Christian Marclay

Records 1981-1989 is a fascinating collection of Marclay's work during the 1980s, the results of hours of home recordings -- using up to eight turntables and various other instruments of his own making -- plus many live performances (one track comes from a nationally televised appearance on the David Sanborn/Hal Willner program Night Music). Marclay did much more than just scratching and sampling for these tracks -- "One Thousand Cycles" uses an increasing variety of repeated samples and clicks to create a complex rhythm of its own, while "Pandora's Box" varies the speed on its array of plunderphonics. (Though the latter sounds like an easy contemporary of late-'90s major-label turntablist LPs, it was originally released on a 1984 avant-indie compilation from Sweden that also featured Sonic Youth and Live Skull.) ~ John Bush

The definitive collection by the seminal Fluxus-Inspired, Avant-Garde/Anti-DJ... pre-sampledelia! From THURSTON MOORE'S Liner Notes: "I remember stopping at Christian's apartment in the late eighties and seeing all his records piled everywhere- a lot of them were cut up and reglued together and some were modified with paints and other topographic materials. As fascinating were the turntables he had been constructing: they were custom-honed machines which would allow him to create and improvise his music to a much more personal degree. It was impressive... Christian (was) creating improvised worlds of sound-on-sound and you would swear there could never be anything quite like it. Within the last five years, however, a whole new global breed of DJ has arrived- equally informed by radical hip-hop, jazz forms and art-music... I flash back to 1981 and see Christian walking around the East Village, completely oblivious to the fact that he would become a future sound genius."