Janek Schaefer LP : 'His Master's Voices' audiOh! Archive release

[JANEK SCHAEFER <janek@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Janek Schaefer
His Master's Voices 
Transparent LP [audiOh! 04]
33 copy release - hand lathed in 1997 [only about 10 or 11 copies left]
Total running time: 37:30


Track Listing:
A1. His Master's Voices A2. Chop Heart A3. Startle Bath A4. Foreground Blink
B1. Erans B2. Multiplex Plaza B3. Sablon Inferno B4..is waiting in the wings

Press Notes Oct 2002

This is the first release that I produced. The music consists of my first
ever compositions using the Tri-Phonic Turntable, so all the tracks were
performed live. It is packaged in a black sleeve with black polylined inner.
The LP was hand lathed by King Records in New Zealand and was cut in reverse
so that the music plays from the inner to the outer edge. It should play on
a standard turntable, but I can't guarantee it as they all have a mind of
their own! The quality of this cut means that the groove is very shallow and
the stereo music was reproduced in mono. All this now gives the quality of
the music an antique and very fragile feel. Finally now, it feels
appropriate to make it available as a reflective and historical audiOh!
Archive release. The record itself is most likely a more visually appealing
rather than sonically successful object hence it comes with a remastered
Black CDR of the original music to highlight the differences in the audio as
it is hand lathed to vinyl.

The music has a quite raw live quality and was created during august 1997
for my first international concert in Brussels alongside Project Dark at the
'Cyber Theatre' [now a multiplex cinema complex!]. I wanted to be able to
play my own compositions on the Tri-Phonic in performance, so I found the
cheapest place in the world to have a two sided, transparent LP made. For
me, 'His Master's Voices' is the most interesting track on the album. It's a
very simple and clear demonstration of the multi-arm simultaneous play back
of the Tri-Phonic Turntable, and was the fist Plunderphonic collage I ever
recorded on it. T.S.Elliot reads an extract in mono from his 1944 poem, 'The
Four Quartets' which ponders on 'Time', past and present. Taking the spacing
of the tone-arms as a basic delay device set out on a single copy of the LP,
each output is panned across the stereo field which in turn 'amplifies' the
content of the prose. 'Erans' was made in a similar way using a percussion
sample LP played a various points in reverse at differing speeds.