A couple of minutes into Johann Strauss, the opening track, Lucy came into the room: "What is this?" After my brief response, "Christian Marclay," she turned on her heels, leaving the "tut" unspoken and left again. I remember playing the same track to my dad around the time I got the album, fifteen years ago or so, and he was more fulsome in his nonplussed-ness. "So he's changing the speed the record plays at, making it sound odd. Why?"
What they were both not responding to was a hacked version of The Blue Danube. The back of the CD explains it thus:
Each piece is composed entirely of records by the artist after whom it is titled. John Cage is a recording of a collage made by cutting slices from several records and gluing them back into a single disc. In all the other pieces the records were mixed and manipulated on multiple turntables and recorded analog with the use of overdubbing. A hand-crank gramophone was used in Louis Armstrong.
The last bit in particular gives away that, as Stephin Merritt writes songs about songs, Marclay makes recordings about recordings. Well, that's part of it. As this mini documentary shows, he "misuses" vinyl in all sorts of ways.
I've seen Marclay play three times, and once (St Lukes, Old Street, 2005) he was collaborating with someone on stage and actually cut a record of the sound the other performer was making during the show, before playing it at the end. Or something like that. I think. Another time he exhibited over 1,200 Christmas records (I looked for this one but, surprisingly, it wasn't there).
I've got most out of Marclay's work when I've seen it in art galleries. I first saw Guitar Drag in a gallery in Chicago in 2001, and it's the one piece of his that has got me in the gut rather than the head…
… or the senses, like Video Quartet, which I first saw at the White Cube in the summer of 2003
When you go into a gallery you expect and want to be challenged a bit; as I long ago tired of hearing, you want to see the envelope being pushed, just so you know where the envelope has got to. Even though I feel there's more to Marclay's sampling ethos than John Oswald's, but after the postmodern playfulness of Johann Strauss… comes more postmodern playfulness, only with source material that isn't quite so much fun, and the jokes start to wear a little thin. New York scenesters like John Zorn, Fred Frith and Marclay himself (turning his weapons back on his own work in an arch-but-necessary bout of reflexivity) were incoherent enough to start with, so arguably the last thing they needed was attack of the cut-up technique. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding.
As with that John Oswald album, I got this on the strength of high praise in Chris Cutler's Recommended Records catalogue — in fact this one was released by ReR/Recommended. I can tell it must have been about 1996 from the URL on the sleeve www.dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/estate/jf23.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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