Releases

Many of Philip Jeck’s deleted releases are now available on bandcamp

www.bandcamp.com

Philip Jeck writes:

“To make this record I used Fidelity record players, Casio Keyboards, Ibanez bass guitar, Sony minidisc players, Ibanez and Zoom effects pedals, assorted percussion, a Behringer mixer and it was edited it at home with minidisc players and on a laptop computer.”

Photography and artwork by Jon Wozencroft

Cut by Jason at Transition

Track listing:

Side 1.

Fleeing
Saint Pancras
Barrow in Furness (open thy hand wide)
Reverse Jersey

Side 2.

… bend the knee 1
Called In
Brief

Side 3.

Broke Up
… bend the knee 5
Called Again

Side 4.

And Over Again
The Station View
Saint Pancras (the one that holds everything)

This album comes with a free download of Philip Jeck “Live in Caen”, recorded by Franck Dubois on 28th February 2015 at Impressions Multiples #4 (ésam Caen/Cherbourg) with thanks to Thierry Weyd.

Download only (320 kpbs MP3)
Reorganised by Philip Jeck

This live recording was made at Experimental Intermedia, New York City, for Touch.30 on 16th September 2012, and has been reorganised and edited by Philip Jeck. With thanks to Phill Niblock and Byron Westbrook. Live photo by Dave Knapik. Stone by Jon Wozencroft.
30 is the number of upright stones that originally encompassed the Sarsen Circle, Stonehenge’s best known feature.

feat. Marcus Davidson – percussion | Mike Harding – Conductor (& percussion) | Philip Jeck – Casio SK1 keyboard, effects, mixing desk and MD player | Dave Knapik – radio, iphones, Buddha Machine, Polaroid 450 Land camera, Knockman toys: the Pororon and the ChaCha, and police scanner | Lary 7 – contrabass | Ken Montgomery – Slepian Modified Casiotone M-10, Trogtronics 655 Black Box & Kaoss Pad | JG Thirlwell – laptop, keyboard | Brian Turner – guitar/amp | Andrea, The Enchantress of Bioluminosity – Zils

Tracklist:
1. The Sarsen Circle 30′ 00″

Download “The Sarsen Circle” [Zipped 320 kpbs MP3] in the TouchShop

You can now download FLAC Audio versions of Philip Jeck’s albums

Loopholes

Loopholes [Touch # TO:26, 1995] was Jeck’s first album for Touch and was voted in was in Yamatsuka Eye’s top five CDs of 1995 in Remix (Japan).

i/e (USA) wrote: “Sometimes, sampling just means plunderphonics – vaguely altering the original’s sound source and using it for dubious means – and sometimes it’s used in a particularly novel manner, as Philip Jeck offers on the gangly Loopholes. Using just a single Casio keyboard, plus vatious tape-recorders and record-players, Jeck conjures up everything from systemic beatmusic (“Louie’s Riddle”) to aliens in the bush speaking in tongues (“PS Two”). Seemingly ‘simply’ constructed, in reality these arresting pieces form a complex and highly individualistic mosaic of sound.”

7

7 [Touch # TO:57, 2003] was Jeck’s 7th album for Touch and was voted one of the best albums of the year in betamusic (Singapore).

tinymixtapes (USA) wrote: “…it is Jeck’s deft approach and execution which makes this album so successful. The years he spent practicing his art saran-wraps every note, and not a moment goes by when his acute compositional skills are questioned. Naysayers may argue that Jeck’s 7 veers toward accessibility to appeal to the hipsters, but my ears tell me that 7 is a sonic documentation of an artist who has honed his craft. Although Host (released around the same time) is decidedly more experimental and daring, that doesn’t mean that 7 has an underlying intent of streamlining for the trucked-capped.”
More will be added soon…

320 kpbs mp3 – 1 track – 35:31

Photography: Sohrab

The second in a series of reworkings of Sohrab material by artists, including Philip Jeck, showing solidarity to his cause… all label and artist money goes towards the fund for his appeal against refusal to be granted political asylum in Germany…
Philip Marshall mix content providers:

Daniel Menche – Zarinn (menche mix) 11:45 | Jana Winderen – Susanna 7:00 | Philip Jeck – Susanna (remix) 5:23 | Philip Marshall – Somebody, Hidden 7:45 (Mastered by BJNilsen, Berlin, 20th May 2011) | Michael Esposito – Somebody’s Ghost 6:47

Buy Sohrab “You Are Not Alone ll” in the TouchShop

CD in jewel case
Photography & Design: Jon Wozencroft
Mastered by Denis Blackham

Plus bonus 320kbps .mp3 download – 1 track – 30:59
TO:81DL – Philip Jeck “Live at Corsica Studios”, recorded on 1st July 2010.
[This performance was recorded straight to digital from the main desk.]

Track Listing

1. Pilot/Dark Blue Night 8:47
2. Ark 4:21
3. Twentyninth 2:36
4. Dark Rehearsal 7:36
5. Thirtieth/Pilot Reprise 2:56
6. The All of Water 8:29
7. The Pilot (Among Our Shoals) 4:33
coda:
8. All That’s Allowed (Released) 3:24
9. Chime, Chime (Re-rung) 7:34

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.
Philip Jeck writes: “A version of “An Ark For The Listener” was first performed at Kings Place London on 24/02/2010. It is a meditation on verse 33 of “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, Gerard Manley Hopkins poem about the drowning on December 7th 1875 of five Franciscan nuns exiled from Germany. This CD version was recorded at home in Liverpool and used extracts from live performances over the last 12 months. The “coda:” tracks are remixes of 2 pieces from “Suite: Live in Liverpool”. “Chime, Chime (Re-rung)” was originally made for Musicworks magazine (#104, Summer 09) and “All That’s Allowed (Released)” is previously unreleased. All tracks were made using Fidelity record-players, Casio SK1 keyboards, Sony mini-disc recorders, Behringer mixers, Ibanez bass guitar, Boss delay pedal and Zoom bass effects pedal.”

An Ark… is Jeck’s 6th solo album for touch since ‘Loopholes’ in 1995. The Wire reckoned it was ‘Stoke’ (Touch, 2002) which ‘made him great, but his body of work and his achingly brilliant live sets are rapidly defining him as one of our best artists, and his recent award from The Paul Hamlyn Foundation confirms him as such.

The cover shows Mirosław Bałka’s installation at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, “How It Is”, April 2010.

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 known 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). In 2010 he won one of The Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Composition.

Buy Philip Jeck “An Ark for the Listener” at Bandcamp

Vinyl LP (deleted) – 5 tracks

Track listing:

Side A
1. Press
2. Intro Roll

Side B
1. Live With Errors
2. All That’s Allowed
3. Chime, Chime

Recorded at Hive, FACT, Liverpool on 25th October 2006 as part of Touch 25, live to a M-Audio Mictrotrack 24/96. Edited by Philip Jeck April 2007. Cut by Jason at Transition 14th May 2007 on a Neumann VSM 70. Released on Autofact 14th January 2009.

CD (deleted) – 7 tracks – 44:50
Artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft
Mastered by Denis Blackham

Track Listing:

1. Unveiled
2. Chime Again
3. Fanfares
4. Shining
5. Fanfares Forward
6. Residue [to listen, click on the title]
7. Fanfares Over

“… the Day I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity” [from ‘The Chariot’ by Emily Dickinson]

‘Sand’ was recorded live in Holland and England in 2006/7 and edited in Liverpool January, 2008 using Fidelity record-players, Casio SK keyboards, Behringer mixer and sony mini-disc recorders.

In memory of Phyllis May Jeck (1920-2008)

” … the Day

I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity”
(from ‘The Chariot’ by Emily Dickinson)

Sand was recorded live in Holland and England in 2006/7 and edited in Liverpool January, 2008 using Fidelity record-players, Casio SK keyboards, Behringer mixer and sony mini-disc recorders.

Following Philip Jeck’s acclaimed collaboration with Gavin Bryars and Alter Ego on a new version of ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’ (Touch Tone 34), ‘Sand’ is a set of seven new compositions that highlight Jeck’s mastery of vinyl manipulation, personal and collective memories.

During the past year Jeck has refined and consolidated his unique sound, playing superb sets at last summer’s Faster than Sound festival and at York Minster for Spire. He has recently released ‘Amoroso’ [Touch # TS01, 7″ vinyl only with Fennesz] where he responds to Charles Matthews’s homage to Arvo Pärt.

‘Sand’ is at once elegiac, celebrational, mournful and uplifting. Those who have followed Jeck’s development since his first release, “Loopholes” (Touch TO:26) will observe his return to the industrial textures that coloured that collection, though here they are fused with his symphonic grace and continued development as a composer and live performer .

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.

This is Philip Jeck’s 4th solo album for Touch after ‘Loopholes’ [Touch # TO:27, 1995], Surf [TO:36, 1998], Stoke [TO:56, 2002] and ‘7’ [TO:57, 2004]. A companion vinyl release to Sand, ‘Suite: Live in Liverpool’ [Tone 28/FACT11] is being released on US label Autofact later this Summer.

He recently performed on “The Sinking of the Titanic” with Gavin Bryars in Rome, about which Boomkat (UK) said: “The most noticeable addition is Jeck, whose expertise and unique style seems to fit like the final piece of the puzzle as his crackles and motifs melt into the architecture of the recording as if they had always been there. This additional layer of nostalgia brought forth by these found sounds adds a significant sense of history, forcing the mind back into hazy film footage and decomposed photos, a perfect match for the subject matter.”

7″ vinyl only

Track listing:

Side a:
Fennesz/Matthews 3′ 34″

Side b
Jeck/Matthews 3′ 24″

cut by Jason @ Transition
artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft

Am`o`ro´so
n. 1. A lover; a man enamored.
adv. 1. (Mus.) In a soft, tender, amatory style.

Charles Matthews plays the Grand Organ in York Minster, during Spire Live on 20th January 2007. This release is a homage to Arvo Pärt… Arvo Pärt is often identified with the school of minimalism and more specifically, that of “mystic minimalism” or “sacred minimalism”. He is considered a pioneer of this style, along with contemporaries Henryk Górecki and John Tavener.

7″ vinyl was the quintessential format for popular music. Today, it is an undervalued and mostly promotional medium, used as a fetishistic signpost to a time of musical authenticity and a “healthy” popular culture. It might seem like another retrograde step to launch a vinyl series just as the download format threatens to dominate, and indeed there is an element of “the rear view mirror”… the generation of Touch artists who grew up with vinyl [and cassette] still feeling a strong emotional attachment to it. This series is more than that… an overtly critical, non-digital statement is supported by treatments of audio work which cannot be applied to digital formats – the sonic texture, the use of a locked groove, the A & the B and the additional dimension of the visual counterpoint. As for the aspect of audience participation, we choose not to specify the RPM on the label, encouraging the listener to experiment with playback options and personal preferences. An attempt to make music that works at both speeds. The front cover might actually be the back cover…

About the players:

Charles Matthews: “I felt you were pure music, not human flesh, music through time, music played from the Universe, without boundaries.” [an audience member, July 2007] Born in 1966, Charles Matthews studied at the Royal College of Music, London, and was an organ scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. His teachers have included Beryl Tichbon, Gwilym Isaac, David Pettit, Patricia Carroll, Nicholas Danby, Charles Spinks and Dr Richard Marlow.

Charles pursues a varied career as pianist, organist, composer and teacher, performing and broadcasting for radio and television within the UK and internationally. He has won numerous awards, perhaps most notably the first prize in the 1999 Franz Liszt Memorial Competition in Budapest. His recordings have been issued by Olympia, Priory, Guild and Touch; he is the organist for the Touch project, Spire, which also includes Christian Fennesz and Philip Jeck.

Christian Fennesz: Fennesz uses guitar and computer to create shimmering, swirling electronic sound of enormous range and complex musicality. “Imagine the electric guitar severed from cliché and all of its physical limitations, shaping a bold new musical language.” – (City Newspaper, USA). His lush and luminant compositions are anything but sterile computer experiments. They resemble sensitive, telescopic recordings of rainforest insect life or natural atmospheric occurrences, an inherent naturalism permeating each piece. He lives and works in Vienna and Paris.

Philip Jeck: 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.

Gavin Bryars/Philip Jeck/Alter Ego
The Sinking of the Titanic
Touch # Tone 34
Limited Edition of 2000

CD in Special wallet + postcard [postcard image by Andrew Hooker]

Artwork by Jon Wozencroft

1 Track – 72:37

This version of Gavin Bryars’s seminal piece, The Sinking of the Titanic, was recorded at the 49th International Festival of Contemporary Music at The Venice Biennale on 1st October 2005 at the Teatro Maliban.

Gavin Bryars – Double Bass
Philip Jeck – Turntables
Alter Ego – Strings, Brass, Wind, Percussion, Keyboard, Tape Recorder and sound design

Boomkat (UK):

Gavin Bryars’ ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’ is, and I say this with confidence, one of the finest pieces of music you could ever wish to own. Written in 1969 it has journeyed through the lands of modern classical, experimental and electronic music netting dedicated followers on its way, and each and every time I hear it I become more convinced of its genius. Bryars wrote the piece to mirror the last moments of the doomed voyage, when the Titanic sunk and famously the band played on. According to survivors the music being played was a rendition of ‘Autumn’, an Episcopal hymn which forms the basis of Bryars’ composition. The notes and phrases from the hymn are worked in and out of the piece, sinking through the waters, effected by time, nostalgia and the cavernous reverberations of the ship itself with each scrape and hiss worked into Bryars’ incredible vision. For this special performance of the piece we see Bryars (on double bass) alongside Italian ensemble Alter Ego (not to be confused with the German electronic duo of the same name) and experimental turntablist Philip Jeck, and the result is arguably its most stunning rendition to date. The most noticeable addition is Jeck, whose expertise and unique style seems to fit like the final piece of the puzzle as his crackles and motifs melt into the architecture of the recording as if they had always been there. This additional layer of nostalgia brought forth by these found sounds adds a significant sense of history , forcing the mind back into hazy film footage and decomposed photos, a perfect match for the subject matter. Also of note are Alter Ego, who surprised me with their stunning renditions of Philip Glass recently, and work comparable magic here on Bryars’s composition, with their ensemble bringing in the sounds of bottles, tape recorders, laptops and percussion on top of more traditional instruments. The sounds are merged together effortlessly to form a fog of harmony and memory, perfectly melting the themes which Bryars intended his piece to convey in the first place. Really words can’t do justice to ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’, like William Basinski’s ‘The Disintegration Loops’ there is a timelessness, a patience and an ineffable beauty to this music that almost impossible to describe. Unique, flawless and totally essential music.

You can read other reviews here

CD (deleted) – 7 tracks

Tracklist:

1. Wholesome
2. Museum
3. Wipe
4. Bush Hum
5. Now You Can Let Go
6. Some Pennies
7. Veil

“Johnny Mathis advances the art of remembering” (Mort Goode 1972)

… points of origin slip into areas of acceptance then long listening eliminates any worries about that acceptance and parts the normally tightly bound, throwing seldom acknowledged emotions through newly opened doors…

British musician Philip Jeck’s life work is with sounds, and how they may be transformed in random and unexpected ways. For instance, a needle stuck in a record’s groove is a source of consternation for most people. Jeck, on the other hand, is eager to let the diamond ride a while because the repeated passage becomes an object for study and transmutation. His artform is an otherworldly sound world of pops, clicks, and crackles, mostly built up from dusty vinyl dug up from junk shops and outdated phonographic equipment no one would cast a second glance at in this day and age. Transcendent and mysterious, 7 is a set of pieces created with a sample keyboard, and a trove of his beloved old vinyl. “Bush Hum” extends the enquiry further by looping the harmonic buzz of an old Bush record player into a polychromatic, shifting swarm. The music is enveloped in a patina of dread and beauty, something that’s remarkable considering how immiscible these two qualities normally are. But Jeck plumbs it with masterful verve. “Now You Can Let Go” references the echo of dub, “Museum” blends a brass fanfare with a mordant groan; “Wholesome” is anything but, considering its skeletal, arpeggio-tinted construct.

CD (deleted) – 1 track

This recording is taken from their live performance at the Moers Jazz Festival, Germany, in May 2002

“There are grains of truth in the suggestion that, in moving, you may find yourself in or out of some one’s favour. But, listen to the slow, delicate, even introspective background: some breeze, some chimes, some distant thunder as each focal point remains a lament.”
This blistering work was recorded live at the Moers Jazz Festival, Germany, in May 2002 and follows hot on the heels of Philip Jeck’s highly acclaimed “Stoke” [Touch # TO:56, 2002], about which The Wire said “Philip Jeck has always been good, but Stoke makes him great” and Side-Line wrote: “an essential record for the lovers of meaningful experimental and ambient stuff!”.

Jacob Kirkegaard is a member of Danish combo Aeter who work in a mixed media context. He was born in Denmark, 1975 and studied at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne. Germany. He now lives in Berlin. He has taken part in numerous festivals throughout Europe, playing live, improvising with samplers and other electronics, as he does on this recording.

CD – 7 tracks – 53:32

Artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft

Tracklist:

1. Above
2. Lambing
3. Vienna Faults
4. Pax
5. Below
6. Open
7. Close

The Wire (UK):

With its acrobatic athleticism and penchant for charming gimmicks, in all likelihood HipHop will indefinitely dominate the field of turntablism. Even record-spinning abstractionists like Christian Marclay and Martin Tetrault, who may not always share HipHop’s necessity for the beat, put on flashy demonstrations that engage the machismo of technique, alongside their critically minded recombinations of cultural readymades. While Philip Jeck’s performances, installations, and recordings have centred around his arsenal of turntables (at last count, he was up to 180 antique Dansette record players, though more normally he performs on two or three, and a minidisc recorder), he isn’t terribly interested in the contemporary discourse of turntablism, preferring to coax a haunted impressionism with those tools. However as a calculating improvisor, he shares affinities with the turntable community. Once he is in control of the overall context of the music, he leaves much to the spontaneous reaction towards sound at any given moment.
A typical Jeck composition moves at an incredibly lethargic pace through a series of looped drone tracks caught in the infinities of multiple locked grooves. As he prefers to use old records on his antique turntables, the inevitable surface noise crackles into gossamer rhythms of pulsating hiss. Occasionally, Jeck intercedes in his ghostly bricolage with a slowly rotated foreground element – a disembodied voice, a melody, or simply a fragment of non-specific sound – which spirals out of focus through a warm bath of delay. For almost ten years now, Jeck has been developing this methodology, building up to Stoke, his strongest work to date. Its opening passages are on a par with his Vinyl Coda series, with Jeck effortlessly transforming grizzled surface noise into languid atmosphere.But Stoke really gets going with the breathtakingly simple construction of Pax, upon which Jeck overlays an aerated Ambient wash with the time-crawling repetition of a single crescendo from an unknown female blues singer. By downpitching her voice from the intended 78 rpm to 16 rpm, he amplifies its emotional tenor by making her drag out her impassioned declarations of misery far longer than is humanly possibly. The effect is just beautiful. Philip Jeck has always been good, but Stoke makes him great. [Jim Haynes]

This reissue is now available from the TouchShop

CDR (deleted) – 1 track – 34:31

Tracklist

1. Live at ICC

Recorded by Mike Harding live at ICC, Tokyo as part of the Ash International trip to Japan in 2000.

CD (deleted) – 7 tracks

Tracklist

1. Demolition
2. Box Of Lamb
3. Surf Finger
4. Spirits Up
5. 1986 (Frank Was 70 Years Old)
6. Tilting
7. I Just Wanted To Know

AT A PLACE that is yours or mine. It is morning, evening, anytime. You are driving to work, to a theatre, home. You are in a crowd or all alone. You are in Rio, Chicago, Sydney, on a plane to Madras, a ferry to Dublin. You are at college, in a rest home; the children are sleeping, the grandparents are on the phone. You have your own time, own place. You listen to whatever comes out of now, the past. The sound can drip with well won laurels of acceptance, of transience, of longevity. There is a touch, a method that changes, adapts with the mood of the music and times. The touch is always personal, passionate: it embraces, repels, passes, returns.

Like blurry postcards of someplace you’ve never been, or a fleeting memory of someone you’ve never met, translated into sound. A sound so warm and thick, familiar and inviting, that it transports you to a sonic universe where a skipping record becomes your footsteps, and a repeated crackly phrase becomes the wind through the trees. Easily one of the most transcendentally perfect records ever.

CD – 10 tracks

Tracklist:

1. Casio
2. Anatomy
3. Louie’s Riddle
4. Ulster Autumn
5. PS One
6. Harry and Krishna
7. PS Two
8. The Christian Sink
9. The Frequent Pool
10. Incassum, Casio

On Loopholes, his impressive solo debut CD, Jeck uses tape loops and a cheap Casio keyboard to create a lo-tech jungle without the breakbeat – a collision of sources rendered unrecognisable through speed changes, short loop lengths and distortion. The progressive degeneration of material through successive re-recordings is celebrated in Jeck’s blissed out, textural aesthetic. For the Loopholes CD artwork, Touch label partner and graphic designer Jon Wozencroft creates a neat visual analogy to the music using photographs of VHS playbacks of images generated by camcordering TV pictures. The medium loops back on itself and enhances its own idiosyncratic qualities. “Its similar to the way I’m working with sound: just textures and landscapes. You’re not quite sure what they are and it doesn’t matter,” says Jeck. “I’m not brilliant at keeping time with tunes or whatever”…