DJ as Artist

By stephensurlin on September 9th, 2009, 5:20 pm 3 Comments

Japanese artist Yuri Suzuki creates very inspiring sculpture/installation based audio art. His piece titled Prepared Turntable 2008 is shown below. On Suzuki’s website he describes the work as

“A turntable that focuses on actively composing and playing music.
This record player has 5 tone arms, each of which can have its volume controlled by its own fader.
This is an analogue answer for the digitalized DJ.”

I found my interest in Suzuki’s work came in part from my recent interest in American and European modernist music, artists like: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Cage(Who greatly developed the “Prepared Piano“), Alban Berg…

It is within these artists that the idea of music that has a rhythm that is heavily based on cycles and patterns, which can be seen in a quite literal way in the body movements of the musicians in this link Philip Glass that shows a string quartet playing his music, the players sway in circles of varying length based on the rhythmic part they’re playing. The idea of cyclical based music seems to easily transfer to the medium of a turntable playing a record, a rotating disc with grooves of varying length around it. These grooves contain a loop that is the exact length of time that it’s placement on the record allows, since grooves closer to the centre are shorter and ones on the outer edge, longer. Therefore, based on the type of loops put on this custom made record, anyone can compose a rhythmic composition using the various “instruments” that exist within the records surface.

That being said, Yuri Suzuki has another project that works with the cyclical nature of records and their commonality. His piece Sound Chaser 2008 a Technical collaboration with Yaroslav Tencer is,

“A train-style record player. Users connect the chipped pieces of records together to make new tracks. The records pieces are from cheap records bought at jumble sales or used record shops. This record player revives forgotten, old records.“

The potentiality of Glass’s concepts are made manifest with this “train” cars on a track. I wonder if this piece could also be done by providing a large amount of extra track and the track itself could be elongated and adjusted by visitor to the gallery, causing many different length and shaped “tracks”.

 

Yuri Suzuki is also a DJ, so here are a few of his mixes:

Acid Rave Mix

Minimal house mix

Electro disco mix recorded in Tokyo April 2005

Category: assignments, blog | Tags: DJ Mixing Philip Glass Record Sound Art Track Train Turntable Vinyl Yuri Suzuki | Permalink: DJ as Artist