SEMIBEGUN 024: THE RECORD PLAYS ITSELF

 

Air Date: March 10, 2024

The needle drop shatters the illusion that we are merely listening to a recording. The turntable and the record have existed as tools of performance and composition since their inception in the late 19th century. Early on, its limitations and affordances influenced how composers wrote and musicians performed. Practitioners of Gramaphonmusik and musique concrète utilized the record as compositional material before moving to the sound collagists preferred medium, tape. DJs from myriad parallel and intersecting musical trajectories spun new sounds and music-making practices out of their turntables. And the practice of frictional sound reproduction continues within a seemingly frictionless, streaming-based listening culture. We play the record; the record plays itself. An hour of non-exhaustive approaches to composing and performing on/with/for records and turntables, including my own! Music by Maria Chavez, Mariam Rezaei, Edward Elgar, The Caretaker, Philip Jeck, Herbie Hancock, Grandmaster Flash, and more.

Elgar, known to those who love classical radio as a "composer" whose work people "enjoy," may not have been taken by the potential of recording as a new compositional domain the way Hindemith, Cage, or the Pierres were. But he did compose and perform for the medium as a mode for advertising his works to potential consumers of sheet music! Here he stands before a cramped ensemble in 1914, conducting the premiere of his piece "Carissima," not for an audience but for an acoustic horn! Surely the limitations of the medium (some of which can be seen here), such as the length of a recording and frequency reproduction, factored into his composing and conducting decisions.

TRACKS

  1. Semibegun – “Kill Slay Always”; 2023

  2. Maria Chavez – “The Language of Chance (Live at Le Guess Who)”; 2018

  3. Paul Hindemith – “Trickaufnahmen für Schallplatte [Trick Recordings for a Phonographic Record]”; 1930

  4. Edward Elgar – “Carissima” conducted by Elgar; 1914

  5. Semibegun – “Kill Slay Better”; 2023

  6. Gavin Bryars with Philip Jeck & Alter Ego – “The Sinking of the Titanic (1969-)”; 2005

  7. Pierre Henri & Pierre Schaeffer – “Symphonie pour un homme seul”; 1950

  8. Milan Knížák – “Broken Music pt. 1”; 1979

  9. Grandmaster Flash – “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel”; 1980

  10. Herbie Hancock – “Rockit”; 1983

  11. Semibegun – “Kill Slay Country”; 2023

  12. Semibegun – “Kill Slay Naked”; 2023

  13. The Caretaker – “Pared back to the minimal”; 2011

  14. Mariam Rezaei – “HMMM”; 2023

  15. Semibegun – Improvisation and “Kill Slay Nothing”; 2024/2023