Vinyl Requiem

Philip Jeck & visual artist Lol Sargent conceived Vinyl Requiem to expressively mark the imminent demise of mainstream analog music, with vinyl record sales rapidly shifting over to the then new compact disc format - it was the beginning of the digital era. Then having won a prestigious Arts Council New Collaborations Award as a commission to specifically create Vinyl Requiem, they blended together and rehearsed the entire sound and vision production over a number of intense weeks during a project dedicated residency at the Vooruit Arts Centre in Ghent, Belgium, followed by its UK premiere at the Union Chapel, London, on 4th June 1993. Vinyl Requiem consisted of an 8 x-6 metre wall of 180 Dansette record players, all! painted white, 12 Kodak 35mm slide projectors sequenced by an early Apple computer, and 3 Eiki 16mm film projectors. It was both a record orchestra and a contoured projection screen combined into a single vertical scaffold structure. Numerous 7", 10" & 12" vinyl discs - complete with Jeck's trademark carefully positioned sticky paper dots -were manually played and swapped by three Dansette Operators (Gert Keunen, Robert Overson, Donna Rutherford) walking to and fro on their individual 8 metre long platforms (each equipped with stop watch and miners lamp) performing Jeck's swirling, resonating, intricate turntable composition. Visually reflecting Jeck's score, Sargent created 35mm slide and 16mm film animated sequences, which he and his assistant (James Mealing) hand triggered at rehearsed specific time points, producing a multi layered fusion of sound & light lasting circa 70 minutes, during which Jeck also performed two live solo sessions using a separate cluster of Dansettes on stage. Thirty three and a third years on, here is a specially edited vinyl version taken from the recordings at Union Chapel.