Turntable Strings

Limited edition 12” Vinyl Picture Disk with locked groove made by Automated Noise Ensemble (Gawthrop and Levene). Production funded by Arts Council England Yorkshire (£4,500).

This disc was derived from a performance (using digital photography, audio recording, lathe cutting and printing) that utilised DJ decks, transducers, string, sticky-tape, amplification and physical actions. A first version of the performance was presented at International 3 Gallery, Manchester in 2002. Another version included miniature video cameras that produced images of the strings hitting the transducers. The work explored disparities between what is seen and heard using the context of DJ-ing, but without records or stylus. Audibly, it consisted of a wide variety of clicks and scrapes that produce complex rhythms moving in and out of phase. The record consists of, on one side, an image of the strings on a turntable coincident with a locked groove (loop) of a recording of the same strings hitting a transducer. The second side consists of two versions plus two mixes by Chris Gladwin (University of Salford). ‘Turntable Strings’ was the first of an ongoing series of works concerned with records and the playing of them.

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