“Ten Turntables”
Title:
- Ten Turntables
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Artist Statement:
Ten Turntables is a real-time interactive installation featuring ten record players and a suite of “locked grooves,” loops that are or both incredibly short and infinitely long. The combination of sounds can be altered at your whim: moving the “needle” (stylus) from one groove to another on any of the ten turnta-bles results in a new component of sound to be summed with others at the mixer.
With the locked grooves tempo-matched to a single revolution of the record, by design the format ad-dresses one of two key components of “beatmatching,” a technique deployed by DJs to combine discrete audio sources by playing each at a common tempo. The other component of beatmatching relates to alignment; altering the position of one in relation to the other can transform the feel and character of the combined sound. At its most elegant, these combinations could represent an extension of Steve Reich’s phasing. A more chaotic outcome might be more akin to the provocative “turntablism” of Christian Mar-clay.
Ten Turntables encourages participants to consider: is this a catalogue of short sketches, a new collabora-tive performance, a sonic tapestry, or a rhythmic disaster? As both performer and audience, participants decide in real-time whether the summed audio output is desirable and worthy of further listening, or whether the installation can be improved through intervention.
