Artist : Philip Jeck & Marcus Davidson
Title : Spliced
Genre : Ambient
Year : 2010
Date : 07/2010
Bitrate : VBR kbps
Tracks : 02
Label : Touch
Source : Vinyl
Encoder : Lame 3.97
Length : 08:17 min
Size : 11,4 MB
Tracklist:
----------
01.London Tenderberry 04:16
02.Tenderberries Version 04:01
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08:17 min
A: London Tenderberry 4' 09" B:
Tenderberries Version 4' 22" Cut by
Jason @ Transition Artwork and
photography by Jon Wozencroft Live at
the The Museum of Garden History,
London, 8 May 2009. Keyboards: Marcus
Davidson. Record players, editing &
overdubbed bass: Philip Jeck "Trains of
blossom, trains of music." Philip Jeck
studied visual art at Dartington College
of Arts. He started working with record
players and electronics in the early
'80's and has made soundtracks and
toured with many dance and theatre
companies as we as well as his solo
concert work. His best kown work "Vinyl
Requiem" (with Lol Sargent): a
performance for 180 '50's/'60's record
players won Time Out Performance Award
for 1993. He has also over the last few
years returned to visual art making
installations using from 6 to 80 record
players including "Off The Record" for
Sonic Boom at The Hayward Gallery,
London [2000]. Philip Jeck works with
old records and record players salvaged
from junk shops turning them to his own
purposes. He really does play them as
musical instruments, creating an
intensely personal language that evolves
with each added part of a record. Philip
Jeck makes geniunely moving and
transfixing music, where we hear the art
not the gimmick. His latest album for
Touch is due in the summer of 2010.
Marcus Davidson was a chorister at
Worcester Cathedral. He read Music at
Birmingham University, studying
composition with Vic Hoyland, and later
received a masters degree in composition
at City University, London, studying
with Rhian Samuel. Marcus has worked
particularly in the fields of music for
dance and music-comedy, arranging and
writing for stage, radio, video and
television. He specialises in playing
for Ballet and Contemporary Dance at
London professional schools, and is a
member of Spire, the Organ based project
by Touch. Spire has performed at the
Hardingtonar Festival 2008, York Minster
in 2007, the Festival of Holland 2006,
the Fuse Leeds 2006 contemporary music
festival, the Gas Festival 2005 in
Stockholm, La Batie Festival 2004 in
Geneva, and has been broadcast on BBC
Radio 3. He has recorded an album of
Celtic-inspired music, Ribbon of Time,
with Rob Millner, and is also writing a
ballet. Here the two artists collaborate
on vinyl for the first time... Reviews:
Boomkat (UK): The two tracks on this 7"
were recorded at a performance by Philip
Jeck and Marcus Davidson during a long-
weekend of events and talks revolving
around the themes of Hauntology and
sounds of the natural world in early
summer 2008 in the resplendent
surroundings of London's Museum Of
Garden History, located on the South
Bank. Davidson plays keyboards and Jeck
uses his familiar, but enigmatic array
of record players, editing and
overdubbed bass to create majestically
blooming harmonics and beautifully
textured patterns that draw us in and
envelope us within their lush clasp. As
with anything Philip Jeck is involved
with, the magical connotations seem the
most appropriate, as they elicit
something unimaginably life-affirming in
the A-side's 'London Tenderberries'
which he duly morphs into an inverse
dimension of dub-distanced and
intangible subbass strafes moving across
the stereo field within opaque
atmospheres that seem to leave a fine
layer of Thames fog mixed with ultra-
fine pollen on the surface. Mystical,
phantastical and utterly compelling
material. Aquarius (USA): Most readers
of the aQ list won't need much more in
the way of a review here than simply
this: NEW PHILIP JECK. That's the way we
are certainly. Easily our favorite
turntablist / sound sculptor /
soundscaper, every Jeck record a new
fuzzy, warbly exploration of some
forgotten otherworld, the magic of his
music in part due to the fact that his
sounds are not so obviously created with
records and turntables, like Strotter,
or the Caretaker, his sounds exist as
ghostly songs, broadcast from another
time, or place, their construction,
while fascinating and wondrous, are not
critical to the enjoyment of the sound,
and what a sound, warm, and lush, sepia
toned, softly blurred, out of focus,
woozy and warbly and daydreamy. But by
now, you like us, are indeed
appropriately obsessed with the music of
Philip Jeck, and thus are as excited as
we are about THIS. Two new songs both
record live at The Museum Of Garden
History in London, Jeck is teamed up
with keyboardist Marcus Davidson, who we
first heard on those Spire releases from
a little while back, live recordings of
various performances in acoustically
unique spaces, often churches and
cathedrals, hence Spire. The two are a
perfect match, their sounds blending
seamlessly into a shimmery organic
whole, it's impossible to tell where the
keyboards begin and the turntables end,
or if that's Jeck playing bass, or just
some warped old piece of vinyl, or if
those washed out swirls of notes are
being pulled from grooves or actually
played by Davidson, but again, it hardly
matters, the sound is ephemeral and
spectral, slow swells of softly effected
chordal swirl, fuzzy indistinct
textures, a barely there rhythmic pulse,
serene and so so lovely. The flipside
starts out with what we can only assume
is Jeck's bass, spaced out and spidery
and slooooow, a warm languid creep, the
low end pulsations ringing out into the
ether like ripples on a pond, until near
the end when the bass(?) gathers a bit
of fuzz, unleashing some softly warped
crunch, and some effected synthy
squelch, like a disembodied dubstep
warble, slowed way down and stretched
way out and allowed to undulate
lethargically before settling back down
into that warm washed out warble. As
always, fantastic, and again, beautiful
design and layout courtesy of Touch head
honcho Jon Wozencroft. Brainwashed
(USA): Recorded live as a duet between
turntables and keyboards (with editing
and overdubbing bass added later), the
main track here is a slow, dramatic
piece, with the flip side conjuring the
best moments of electronic dub. While
artists who specialize in the use of a
turntable as an instrument are a dime a
dozen, no one else really uses the
device as creatively or as intensely as
Jeck. Truly "playing" it, rather than
just using it as a way to sample or
scratch records, he coaxes sound out of
the players that bear little or no
resemblance to the source material.
"London Tenderberry" is a piece of slow
drama that has no overt "record" sounds
in it: shimmering synth pads,
reverberated bangs and crashes, and a
gurgling bass pulse meet to create a
flowing river of opaque sound. The flip
side, "Tenderberries Version" is not an
ironic title at all, cutting the mix
from the previous side up into throbbing
bass and electronic synth pulses,
leading to a complex variety of tone and
rhythm, but with an intense dub
sensibility that stands with the best of
the genre. Within the confines of a 7-
inch record, I must admit that this is a
case where less isnÆt more. Sometimes a
project or specific work is best kept
within a sub-12 minute space, where it
is able to make its statement without
becoming stagnant or repetitive, but
that's not this record. The complex
nuances of the A side and the electro-
like bass heavy flip just left me
wanting more. Which is, I assume, the
best compliment I could give. [Creaig
Dunton] The Wire (UK): Lovely live duet
for Jeck's turntables and Davidson's
keyboards, recorded at a festival at the
Museum of Garden History in London. The
line between the sources is not as clear
as you'd imagine, and the music is a
seamless, rudderless surge of sounds,
soundtrackish at one moment,
experimental ghost-prog the next. [Byron
Coley]
http://www.touchmusic.org.uk/