Philip Jeck

All Music Guide:

In similar territory to Christian Marclay and David Shea, Philip Jeck is an avant-garde turntablist, plunderphonic sample terrorist and performance artist whose most famous installation, Vinyl Requiem, included no less than 180 turntables. After studying the visual arts at Dartington College in Devon, Jeck began a performance career that found him at art galleries as well as warehouse parties, where he emulated the turntable tricks of American hip-hop DJs like Grandmaster Flash. It was during a five-year collaboration with contemporary dancer Laurie Booth though, that Jeck developed a more personal and experimental style of music-making allied with Canadian John Oswald's style of plunderphonics sampling. Jeck's 1993 Vinyl Requim installation with Lol Sargent utilized 180 turntables as well as 12 slide projectors and two film projectors and won a Performance Award from Time Out magazine. The following year, he appeared on the Blast First! compilation Deconstruct alongside Christian Marclay, John Oswald, Bruce Gilbert and Stock, Hausen & Walkman and in 1995, Jeck released his debut album Loopholes for Touch. Surf followed four years later and then in 2001, Coda IV was released.

Wikipedia:

Philip Jeck (born 1952) is an English multimedia composer, iconoclast, magician, choreographer, prankster, woodsman and alchemist. He is perhaps best known for his work Vinyl Requiem with Lol Sargent (a performance for 180 Dansette record players, 12 slide-projectors and 2 movie-projectors) which won the Time Out Performance Award in 1993. He is signed to the UK label Touch.

Overview [edit]

Philip Jeck studied Visual Arts at Dartington College of Arts, Devon, England. He began exploring composition using record players and electronics in the early 1980s. Jeck has performed solo shows throughout Europe as well as in Japan and the USA. He has composed and performed scores for dance and theatre companies including Anatomy Performance Co., Yolande Snaith Theatre-dance, Movie'n'Opera (Vienna), Laurie Booth and Steve Paxton. He has also composed scores for the dance films Beyond Zero (Channel 4) and Pace (BBC 2).

Jeck is a former member of Slant, and has had tracks released by Blast First (on the Deconstruct compilation) and The Soundworks Exchange (First Edition).

Philip Jeck has performed versions of his turntable pieces throughout the world, including a 2007 performance of his prior release Vinyl Coda I-III in Bangkok, Thailand, as part of the Bangkok International Art Festival. Workshops he has conducted include an event at the School of Audio Engineering in Bangkok organised by the British Council.