Christian Marclay and Unwanted Sound

by Joe Wallace

My first exposure to Christian Marclay was though my bandmates in Crevice. In 1999, some of the Crevice crew hooked up with Marclay to do an art show in San Antonio, Texas at the Art Pace gallery. The show, according to Uncle Buzz Records (the label home of Crevice, Pink Filth, Paisley Babylon, and others) to be an “audio/visual event using hundreds of Christmas records (Marclay) collected while in town.

Interesting enough to combine DJing with art galleries; moreso that the idea was to create new music from a collection of thousands of Christmas records. Ever since then I’ve been intrigued by Christian Marclay and his body of work. I don’t think DJ culture has been the same since Marclay, in the same way that tape manipulation art hasn’t been the same since John Oswald.

Marclay has been described as a “Dadaist DJ.” He may be a DJ but is far from a club kid knob twiddler.
For starters, he studied sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston Marclay has been involved in a number of collaborations with high-profile names in music. The term DJ or turntablist is really inadequate for Marclay–he’s gone far beyond club DJing and studio recording. His concepts involve the physical manipulation of the recorded music on vinyl as well as the aural manipulation of it.

Christian Marclay has worked with John Zorn, Sonic Youth, Otomo Yoshihide and Fred Frith. His work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art New York among other important galleries around the world. It’s obvious that he’s a name in the business of sound, in the same manner as Eno, John Cage, Harold Budd and other experimenters/pioneers.

Check this clip about Christian Marclay and his desire for “unwanted sound”. It’s a fascinating little glimpse into the world he inhabits. “When we play a record we don’t want to hear the surface noise,” said Marclay,”But those are the sounds I’m interested in. I’m interested in the sounds I can get out of this vinyl record.”