The turntable and the guitar: the interactions of Danny Clay, Jon Fischer and Giacomo Fiore on #neuguitars #blog #GiacomoFiore
turntable drawing no. 16 | giacomo fiore and danny clay | Giacomo Fiore (bandcamp.com)
The guitar and the turntable are among the most interesting products of mass culture in the musical field. Their history has branched out in a series of conceptual developments, to the point of involving even the most dynamic forms of musical research, always looking for new materials and means to explore and use. This LP “Turntable Drawings no.16” offers a new, interesting point of view on the possibilities that these two instruments can still offer.
“Turntable Drawings” is a series of musical operations, of numbered works in continuous development by the composer Danny Clay and the engraver Jon Fischer, based on a collection of handmade LPs, made by Fisher himself. Turntable Drawing No. 16 combines the sounds produced by three turntables playing looped records with grooves locked with an electric guitar score, itself based on looped chord fragments. The LPs used are encoded with various sounds: some loud, some melodic, all quite low fidelity. Indeed, the “low fidelity” sound seems to be a constant in this work which is presented here in two different versions: the “studio” version of Danny, composed of collage material recorded between September 2018 and April 2020, and the “live” performance by Giacomo Fiore, which uses an ad hoc modular synthesizer patch that plays in a loop and processes both the recorded sounds and the guitar in real time.
“Turntable Drawings” shows a conception of art, of music as to do, something concrete, empirical, created in a context of material and technical elements defined by popular music. An idea of art far from an idealistic vision, to which the concept of music as form is opposed, where the term ‘form’ means organism, formed physicality, open work, living an autonomous life, calibrated and governed by its own laws. Where the concept of expression is matched by that of production, of forming action. The result is a raw, almost tactile sound material, where the electric guitar moves on iridescent organic textures, changing shape, sound and direction every time.
“Turntable Drawings no.16” is an example of a dynamic work, capable of assuming different forms, while keeping intact the dynamics and internal structures that form a basic framework on which the performers can move, innovating it every time. The result, encoded, trapped in the grooves of the LP is then a work of design.
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