Artists have been using—and misusing—the turntable as a musical instrument for decades, but no one played it quite like Philip Jeck. He employed a battery of vintage monophonic record players to create otherworldly soundscapes out of thrift-store vinyl. He created loops by affixing stickers or bits of tape to his scuffed-up records, and he used delay pedals, a MiniDisc recorder, and a Casio sampling keyboard to build up his layers of sound. Frequently setting his turntables to their slowest speed—16 RPM, just half that of a conventional LP—Jeck wrung a thick, psychedelic syrup from his battered wax. Often, the omnipresent clicks and pops were the only recognizable element in his cavernous creations. It was as though he were spelunking in the crevasses of the grooves themselves, his headlamp throwing fantastical shapes on the rutted cave walls.
Jeck released his debut album, Loopholes, in 1995—a year before DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… extended the art of the crate-digging beatsmith from rap single to longform collage. But where Shadow judiciously edited his drums and basslines into intricately detailed assemblages of moving parts, Jeck’s approach was moodier and more immersive; murky loops swirled together like the currents of a muddy river, sluggish and without end.
For decades, Jeck’s approach remained remarkably consistent across both stage and studio. Trained as a visual artist, he first became interested in DJing in the 1980s after hearing DJs and remixers like Shep Pettibone and Larry Levan; it was only upon picking up a used Dansette, a rudimentary record player from the ’50s and ’60s, that he hit upon the style he would pursue across the course of his musical career.
“I really liked what it did to the sound,” he told me when I interviewed him for Wax Poetics in 2004: “It was quite lo-fi, with this funny remove.” The Dansette’s 16-RPM switch only added to the possibilities, particularly when paired with a vintage 78. “When you slow a record down that much,” he said, “other things start appearing out of the sound.” What he played hardly mattered, it was all in how he played it. Sixties rock, modern classical, big-band jazz, country—they all became fodder for his slurry. He said that even the original artists wouldn’t recognize their own work once he put his stamp on it.
He began developing his style on the road, steadily adding more turntables to his setup. In the late ’80s, as sales of vinyl fell victim to the success of CDs, he began work on a piece called Vinyl Requiem, intended as a tribute to the medium. At first he envisioned it as a quartet of machines, but he eventually collected 180 Dansettes, which he set up on a massive riser, walking between them to switch a single loop on or off.
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He worked like an improviser. Armed with a stack of 30 records, he might have his first couple of moves mapped out, but after that, he simply followed his ears. “My approach is actually in listening to the thing that’s happening in the record I’m playing,” he said. “Really, it’s my emotional response to that sound that moves me onto the next thing. I try to chase the thing I like. That always opens up another door. If I’m coasting, I’ll put on something I don’t know to wake me up—a shot of adrenaline. When you get a little bit scared, you’re really listening.”
Despite the imposing scale of something like Vinyl Requiem, the real power of Jeck’s work, particularly on record, is its simplicity. Manipulating his loops by hand—spinning a drum to create an unsteady groove, or tapping the record to create vibrato—and using those slow playback speeds to accentuate the music’s textures, Jeck managed an unbelievably tactile strain of ambient music, one that often felt like he was touching the sounds themselves. His faith in music’s ability to transport listeners was almost mystical. “For the instant hit, there’s nothing like it—one beautiful sound can really take you somewhere else,” he said. In that spirit, here are 10 gateways into Jeck’s secondhand stratosphere.
Philip Jeck: Loopholes (1995)
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By Jeck’s debut, Loopholes, all the elements of his solo recordings were already in place. Resolutely minimalist, the album displays a raw, no-frills approach to sample-based music: His loops are filtered and re-pitched until the source material is all but obliterated; it’s rare that you can determine what instrument a given sound might come from, much less what song. What’s striking is how much mileage he gets from such economical source material: “Anatomy” swells like My Bloody Valentine at their most ebullient; “Harry and Krishna” clangs like pile drivers echoing off nearby buildings; and the low-end frequencies and lurching beats of “The Christian Sink” and “The Frequent Pool” find common cause with boom-bap hip-hop. In later years, Jeck’s music would become notable for its slowness, but “Louie’s Riddle” replicates a queasy techno rhythm that hurtles like a runaway train.
Philip Jeck: Surf (1998)
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Surf opens with a sound reminiscent of church bells, suggesting links between medieval European village life and avant-garde minimalism, and gradually blossoms into ringing chords reminiscent of Glenn Branca’s guitar symphonies. The album is slower and slurrier than Loopholes, with a track like “Box of Lamb” anticipating Grouper’s desolate atmospheres. But Jeck had no interest in just letting a moody loop do all the work for him: The immaculately composed “Surf Finger” moves stealthily through its varied changes—loping congas, Fennesz-like fuzz, overdriven ring modulators, illbient breaks—like a jungle cat on the prowl.
Philip Jeck: Vinyl Coda I-II (2000) and Vinyl Coda III-IV (2001)
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Originally released on CD in 2000 and 2001, then reissued in 2019, the four-part Vinyl Coda offers the chance to sink deep into Jeck’s aquatic sound world: The shortest piece here is 22 minutes long, and the longest runs more than an hour. The unpolished sounds have more in common with the lo-fi brutalism of Loopholes than the more delicately shaded soundscaping of Stoke or 7, but the pieces’ extreme lengths and air of mystery make them just as hypnotic. Garbled voices and cryptic bleeps suggest intercepted radio transmissions from another dimension, while doleful instrumental passages anticipate the haunted ballroom music of the Caretaker. Unlocking ghostly frequencies embedded in his dusty vinyl, Vinyl Coda captures Jeck at his most eerily moving.
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Philip Jeck: Stoke (2002)
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A narrowed sense of focus distinguishes Stoke, Jeck’s first great album. Each track zeroes in on just a handful of elements, drawing widescreen vistas out of the merest wisps of sound. In “Above,” disembodied voices poke through a whirlwind of sped-up tones, like a television set caught in a twister. Pairing eerie organs with a slowed-down snippet of the blues, “Pax” evokes a windswept battlefield graveyard. He’s at his most reduced in “Lambing,” which is nothing but vinyl crackle and ghostly sighs. Phonograph inventor Thomas Edison was reportedly fascinated by the idea of capturing the voices of the dead, and the séance-like Stoke is shot through with appropriately occult undertones.
Philip Jeck & Jacob Kirkegaard: Soaked (2002)
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Recorded live at Germany’s Moers Festival, Soaked captures Jeck in performance with Swedish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard, credited here with sampler and “other electronics.” The two musicians share an affinity for texture, and these seven interconnected tracks are flush with the rustling of shirred fabric, crumpled cellophane, and trickling water. Occasionally, a scrap of voice will drift to the surface, a ghostly echo from an earlier century, intoning sing-song verses that land halfway between whimsy and dread.
Philip Jeck: 7 (2003)
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7 is just as slow and sad as Stoke. A boundless field of shimmer, the opening “Wholesome” is one of the most purely ambient pieces Jeck ever released, and “Museum” hammers horn fanfare into a daybreak glow. Despite these atmospheric touches, the record is still marked by its extreme physicality: At times, you can really feel the needle trawling through the groove of a pensive piano melody, dredging up bits of low-end muck. Where previous records felt largely dependent upon chance, his compositions begin to feel more intentional here, or at least more intently crafted. “Now You Can Let Go” melds Hawaiian guitar, harmonica, and dub delay into a kind of lysergic Looney Tunes soundtrack that builds to a thundering percussive climax. It’s remarkable how much drama he gets out of these small sullen loops, just by rubbing them together and letting the sparks fly.
Fennesz/Jeck/Matthews: Amoroso (2007)
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On this one-off 7″, Jeck and the Viennese guitarist Christian Fennesz team up with organist Charles Matthews as part of a project dedicated to the pipe organ. “Amoroso” is meant as a tribute to “sacred minimalist” Arvo Pärt, and the Estonian composer’s contemplative, devotional style is clearly audible on the A-side, where Fennesz lends delicately distorted processing to Matthews’ pipes. On the B-side, though, Jeck offers one of the noisiest recordings in his catalog. It’s not clear exactly how he created “Philip Jeck plays Charles Matthews,” but the results sound as though he’s taking a sandblaster to the cathedral itself. It ends in a skipping locked groove, putting a turntablist’s spin on the notion of eternity.
Gavin Bryars with Philip Jeck & Alter Ego: The Sinking of the Titanic (2008)
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Gavin Bryars wrote The Sinking of the Titanic in 1969 as a tribute to the string quartet that reportedly continued playing as the ship went down. The English composer’s piece was also a kind of thought experiment: What might it have sounded like, he wondered, if the music continued all the way to the bottom of the ocean? In its debut recording, released on Brian Eno’s Obscure label in 1975, the music’s elegiac refrain gradually becomes more and more distant and muffled, as though traveling back to us from thousands of leagues underwater.
In this 2005 performance, recorded live in Venice with the Italian experimental ensemble Alter Ego (and featuring Bryars himself on double bass), the players begin as if with a tracking shot of the seafloor, as Jeck’s damaged vinyl mimics the clicking, crackling sounds of stones and shells being tossed about by the current. Bryars’ piece ultimately situates itself at the nexus of sound, memory, and decay, which makes Jeck the perfect interpreter of its themes.
Philip Jeck: Cardinal (2015)
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Jeck’s sleeve notes for Cardinal ground the album in questions of faith. He cites the writer Marilynne Robinson’s “love of humanity and sense of wonder about the great mystery of existence” and dedicates “Saint Pancras” to a young Roman who converted to Christianity and was beheaded at the age of 14, in roughly 304 AD. Precisely how those themes figure into the music is not clear, but there’s no mistaking the sense of turmoil in these sweeping drones, in which the harsh effects of digital time-stretching threaten to overwhelm the gentler feel of his analog manipulations. In keeping with his epigraph—“weeping for the wrongs we cannot undo”—it is a somber, intense, and at times agonizing listen.
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