In the book The Recording Angel by Evan Eisenberg I’m drawn to a section that reads;

‘But if a record is a time capsule and a phonograph is a time machine, they are also so in an unaccustomed sense. A record is a sculpted block of time, repeatable at the owners whim…But a record does not record historical time. It records musical time which, though it exists in historical time, is not of it. A Vioncello is already a time machine, taking its listeners to a place outside of time. The phonograph is also a time machine of this sort, but with the difference that the listener operates it himself and can take a spin as often as he pleases.’

From my continued reading of Eisenberg’s book, many of my personal thoughts about the ‘power’ of music, records and culture align with Eisenberg’s. Although I do feel the book is quite dated and Eisenberg’s glossing over of many genres in favour of classical can become tedious, he illustrates the unnatural beauty of listening to recorded music. Essentially, he argues that the record is physical musical time, a wax object containing the act of musicianship. As a listener we can travel with our ears to the time and place of the recording. However…

This is all fun and whimsical but I’m interested in destroying time.

During the feedback session with Gareth he put me onto the artists Oval and William Basinski. Both intwine the art of destruction with the art of creation, the result being utterly hypnotic and original. (I will discuss these two artists in a later post.) Inspired by both works I collected a number of old records to scratch, warp and shatter.

Initially each record sounded very similar and not very good. But thinking back to the Eisenberg quote I decided to layer the shattered records on top of each other and record the results, I began messing with musical time. This William Burroughs cut-up technique approach to records has really inspired me. Although for the purpose of my piece I will only be sampling portions of the recordings, I wish to expand on this method a lot more.