Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on December 2012
Sometimes the pop of a needle hitting a record on a turntable is not the prelude to music but an end in and of itself. In the hands of renowned sound-based conceptual artists Christian Marclay (recently acclaimed for his 24-hour film The Clock), Toshio Kajiwara and DJ Olive, the turntable is transformed into the medium not for music but for the summoning of unearthly spirits. 21 September 2002 documents a performance the trio staged at Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum. While the recording lacks the drama and dimensionality that the concert no doubt had, with a pair of headphones on its vocabulary of unearthly squelches, bleeps, bloops, whirs and clicks and snippets of everything from opera to film soundtracks serves to transport the listener to an audio neverland.
