The video clip we are about to see shows a performance by three DJs known as

Transcription

1 Visual Knowledges Conference The University of Edinburgh September 2003 ISBN: Turntablism The video clip we are about to see shows a performance by three DJs known as turntablists. All of the sounds we will hear, from the bass-heavy beat to the percussive and complex scratches, are created by the manipulation of turntables and records by the DJs hands. Turntablists play a music based on creating new sounds by playing old records they use records and turntables, in other words, as musical instruments. When watching the video, pay particular attention to the movement of the DJs, especially the movement of their hands. The essence of what DJs do is remixing prerecorded music; they take these sounds and create something new out of them, either by combining elements of different songs together, or taking a fragment of one song and altering the way it sounds extending it into a potentially endless loop, cutting it up into smaller sections, or using the mechanics of the turntable to create altogether new sounds, like the scratch. The turntablist performs this remix manually and live with vinyl records, and that is precisely why the turntablist is a problematic figure within the history of sound reproduction technology. Turntablists use records in a way that counters what I will show to be the sound industry s trend towards invisible sound media. Today, digital technology makes seamless, infinitely layered mixes possible on a home computer; any noise can be 1

2 reproduced and/or transformed at will, and nearly all visual traces of the mediation of the producer are eliminated through digital reproduction. So why does the scratch DJ survive and even thrive in the era of digital sound technology? Why does anyone still obsess over playing records and spend hours and years developing the ability to coax new sounds out of what should be an obsolete technology? The answer, I will suggest, lies in the dynamic of sight and sound in turntablism DJs with their hands on the records, moving them back and forth, scratching and cutting. It amounts to a re-imagining of the proper interaction of needle and groove, as well as the roles of producers and consumers of recorded music. Today s scratch DJs make use of a visual knowledge of the record, and I will propose a point of origin for this knowledge. Fascination with the visual properties of records and turntables extends far back into the history of sound reproduction technology, when the turntable was known as the gramophone and it was the dominant medium for recorded music. Even then, the mainstream trend in the commercial music industry was to downplay the visual presence of the gramophone and its records, but theorists like Theodor Adorno and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, along with composers like Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, and John Cage showed an interest in the possibility of the gramophone as an instrument in its own right. Contemporary DJs have succeeded in creating a place for the turntable as instrument, and I will be arguing that the fact that this has happened in the era of digital technology is not insignificant, but is rather a defining feature of turntablism. The wax-cylinder phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, and from this moment, the sound machine was conceived of as a vehicle for freeing sound from the 2

3 body. While the simple working mechanism of the first phonograph its hand crank, wax cylinder, needle and speaking tubes was quite visible to the user, Emile Berliner s gramophone concealed much of its mechanism within a box. A machine whose mechanisms were mostly hidden aided in the illusion of a disembodied sound. That is why the gramophone s form moved away from reference to its mechanical function, with its speaking horn rendered into florid forms, or even fanciful shapes like Zeppelins. 1 The most enduring trend was to hide the gramophone within a piece of furniture, allowing it to blend in with the rest of the domestic living room. Theodor Adorno writes, in a 1927 essay entitled The Curves of the Needle, that the transformation of the piano from a musical instrument into a piece of bourgeois furniture [...] is recurring in the case of the gramophone but in an extraordinarily more rapid fashion [...] In the functional salon, the gramophone stands innocuously as a little mahogany cabinet on little rococo legs. 2 Since Adorno s observation, the media of recorded sound have steadily retreated from the human eye. Magnetic tape lowered recorded sound s visual profile, and the cassette tape was able to hide the recording medium itself within a plastic shell. The advent of digital recording brought us the compact disc, whose writing is invisible to any eye but the laser hidden inside the CD player, which is generally an unobtrusive black box, keeping the mysterious playing mechanism, as well as the medium of recording, out of view. The latest step is the mp3 file, a medium that approaches the ideal of the invisible, intangible recording medium. The mp3 file is infinitely reproducible and transportable it exists only as data, located perhaps on your computer s hard drive or in 1 See Adorno s The Curves of the Needle in October 55 (1990), p Ibid, pp

4 a portable mp3 player. The mp3 file is always homeless, and never identified with a physical medium, unlike the CD. This is the state of the medium of recorded sound at the start of the 21 st century, and it is fitting that the mysterious invisibility of sound reproduction matches the mystery of commercial sound production. Commercially produced recordings have, since the advent of electronic recording technology, created a technological gap between musicians and the recordings that represent them. Claims of aural fidelity become complex when the mediation of the recording studio is considered. Studio technicians create complex mixes and edits with the goal of attaining a pure sound a sound that is more ideal than anything a musician can produce in front of a microphone. Yet these studio mixes and edits are rendered invisible and inaudible for the consumer, presented as if the musicians on the recording spontaneously performed the music that the listener hears. Rare are the recordings that call attention to the intervention of the recording process. The hip hop DJ challenges all of these trends in sound technology, both visual and aural. The scratch DJ takes what is now an outdated form of technology and places it on display, which is at variance with the ideal of invisible sound machines. The DJ s use of sampling, scratching, and mixing records challenges the ideal of aural fidelity to an original sound or performance. This latter aspect of DJ performance challenges a related aspect of the sound industry the notion of musical authorship and the status of the recording as a commodity. When DJs first began to appropriate fragments of previously recorded music, they were guilty in the eyes of the recording industry of a double infidelity: to the original sound on inscribed into the record, and to the value of the commodity, to its integrity as a discrete unit for sale. 4

5 While hip hop s development as a form of popular music has deeply challenged previous notions of musical production and consumption, much of the basic elements involved in turntablism in particular the focus on the record s groove and the possibility of using the sound machine as a musical instrument have a history the extends back into the first half of the twentieth century, fifty years before the birth of hiphop. In 1930, the German composers Paul Hindemith and Ernest Toch gave a concert in which, according to a contemporary witness, made-for-phonograph-record-music was accomplished by superimposing various phonograph recordings and live musical performances, by employing variations in speed, pitch height and acoustic timbre which are not possible in real performance. The result was an original music which can only be recreated by means of the gramophone apparatus. 3 The records in this performance were used to create a sound collage, utilizing both layered sound from different recordings played simultaneously and distortions made possible by the gramophones themselves. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the painter and photographer, writes about further gramophone experiments in a 1933 article entitled New Film Experiments : The composers Hindemith and Toch have achieved some startling results by the application of the mechanical process of the phonograph [ ] by increasing the speed with which he recorded a fugue made up of vocal parts only, Toch was able to produce an as yet unrecognized aspect of the human voice. 4 John Cage also composed a piece involving the gramophone his Imaginary Landscape No. 1of 1939 features gramophones playing 3 Heinrich Burkhard in the journal Melos, quoted in Thomas Levin, For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, October 55 (1990), p In Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p

6 test-tone records at varying speeds. 5 While these composers did propose a new way to listen to records on gramophones, they were focused on sound itself, a sound that did not refer to the visual properties of its recording medium. The relationship between the visual properties of records and the gramophone as instrument was recognized years before the gramophone concerts referred to above. In 1923, Moholy-Nagy wrote a short article entitled New Form in Music. Potentialities of the Phonograph (the German original is Grammophons ). 6 The article focuses on the relation of the visual elements of the record, the shape of the groove in particular, to the sound the record produces. In this essay Moholy-Nagy proposes that the record be studied to establish a groove-script alphabet, which will facilitate the development of an overall instrument with will supersede all instruments used so far. In a sense, this is a re-envisioning of the role of the gramophone; Moholy-Nagy s project is to transform the gramophone from an instrument of reproduction into one of production; this will cause the sound phenomenon itself to be created on the record, which carried no prior acoustic message, by the incision of groove-script lines as required. The records produced by this method would be created through an intimate knowledge of the graphic qualities of the record s grooves and the sound that they produce. An understanding of the record s groove-script alphabet is a bridge between the visual and aural properties of the record. The gramophone thus signals for Moholy-Nagy the potential for a new form of music, a form that has a visual dimension. No longer burdened with the mediation of the composer s score or even instrumentation, the gramophone could potentially allow 5 See Rob Young, Roll Tape: Pioneer Spirits in Musique Concrète, in Modulations, ed. Peter Shapiro, pp In Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, pp

7 the musician-artist to compose and perform works according to graphic and sonic harmonies. Theodor Adorno also expressed an interest in the visual dimension of gramophone records. For Adorno as well as Moholy-Nagy, one of the key features of the gramophone record s groove is its inscrutability. In The Form of the Phonograph Record (1934), Adorno describes the enigmatic shape of the grooves on the record in detail: It is covered with curves, a delicately scribbled, utterly illegible writing, which here and there forms more plastic figures for reasons that remain obscure to the layman upon listening. 7 Later in this essay, Adorno describes the record s grooves as mute music (58), evidence of an age-old, submerged and yet warranted relationship: that between music and writing (59). Like Moholy-Nagy, Adorno suggests that a visual understanding of the groove could lead to a new form of musical production. The record s spiral is a script of sound, a true writing that does not merely represent, but is determined by sound, a script that may be legible to musicians in the future. The key to the development of the gramophone as an instrument was the audiovisual bridge suggested by Moholy-Nagy and Adorno: to envision the gramophone as a producer, as opposed to a mere re-producer of music, it is necessary to understand what makes gramophone-produced music unique. An answer, when the audio experiments of Hindemith and Toch are considered alongside the visual emphasis of Moholy-Nagy and Adorno, is that the sight and sound of turntablism work together in a dynamic relationship. If one is to understand the potential for new music produced through the gramophone as that of recombination or re-appropriation of previous musical forms, then it is important to note how one sees the recombination through knowledge of the 7

8 groove-script alphabet and act of spinning records as well as how one hears the recombination of familiar sounds. By the nineteen seventies, records were still the dominant medium for commercial music, but new recording media, such as audio tape, threatened to displace the record as the form of mainstream musical commodity. In the commercial recording studio, magnetic tape was also the medium of choice for editing and master recordings, albeit in the service of the ideal of fidelity. The disc record was increasingly out of step with the new technology. It was during this transition away from vinyl records that the hip hop DJs were born, and their appearance is notable precisely because they began to use records in a way that countered commercial music s trend away from recorded media that could be seen and touched. In popular accounts of hip-hop s origins, a Jamaican-born Bronx DJ named Kool Herc is credited as being the first DJ to isolate the breakbeat from the rest of the record, thus creating the soundtrack for breakdancers, rappers, and graffiti artists. 8 The break is the part of a song usually in funk, but also in rock, disco, and jazz in which the vocals and melodic instruments drop out and the drummer cuts loose. Breakdancers got their name by being more interested in dancing to the breaks than the rest of the song in disco clubs, they would hang out on the edges, watching the disco dancers, then jumping in to the middle of the floor when the break came on. Kool Herc began to play just these beats so that the breakdancers, the b-boys and girls, could have a longer set of music devoted entirely to them. Kool Herc had to switch between records to play the different breaks, and by all accounts, the transitions were inelegant. Then the DJs Grandmaster 7 In The Form of the Phonograph Record, trans. Thomas Levin, October 55 (1990):

9 Flash and Afrika Bambaataa developed the techniques necessary for extending breaks they used two copies of the same record, and seamlessly switched between them to loop the break, over and over. This became the foundation of hip-hop music live mixing of records was not new for DJs, but isolating specific parts of them and creating a whole new sound, based on repeating these samples, was very new. Hip hop music made a favorite part of a song, the break, into the basis for a new way of listening. The DJ thus offers a model for a very active use of the turntable instead of a passive playback for a crowd, the DJ becomes more selective, picking out tiny fragments of songs, perhaps only a few bars long, and stretching them into minutes-long loops. Isolating the breakbeat was just a first step for turntable music. Scratching, transforming, and beat juggling are the techniques that make the best case for the turntable as a musical instrument. Scratching and transforming both refer to the sounds that are produced when the DJ physically moves the record against the needle at a speed other than the turntable s even rotation. The scratch refers to the friction against the needle, and is a rudiment of DJ technique; the transform was added later, and this is a way to alter the sound of the scratch, by manipulating the crossfader switch that controls the signal flow between left and right. Beat juggling takes the concept of extending the breakbeat even further, by cutting up the break into even smaller units and recombining them to form a new beat. The technical skill required to do this is extreme the DJ must know exactly where the needle rests on the groove of both records, and cue them into position in a matter of seconds. 8 See Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved my Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, and David Toop, Iron Needles of Death and a Piece of Wax, in Modulations, ed. Peter Shapiro. 9

10 All of the DJ s techniques are based on finding new ways to read records, and it is this aspect of turntablism that connects most strongly with the theoretical writings of Moholy-Nagy and Adorno. DJs are constantly searching for ways to use the information encoded on the record the groove-script alphabet, in Moholy-Nagy s words to build new sounds. As Adorno and Moholy-Nagy observed, the mute music of the disc record is frozen in a plastic form, and their emphasis on the visual qualities of the groove is also the starting point for the scratch DJ. Experienced DJs can locate a break by sight and memory alone they know exactly which groove to drop the needle on to find their beat. Most DJs make this process easier by placing a label on the disc to provide orientation, like the needle of a compass; when the label is pointing north, or at twelve o clock, the DJ knows when the break will begin. The label adds another piece of visual information to the disc, supplementing the spiral with another point of reference. The most important audio-visual bridge in turntablism, however, is located in the DJ s movement. In this clip, featuring a DJ named Roc Raida, the connections between the spinning discs on the turntables and breakdancing are obvious. Here the DJ is making the music that he is moving to, while his movement makes the music; there is no distinction between the kinaesthetic aspect of the music and its sound. The speed and dexterity in this performance are impressive, but the control necessary to execute the moves is where the real virtuosity lies. The record must be handled with just the right amount of pressure so that the needle stays in the groove and produces the desired sounds, and as the film clip will demonstrate, this becomes extremely difficult during such fast and furious moves. The turntable has always been in danger of disappearing, even within hip hop culture. Within the first few years after hip hop s genesis in the mid-seventies, hip hop 10

11 went into the recording studio and produced its own records, such as Rapper s Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang. In the studio, technology was available that made sampling and beat-making vastly easier than the live mixing involved with turntables. In 1982 s Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa, a drum machine was employed to provide the track s underlying beat. As hip hop music became a commercially viable subset of the recording industry, turntables and records seemed like an outdated way of mixing and producing hip hop. In the recording studio, producers and rappers could sample from any recording and creates any sounds they liked, piecing the elements together to create recordings that, on the one hand, always referred back to the original sound of a live DJ mixing and scratching on the turntables, while taking advantage of studio recording technology to create tracks that would be impossible with just two turntables. From the nineteen eighties on, as rap music was incorporated into mainstream pop music, the live DJ became as unimportant as the vinyl record to the commercial recording industry. So turntablists went underground and kept spinning records and developing their technique, testifying to the dedication of turntable and record enthusiasts. By the mid nineteen-nineties, turntablism resurfaced in mainstream music as a subset of hip hop. DJs who were calling themselves turntablists for the first time had shed rappers and studio production, focusing instead on the discipline of two turntables and a stack of records. Turntable music promises a multimedia experience that has proven popular, perhaps because it has several dimensions the familiar-yet-transformed sound of the beats, the abstract, percussive sounds of scratching, the references, through sampling, to favorite recordings, the look of scratching, heads nodding in unison, the competitive edge of DJ battles, the breakdancers in the crowd, the energy of live performance. Simon 11

12 Frith argues in Performing Rites that music offers a real experience of an ideal (274). Turntablism s version of the ideal is both a sound and an image: a reference to its origins as block-party music in the Bronx, when hip hop was a community and not yet a commodity. Turntablism thus refers to the history of the record and its uses, but it is also the present and future of the record. It is significant that the record has a future at all other sound media, like the cassette tape, are seemingly doomed to disappear. Will the vinyl record survive the era of digital reproduction? It may as long as there are turntablists to demonstrate the unique meeting of needle and groove. 12

13 Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. The Curves of the Needle. Trans. Thomas Y. Levin. October 55 (1990): The Form of the Phonograph Record. Trans. Thomas Y. Levin. October 55 (1990): Brewster, Bill and Frank Broughton. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey. New York: Grove Press, Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, Levin, Thomas Y. For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. October 55 (1990): Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. New Form in Music: Potentialities of the Phonograph. Moholy- Nagy. Ed. Krisztina Passuth. New York: Thames and Hudson, Scratch. Dir. Doug Pray. Perf. Qbert, Rob Swift, Mixmaster Mike, Roc Raida. DVD. Palm Pictures, Toop, David. Iron Needles of Death and a Piece of Wax. Modulations A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound. Ed. Peter Shapiro. New York: Caipirinha Productions, Young, Robert. Roll Tape: Pioneers in Musique Concrète. Modulations A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound. Ed. Peter Shapiro. New York: Caipirinha Productions,