on 9th November 2009.
Congratulations to Philip on a well-deserved and long overdue award.
See Jeck live: Philip has two gigs scheduled in London in November and December at Café Oto. At “The Night of the Long Worms” Jeck plays a rare bass guitar plus effects set and at “Atmospheres 3” he plays a turntable set. For further information and tickets, visit the TouchShop.
www.phf.org.uk
www.philipjeck.com
Philip Jeck in the TouchShop
The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music
Published by Ashgate, this book by James Saunders features a chapter on Philip Jeck (and Phill Niblock). It is available from Amazon, but it is very pricey...
Autumn 2009 | Live Dates
6th Sept. Pestival QEH London 7.30
10th Sept. Nu music Stavanger Norway (and interview with the Wire)
11th. Sept Istanbul Biennial Opening. Istanbul Turkey
Antrepo No.3: Meclis-i Mebusan Caddesi (Avenue) Liman Isletmeleri Sahasi – Tophane (just next to Istanbul Modern Museum) at 2130
12th Sept. Nu Music Oslo Norway
26th Sept. Todaysart Den Haag Holland
3rd Oct. Listen to the World! ISCM World New Music Days Goteburg, Sweden
16th Oct Fylkingen Stockholm Sweden Solo Show
17th Oct. Fylkingen Stockholm Sweden. MARYLAND. A Dance/Theatre show with Mary Prestidge and visuals by Lucy Cash, sound by Philip Jeck
18th Oct. Fylkingen Stockholm Sweden, Performance with C M von Hausswolf
22nd-25th Oct. Akademie der Kunste, Berlin Germany. The International Turntable Orchestra with many, many Turntable players from around the Globe.
The decayed loops of Jeck and Basinski
Using different media, both Philip Jeck and William Basinski explore the gradual decay and manipulation of recorded sound. Jeck, using turntables, is fascinated by the inherent flaws and sonic detritus amplified by his record players, each crackle and undulation woven into the very fabric of his work, imprinting a personal history into every layer of sound. Basinski, in turn, investigates the gradual and physical deterioration of material recorded to tape, most famously on his four-part 'Disintegration Loops' whereby recordings he made in the 80's were re-examined after years in storage, marking the passage of time and circumstance through every dilapidated moment. Although their work loosely falls into what Simon Reynolds has termed Hauntology, Jeck and Basinski stand apart from most of their contemporaries by working within a precise physical methodology, one that allows involuntary and gradual physical erosion to shape the material, rather than just formulating a revisionist re-enactment of the past. This 14 track selection offers an overview of their work, etching years of recorded sound through a kind of environmentally autobiographical bubble that's both endlessly fascinating and, often, emotionally overwhelming.
The Suffolk Symphony | August 22nd 2009
From August 15th - 24th, Touch will be away on a residency at The Aldeburgh Music Festival [curated by Faster Than Sound]. We are working on a new project, The Suffolk Symphony. Details below…
Faster Than Sound presents The Suffolk Symphony by Touch, featuring Philip Jeck, BJNilsen, Jon Wozencroft, Mike Harding and Philip Marshall.
8pm – 11pm, Saturday 22 August
Hoffmann Building: Britten Studio and Jerwood Kiln Studio, Snape
Tickets: £10.00
Box Office: +44 (0)1728 687110
Book tickets online
Faster Than Sound bring more imaginative experiments with sound and image to the Snape Proms with The Suffolk Symphony, a specially commissioned residency and new work by leading sonic and visual production company Touch. Inspired by the historic coastline of Aldeburgh and its surrounding area including Aldeburgh Music's Snape Proms and its history, Touch will create a new audio-visual symphony from scratch, using only locally sourced sounds and images. Beginning on 16 August, Philip Jeck, BJNilsen, Jon Wozencroft, Philip Marshall and Mike Harding will go on a week-long treasure hunt to unearth old records, field recordings, home-made sounds and images to create a new multimedia Suffolk Symphony, culminating in its first performance on the 22 August.
Following the offer of an Aldeburgh Residency by Faster Than Sound’s creative producer Joana Seguro, Mike Harding responded with the idea of creating a new multimedia work purely from locally sourced sound and image. Mike and BJNilsen went on an exploratory field trip in May to make initial field recordings which are being made into vinyl to be used in the performance, plus to kick start the project website www.thesuffolksymphony.net. The artists are already busy exchanging ideas in preparation for the residency in August, with Jeck drawing inspiration from the work of Benjamin Britten, especially his Simple Symphony, and Jon Wozencroft planning to describe the special place of Aldeburgh on film, shot in real time during the residency.
Directed by Mike Harding with sound by Philip Jeck and BJNilsen and images by Jon Wozencroft, the whole week will be documented for an interactive website by Philip Marshall. The residency will feature workshops and presentations by Philip Marshall and Mike Harding, including interviews with the other artists and a Touch showcase, culminating in the performance which will take place in the recently converted industrial space of the Hoffmann Building. The Suffolk Symphony will be subsequently released through Touch.
The interviews by Mike Harding during the residency will include a discussion with his partner Jon Wozencroft about his vision for Touch, now nearly 30 years old, and an assessment of the changes which have occurred in that period. Philip Jeck will discuss his work, particularly the method behind his live and recorded output, which eschews conventional instrumentation. BJNilsen assesses how field recordings have developed as source material for his work, and Philip Marshall describes the way artists communicate their ideas online and how this affects the relationship between them and their audience. Each interview lasts for one hour, including a 15 minute Q & A session, and dates and times will be shortly be announced via the website.
www.thesuffolksymphony.net
www.fasterthansound.com
www.aldeburgh.co.uk
Book tickets online
Philip Jeck selects his Inner Sleeve in The Wire's September 2009 issue
Hortense Ellis - I Am Just A Girl [Studio One, 1979] - designer unknown
May 2009 | Live Dates
7th May
The Logen Theatre, Bergen, Norway
16th May
Touch Presents...
with The Gavin Bryars Ensemble, performing The Sinking of the Titanic at The Roundhouse, London
23rd May
Spire
St. Saviour's Church, Riga
Reissue of Philip Jeck - 'Stoke'
Touch # TO:56, 2002
CD - 7 tracks - 53:32
CD in digipak
Artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft
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]
This reissue is now available from the TouchShop
