Joe Colley – Project For An LP; Or One Method Of (Nearly) Avoiding The Composer

In this project air movement from small oscillating fans causes the tone arms of three turntables to be dragged back and forth across the surfaces of three test copies of side A of this LP. Due to various factors including fan speed, duration, and tone arm weight, the stylus of each turntable settles in different grooves randomly, creating overlapping layers of sound and occasional simultaneous playback of identical sound material. The signal of each turntable is sent to it's own pair of speakers positioned throughout the space resulting in a hexaphonic array.

The master for side A was generated by two minidsic players set on random mode, with the signal of each sent exclusively to the right or left channel of a DAT machine resulting in different audio in each channel. Identical source minidiscs were used in both players.

The source minidisc consisted of:
5 silences of between 5 and 7 seconds
10 noise fragments of between .5 and 2 seconds
5 constant sound blocks of between 20 seconds and 2 minutes

Side B documents two views of the installation as presented August 1 through 3, 2003 at Beyond Music VI, Beyond Baroque, Venice, CA, showing the transformation of the orginal sound material heard on side A.