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Philip Jeck contributed to the soundtrack of the film ‘There is a Place’, which won the Jury Prize for the Best Screendance Short at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival 2011.

More information can be found at Goat’s website.

Inception brings the trend for slow music to the big screen

Composer Hans Zimmer’s ultra-slow manipulation of an Edith Piaf song displays the beauty in bringing the BPM right down

Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Photograph: Stephen Vaughan/Warner Bros

The malevolent, booming horns that sound throughout Inception are one of the film’s finest features. Their power lies not just in volume and repetition, but also in rebuilding part of the film’s architecture, just as Ellen Page and Leonardo DiCaprio’s characters rebuild the architecture in their dreams.

Without giving away the plot, Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien plays a crucial role in linking Inception’s real and dream worlds. Now it’s emerged that Hans Zimmer, who composed the music, extrapolated his entire score from the Piaf song. In keeping with the atmosphere of blurred consciousness, Zimmer slows down the brass sounds to a somnambulant trudge.

What was once human, defiant and romantic is now lurching, formidable and unstable. Zimmer does something that numerous artists have also recently realised – that slowing music down dissolves and recasts it.

Games, the duo featuring Joel Ford and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin, have been releasing mixtapes of slowed-down 80s hits over the past year. For Lopatin, who has railed against the often limited sonic palette of underground music, these tapes are proof that slowing down music dismissed as cheesy reveals its weirdness, beauty and potential.
Chopped and screwed is a form of hip-hop from Houston that slows tracks down to a crawl. Perhaps the sweltering heat of Texas encourages this lethargy? The muggy clarity of the weed and cough-syrup highs sought on the scene also heighten the music’s sensuality. As Scott Wright noted on this blog, chopped and screwed has been influential on “drag” artists, while mainstream rappers often use a few bars of a screwed, ultra-deep vocal to push their masculinity into the red, a fast-track to thuggishness. Meanwhile Ciara’s recent return to the sound is canny; set against the uptempo European house beats of chart rap, her slowness thrills.

As much as I love Zimmer’s music for Inception, I wondered what Philip Jeck, the master of the musical subconscious, would have done with it. Jeck resurrects battered vinyl classics, slowing down and looping the likes of Aaron Copeland to create fragments of songs echoing across time and sleep.

In a hyperactive digital world, slowed-down music pushes you back into your chair and demands you sit still; it forces you to consider the structures built and choices made. As with Inception, it casts light on a potential world where music sounds different and life runs in an unfamiliar gear.

© Dave Knapik

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.

www.phf.org.uk

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…

Boomkat

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.

Hortense Ellis – I Am Just A Girl [Studio One, 1979] – designer unknown

The Wire

Philip Jeck’s Sand [Touch # TO:67, 2008] was voted No. 2 in The Wire’s Top Albums of 2008

Pitchfork Media (USA) – reviewed in 2008:

Music built from found sounds is fascinating because it violates a traditional tenet of creativity – namely, that the artifact must be a pure expression of the artist’s will and talent. But it can seem purely academic if the results aren’t engaging. The best process-based art moves us intellectually if we’re aware of the concept, but still moves us emotionally if we aren’t, and that’s what Philip Jeck achieves with Sand. He manipulates, layers, and loops the dead spaces of vinyl – run-out grooves and scratches – and breathes them full of life. That’s awesome, but you don’t need to know it in order to feel the surging power of the “Fanfares” trilogy (which emanates from scraps of Aaron Copland’s wartime anthem “Fanfare for the Common Man”), or to become entangled in the fine-woven web of “Shining”. You could write a dissertation on Jeck’s rehabilitation of lost and damaged bits of cultural information, or you could just get lost in his strange world – as flat and sprawling and complexly shifting as its title implies. [Brian Howe]

There is a feature on Philip Jeck in US magazine XLR8R, which can be read here

There is a feature on Philip Jeck in UK magazine plan b, which can be read here:

page one

page two

[right click to download]

“Off the Record” – The Hayward Gallery, London 2000 [part of Sonic Boom, curated by David Toop]

“Vinyl Coda V” – Bangkok, Thailand 2007

“Vinyl Graveyard” – Haarlem, The Netherlands 2003

“Vinyl Pond” – Bruges, Belgium 2002

“Vinyl Pond” – Szczecin, Poland 2005