Sound art, or music? It's never a debate I cared to have, always subscribing to the Cagean view. But in recent years, no doubt due to my engagement with bonafide "sound artists", I've started to make a distinction, which has something to do with listening vs. expression and the boundaries of such articulation - I'll figure it out later and you'll be the first to know. Anyway, Stephen Cornford is very clearly in the sound art camp, as he produces works for galleries and exhibitions that are frequently built around the idea of rotation. The turntable is a natural platform for this, and this 7" excerpts two of his pieces. Unlike Marclay, Cornford is not using the turntable so much for its instrumental functionality as for it's structural - a motor, a rotating platter and a tone arm are the tools, and by implementing various other objects on the decks, these turntables become perpetual sound machines. It's hard to gauge how much "playing" is going on here, or if these are really just recordings of installations. Things change, so you certainly get a feeling that there are different objects being applied, but whether this is being done
in situ or by mixing recordings together in post-processing, is uncertain. You can read the list of sound-generating devices in the liner notes and get a sense of what this "sounds" like: springs, marbles, piano wire, horse hair, ceramic discs, gravel, etc. I love artists who transform the domestic into something otherworldly - British sound artists like the Bohman Brothers seem especially adept at this, and Cornford's recordings really carry it. What I could do without are the liner notes, written no doubt to explain this crazyness to the general public (the record was financed by the Arts Councils of England and Brighton, so clearly some sort of document was mandatory) by comparing it to hip-hop as well as the typical historical bit about Pierre Schaeffer. But that aside, it's a lovely document even though I'm sure these works are best experienced in person.
