ALWAYS EVERYTHING

PHILIP JECK // AN ARK FOR THE LISTENER

Turntablist >Philip Jeck< is an aural impressionist: he lashes indistinct strokes of sound upon one another in much the same way as a painter might wield a brush. But there’s an extra crucial factor involved in his art – time. In Jeck’s hands the canvas’ third dimension is temporal, its Z axis stretching outward into a near-infinity of barely distinguishable individual snapshots, each overlaid in perfect sequence. It’s all the atmosphere of a Turner painting dragged out and intensified over sixty or seventy minutes, leaving a listener in stasis, trapped between layers of paint. No wonder his music is so readily identified with water and the sea.

Long before the hypnagogic set were experimenting with sampling’s potential for engaging nostalgia and memory, meditating on the movement of time and the process of ageing, Jeck’s experiments with junkshop vinyl and battered turntables were riffing on similar themes. The crucial difference lies in their ambiguity. While the music created by Ferraro, Oneohtrix Point Never et al is prescriptive, retaining an intrinsic connection to the eighties – all dayglo colours, gaudy pop, videogame melodies – Jeck avoids obvious referencing in favour of a different sort of haziness, indistinct without being overly vague, and markedly less druggy. If you were to put on his latest solo record for Touch, An Ark For The Listener, without knowing the slightest bit about its themes or inception, it could almost be about any subject you chose to pin it on.

Its potential double meaning certainly helps - the ‘ark’ of the title could refer either to a ship or the chest in which the Ten Commandments were stored. Either way the Biblical undertone fits with the record’s preoccupation with mortality – it was inspired by verse 33 of the Gerald Manley Hopkins poem The Wreck Of The Deutschland, and the drowning of five Franciscan nuns - and its nautical theme aligns Ark with Jeck’s haunting soundscape work on Gavin Bryars’ heartrending The Sinking Of The Titanic. The connection is as strong sonically as it is thematically, both mapping the final moments of souls gradually lost in the ocean’s murky depths.



An Ark For The Listener is less a single, unified work than his last solo full-length Sand, instead coming across as a series of separate ruminations on a shared theme. As ever, melodies appear like magic eye pictures, suspended among gently fluttering curtains of static, rarely approaching the foreground for long before sinking again. One particularly beautiful sequence during opener ‘Pilot/Dark Blue Night’, however, sees a lonely chord progression suddenly burst from nowhere and breach the surface like a whale’s blowhole, or the last, weak upwelling of light from a sinking ship. It’s one of the most straightforwardly affecting pieces Jeck has ever put to tape, though given the notoriously changeable nature of his chosen medium I’m sure similar coincidences happen all the time.

And that’s part of what makes Philip Jeck’s music so special: the tactile, overly sensitive nature of the source material ensures that, for all its careful composition, there’s a wonderful element of luck to the final product. A certain coincidence, a certain aligning of fragments at a certain time, generates tiny frissions, eddies and harmonic interference that can either make or break its delicate spell. When the tension is suddenly, unexpectedly released, it’s like hearing nothing else out there.

And while I’m not overly keen to raise the old analogue/digital argument again, it’s worth mentioning one thing: in fifty years’ time, just watch someone try to rip apart and recontextualise an mp3 like this. Sorry, but it just ain’t happening.

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Rory