Shellackplatten Quintet Live [2015]

Commission from Sanctury
Galloway Forest Park, Scotland

Five wind-up gramophones are sourced along with many shellac 78rpm discs, some with pieces missing or with shattered edges, perhaps being played for the last time, in the middle of a forest, in the Scottish borders...

Over the last few years, I'd been working with vinyl and shellac records and trawling eBay and markets for aural gems without a home. Sanctuary is a festival which focuses on temporal artworks and ephemeral performances and it was an apt place to build a live set of this nature.

 

I unveiled some of my rare 78rpm records and new vintage record players for Sanctuary for this hour-long performance. 

On a recent trip to Moabit, Berlin, for this commission, I visited Europe’s leading idiosyncratic dealer of rare shellac to complete an exclusive palette of sound for this performance.

 

The store, open one day a week, and with an army of Berlin’s shellac devotees crammed into a very modest but highly organised shop, I completed a collection of extremely rare 78s from birdsong, morse code, field recordings, opera and religious records.

The idea was mix five record players at the same time on stage for an hour, a kind of séance of spinning discs.

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