Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay (born 1955) is an American visual artist and composer based in New York. Marclay's work explores connections between sound, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramaphone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collage, Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the "unwitting inventor of turntablism. His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the mid-1970s, was developed independently of hip hop's use of the instrument, and though not well-known to mainstream audiences, Marclay has nonetheless been described as "the most influential [turntable] figure outside hip hop.
Christian Marclay (born 1955) is an American visual artist and composer based in New York. Marclay's work explores connections between sound, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramaphone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collage, Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the "unwitting inventor of turntablism. His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the mid-1970s, was developed independently of hip hop's use of the instrument, and though not well-known to mainstream audiences, Marclay has nonetheless been described as "the most influential [turntable] figure outside hip hop.
Index (Book)
Marclay’s compilation of hundreds of high-contrast black-and-white Xeroxes are like scribblings in a notebook, the first stages of experimentation towards more finished works, a glimpse into the artist’s creative process. This book brings together the source material that has informed Marclay’s practice over the past few years. It was designed in collaboration with Laurent Benner, a graphic designer who has worked with Marclay on various other books and record covers. Their shared sensibility in…
Call and Response (Book)
Seeing and imagining music in a pandemic: a dialogue of found scenes and inspired sounds between two protagonists of experimental music
s/t (Book)
Blending Fluxus, Pop and performance art, Marclay has tested and reinvented the relationship between art and sound over the past four decades.
Compositions (Book)
** 2021 Stock. English version ** This publication explores the work of the acclaimed Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay (1955), presenting a selection of works focusing on his sound compositions, from graphic scores to video installations. In this artist’s book, he shows the relationship between sound and vision, exploring the ways that sound can be made visually manifest. As the artist himself has said: ‘music runs through almost everything I do’.
Actions For Free Jazz
Edition of 500, no repress, no digital** Smalltown Superjazzz was a free-jazz subsidiary label to Smalltown Supersound from 2005-2012. The label has been dormant in the years 2012 to 2019, but is now reborn as the AFJ-Serie. The AFJ-Series represents a new start - built on the foundation and heritage of the Superjazzz label. AFJ-Series is short for Actions for free jazz. This was the slogan for Smalltown Superjazzz and was borrowed at the time from Don Cherry & Krystzof Penderecki’s The New Eter…
Sound Stories
"In Sound Stories, American artist and composer Christian Marclay (born 1955) fuses art and technology, using Snapchat videos as raw material. Featuring texts by Max Maxwell, this book documents the collaboration between the artist and Snapchat in an innovative project mixing the sounds and images of everyday life found on the multimedia messaging app, aggregating unattributed stories. Using algorithms created by a team of engineers at Snap Inc., Marclay experiments with millions of publicly pos…
Live at White Cube
In 2015 White Cube presented a major solo exhibition by Christian Marclay, including a range of new work and a lively programme of performances. Continuing Marclay’s long-standing interest in the relationship between image and sound, the exhibition was comprised of featured The Vinyl Factory Press, a unique hydraulic vinyl pressing machine created by The Vinyl Factory, and screen printing equipment operated by the London printmakers Coriander Studio. Audiences were able to witness on site the un…
Link
Edition of 500, no repress, no digital. After closing out Smalltown Superjazzz’ run in 2015, Mats Gustafson fires up its new iteration - Actions For Free Jazz - in the lacquer crackling, spittle-riddled investigations of ‘Link’ with avant-turntablist Christian Marclay Both known for charting paths less travelled, here they point to strange, liminal zones of perception on their first collaboration, with Gustafsson’s electronically processed tenor and baritone sax channelling an ecology of wee be…
Screen Play (by Ensemble Babel)
EnsemBle baBel has been collaborating with Christian Marclay since 2012. On this double LP we can hear three compositions: Screen Play, Shuffle and Graffiti Composition. Screen Play is a moving image musical score in which found film footage is combined with computer animation to create a visual projection to be interpreted by live musicians. One of the ways that performing a visual score differs from performing tradition musical notation is that the musician cannot read ahead to anticipate what…
In Hindsight
Live recording of a collaboration between multimedia artist Christian Marclay and free jazz saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, which featured Marclay on turntables and Gustafsson on saxophones and took place at Café Oto in London on 13 March 2013. The limited edition release of 500 copies includes the duo’s performance on the A-side and an etching by Marclay on the flip side. Marclay’s onomatopoetic artwork has also been screen printed on the thick card cover.
Christian Marclay was recently awa…
Amalgam
2016 release. A wild and exciting duo between cellist Okkyung Lee and legendary turntable improviser Christian Marclay performing live at London's Cafe Oto for a single long track that runs through an astonishing dynamic of invention and atmospheres in a gripping and spellbinding set. "May 2014, arriving home after hearing the Café Oto performance now released as Amalgam, I began to write. Over time the text developed, augmented by relevant dreams, literature and boxing metaphors, to become inte…
The Sounds of Christmas
The Sounds of Christmas is an annual installation project by Christian Marclay, pioneer of the experimental turntable movement and leading artist operating at the intersections of art and music. Reinventing this work-in- progress for London, the artist presented his collection of over 1,200 Christmas records as a publicly accessible archive, alongside projections of the record covers and footage of previous performances.During the two-week installation, co-produced by Electra and Tate Modern, no…
Fire & Water
In 2012, Christian Marclay was invited to create an artwork for 'Mixed Bathing World', a contemporary art festival held in the town of Beppu, Japan, famous for its onsen (hot springs). It has eight major geothermal hot spots, sometimes referred to as the 'Eight Hells of Beppu'. On a jetty near the harbor Marclay installed a field of 100 flags banners, 50 represented water and 50 fire. At the bottom corner of each flag he attached a small bell. This ArtBook CD includes an innovative work made of …
Records (1981-89)
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 …
Guitar drag
"Guitar drag by Christian Marclay is now being released on neon records. The record is actually the sound track for Marclay's video with the same title that was shown first at London's Hayward Gallery sound art exhibition "Sonic Boom" in 2000. The piece as well as Marclay has become an icon in sound art circles, and although the video can only be seen in exhibitions as an installation, it is widely known. The full 14 minutes sound track is released on a beautiful one-sided 12'' clear vinyl recor…
Graffiti Composition
the Paula Cooper Gallery, is pleased to announce the CD release of Graffiti Composition by American visual artist and composer Christian Marclay. In 1996, Marclay plastered more than 5,000 posters of blank sheet music in public places throughout Berlin during a month-long sound festival. The posters functioned as an open invitation to the public to scribble musical notes, or any other type of graffiti. Marclay photographed the graffitied sheets, selected 150 from the group, and compiled the…
Event
How's this for a threesome; in the red corner we have Christian Marclay with a box of records and his trusty turntables, in the blue corner it's twinkle-toes Yasunao Tone and his prepared CD's and players, whilst in the, erm, green corner stands Christian Wolff and his one man band of bass, percussive stuff, radio-cassette recorder and melodica. FIGHT! Recorded live way-back-when in 1998 as improvised accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham Dance Company performance, 'Event' is a single 50 minute pi…
Moving Parts
Performer, sculptor, and sound artist Christian Marclay has been experimenting with phonograph records and turntables, applying the constructs of hip-hop to avant-garde sound art deconstruction since 1979. Having teamed up with Japanese turntablist and guitar player Otomo Yoshihide for their collaboration Moving Parts, the two continue in their ongoing quest to evolve music and sound far beyond anything that is even remotely accessible to a mainstream audience. Moving Parts is a ravenous bricola…
From The Earth To The Spheres Vol. 6
My Cat Is An Alien also share a split CD with Turntable-manipulator Christian Marclay and cellist Okkyung Lee, and it is their live collaboration “Rubbing” that opens the album. Full of disjointed sounds, scratches and stabs of cello, the piece is a rollercoaster of sonic experimentation, the two players complementing each other to create a wonderfully playful piece of music. After A tentative sounding opening “Beyond The Limit Of The Stars/Beyond The Limit Of The Grooves” Slowly begins to becom…
Live improvisations
All live improvisations should be this much fun! This live date between turntablist and electronic weirdmeister Christian Marclay and percussionist and electronics tinkerer Günter Müller is what the art of improvisation is supposed to be: fun, continually compelling textually, and inspired. While many intellectuals have made wild pronouncements about Marclay and his art -- and it is art, make no mistake -- writing all sorts of blather about how he strips the adult century bare by his cutting up …