Philip Jeck - An Ark For The Listener

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5...according to our Ant on Fri 17 Sep, 2010.

The arrival of a new Philip Jeck album is always a good day, with this, his sixth fresh out of the box and straight into the CD player. This sounds wonderful, but then I expect nothing less from Jeck who over the years has become a master of his artform. This has been created using extracts from live performances and has been remixed at home. His usual turntable set up was used along with mini disc recorders, bass guitar, and effects pedals. As well as the rich textured soundscapes he creates there are also some lovely sparkly twinkling chimes. This arrived late so unfortunately I'm unable to fully digest it, but what I'm hearing is fantastic. 'Twentyninth' really sends a shiver up the spine while 'All That's Allowed (Remix)' is a wide-screen opus that takes on a huge emotional resonance while I discover from the press sheet that the album is a meditation on verse 33 of "The Wreck Of Deutchsland" a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins about the drowning of five Franciscan nuns exiled from Germany.

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Philip Jeck works with old records and record players salvaged from junk shops turning them to his own purposes. He really does play them as musical instruments, creating an intensely personal language that evolves with each added part of a record. Philip Jeck makes geniunely moving and transfixing music, where we hear the art not the gimmick.

Philip Jeck writes: "A version of "An ark for the listener" was first performed at Kings Place London on 24/02/2010. It is a meditation on verse 33 of "The Wreck of the Deutchsland", Gerard Manley Hopkins poem about the drowning on December 7th 1875 of five Franciscan nuns exiled from Germany. This CD version was recorded at home in Liverpool and used extracts from live performances over the last 12 months. The "coda:" tracks are remixes of 2 pieces from "Suite: Live in Liverpool". "chime, chime(re-rung)" was originally made for Musicworks magazine (#104, Summer 09) and "all that's allowed (remix)" is previously unreleased. All tracks were made using Fidelity record-players, Casio SK1 keyboards, Sony mini-disc recorders, Behringer mixers, Ibanez bass guitar, Boss delay pedal and Zoom bass effects pedal."

An ark... is Jeck's 6th solo album for touch since 'Loopholes' in 1995. The Wire reckoned it was 'Stoke' (Touch, 2002) which 'made him great, but his body of work and his achingly brilliant live sets are rapidly defining him as one of our best artists, and his recent award from The Paul Hamlyn Foundation confirms him as such.

Philip Jeck studied visual art at Dartington College of Arts. He started working with record players and electronics in the early '80's and has made soundtracks and toured with many dance and theatre companies as we as well as his solo concert work. His best kown work "Vinyl Requiem" (with Lol Sargent): a performance for 180 '50's/'60's record players won Time Out Performance Award for 1993. He has also over the last few years returned to visual art making installations using from 6 to 80 record players including "Off The Record" for Sonic Boom at The Hayward Gallery, London [2000). In 2010 he won one of The Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Composition.

Tracklisting:

pilot/dark blue night
ark
twentyninth
dark rehearsal
thirtieth/pilot reprise
pilot reprise/the all of water
the pilot (among our shoals)
all that's allowed (remix)
chime, chime (re-rung)

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