Last year, Philip Jeck contributed his talents to Gavin Bryars’s re-imagining of The Sinking of the Titanic. To many, Jeck’s turntablist underpinnings became the highlight of the new work, which had previously relied on strings and samples. Jeck was the perfect collaborator, having already established himself as a purveyor of the forgotten on such seminal recordings as Surf and Stoke. His previous work had included forays into speed manipulation, notably the adaptations of archival 78s. While these productions were often sublime, they were unintentionally hindered by the vocals, in that the enjoyment of each piece was reliant on an appreciation of each singer’s mutated timbre.
Recent movies have provided some rather ludicrous visions of post-apocalyptic music. In “I Am Legend,” the protagonist plays old Marley tracks. In “Doomsday,” cannibals gather for a lip-synched alternative rock festival, featuring – you guessed it – the Fine Young Cannibals. Many moviegoers wish they could forget the rave scene* in “Matrix: Reloaded.”Sand, however, is exactly what one might expect music to sound like after an apocalyptic event: scuttled beats, snatches of melody, hand-cranked turntables, detritus and debris. In the end, as Alan Weisman writes so eloquently in The World Without Us, sand gets inside everything, working and worrying the cracks until concrete breaks and gears wind down. To quote Czeslaw Milosz, “There will be no other end of the world.”
Jeck is a sonic scavenger along the lines of Mad Max in “The Road Warrior.” One can imagine him digging through dusty crates in a gas mask, searching for the perfect warped sample, a shattered snapshot of lives gone by. On this recording, his cherished finding is “Fanfare for the Common Man,” which he masticates and blunts until all that is recognizable is the central organ riff. This recording becomes the anchor for the entire project, which without a familiar source, might seem more foreign than resonant. On a few occasions, Jeck makes the piece wobble in Kid Koala fashion, but more often he rolls out his sonic source like dough. The pops and creaks of album opener “Unveiled” sputter like crackling stars. The stretched surfaces of “Chime Again” contain flecks of organ layered atop pillowed, extended tones, like echoes in a deserted cathedral. This ghostly effect leaks from the combination of old material and older turntables; but since both source and medium have decayed, the sounds that Jeck makes could not have been made when the records and turntables were pristine.
Ecclesiastes once lamented, “There is nothing new in the whole wide world.” These days, very little music contains the element of surprise. Ironically, Sand seems an entirely new life form, despite having been stitched together from pre-existing atoms. While one might argue that every new brand of music is a combination of old elements, Jeck here does more than simply combine particles – he breaks them down into their base components and reassembles them in previously unimagined ways. The result is unexpectedly poignant.
While Sand may take the form of a fanfare, it possesses the nature of a requiem. At first, the final track seems to go on a bit too long; the glissandos at the end are a bit much. Yet its abrupt end is cause for sorrow. While I would have preferred a quiet fade, it seems oddly appropriate that this world would end neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with an unplugging.
-Richard Allen
*Editor's note: Many moviegoers wish they could forget "Matrix: Reloaded" altogether!