Electronic Music: Pulse and Sonica (part 2)

What Jeck shares with fellow turntable fan - and sometime children's party DJ - Janek Schaefer is an interest in how this specific piece of outdated technology can be reused both as an instrument and a symbol. Jeck's Requiem and Schaefer's Extended Play present the turntable as an example of analogue technology, superseded by digital but stubbornly surviving: Schaefer's fascination with the physicality of vinyl is mirrored by Jeck's insistence on its fragility.

Perhaps due to Jeck's training at Dartington - this is the school that taught Ultimate Dancer and Gilbert and George - he is a consistent collaborator and often focusses on the values of live performance. He also belongs to a generation that grew up before the digital revolution, and the turntable becomes more than just a tasty piece of kit. It is effectively his musical instrument which he plays as others use a guitar or piano. Admitting that he was originally inspired by New York DJs in the late 1970s, he applied his training in visual art to sound collages: in many ways, his inclusion in the Sonica festival would have  been more logical than in Pulse, which connects more to the electronic music tradition than Jeck's own hybrid approach.

Jeck is startlingly old school as a performer - his appearance at The Arches in 2005 included choreography by Scotland's Karl Jay-Lewin, and his role was more musical accompaniment than star turn - but the use of vinyl adds more prowess to his presence than lap-top orientated composers can achieve: even Matthew  Herbert's One Pig, which crowded the stage with musicians - amusing dressed in lab coats, struggled to prove that the live performance was much more than a version of the original album, mainly thanks to the perfect sound reproduction of the computers.

Jeck says that he never consciously used vinyl for its nostalgic qualities, yet it is these qualities that link him into an older tradition than contemporary electronic music - the use of glitches and false starts, the emphasis on the surface contours of sound are thrillingly modern, but relate back to the early experiments of Stockhausen or Lucier: the echo of hip hop's star DJs places him in a more rock'n'roll lineage than even Ben Frost - Frost may quote Michael Gira, but his use of the lap-top distances him from the heavy thunder of Gira's Swans.

Thursday 22 November 2012, 8pm