February 16, 2005
Guardian article on Christian Marclay,
avant-garde turntablist, in advance of his upcoming Barbican retrospective.
"You could say that Marclay is obsessed with records.... But it would be more accurate to say he is obsessed with examining the way mass-produced objects act as filters, intercepting the signal as it travels from a source to the organs of sense. 'For me the record is this strange object that has completely transformed the way we think about sound. First of all it turned sound into something material that you can hold in your hand, and it turned it into a commodity you can make money with, which pretty much changes everything.'"
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I have his Record Without a Cover somewhere. I used to love to drop it on my fathers expensive stereo and watch my old man suffer. Krrrg grk kzzwp krggggg...
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I got a question for you turntablists out there: how is it that dj's know which songs are best for the ebb and flow of a non-stop dance mix? Is there a list somewhere or a tool or something that allows them to know the effective beats per minute of any song? Or is it (shudder) a natural talent for being able to pick that sort of thing out?
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Just to clarify, Marclay is emphatically not a "dance music DJ". "For his mid-1980s Recycled Records series, he painstakingly jigsawed out segments of coloured vinyl and picture discs and glued the fragments together, mixing up segments of different LPs. Exquisite objects in their own right, they also formed curious DJ tools - imagine the effect of dropping a needle on these mismatched, reglued artefacts. 'The cut itself is a sound, unwanted sound. I tried to integrate these sounds that were created by this damage, by this patina of time.'" That said, to answer your question, Fes: there are beat counter tools out there, and most of those club records have their BPMs listed on the label. I imagine most DJs build their own databases of tracks and tempos. The rest is just a natural feel, plus practice.