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"After six minutes, time flips into reverse. The sounds of Ramsgate start running backwards. Cackles of seagulls are sucked back into tiny throats, while the distant yelps of school playtime turn giddy and abrupt, doubtless punctuating games of backward hopscotch. Central to the piece is the steady tick of the steam-age turret clock at St George’s Church, which was installed almost two centuries ago. When ticking runs forward, it seems to gift a divine guarantee to the formidable flow of time; an assurance that, amidst the throes of an increasingly erratic and precarious world, our reality is bedrocked by a fundamental metronomic consistency.
The beat of the clock sounds like a metallic dripping in its forward iteration, yet transforms into the sweep of an ultra-sharp knife when flipped into reverse. When the clock switches direction, the last six minutes are methodically undone. Invisible hands scramble to unravel the links of causation, excising the recent ripples of change, putting everything back as it was just six minutes prior. That moment of transition is pure whiplash, like being dragged backward through water – limbs and organs jolted, inner ears swept momentarily out of calibration.
The first side of 60BPM 33RPM is a stereo version of Phil Coy’s surround sound-installation titled sixty beats per minute, which took place at St George’s Church back in May/June 2025. An LED screen displayed a timecode synchronised to the speed of the church’s clock, while speakers amplified the sounds of the clock’s ticking and the ambient surroundings of Ramsgate. After six minutes, the timecode switched direction and the audio flipped into reverse, with so-called “real time” giving way to a backward playback of the six minutes just elapsed. In its stereo version, the installation’s visual element is transposed to the “sculptural object” of the vinyl record – the first time Coy's sound work has been issued in the recorded format – with the spinning grooves acting as a poetic allusion to the circular mechanisms of the clock.
The first side of 60BPM 33RPM is a stereo version of Phil Coy’s surround sound-installation titled sixty beats per minute, which took place at St George’s Church back in May/June 2025. An LED screen displayed a timecode synchronised to the speed of the church’s clock, while speakers amplified the sounds of the clock’s ticking and the ambient surroundings of Ramsgate. After six minutes, the timecode switched direction and the audio flipped into reverse, with so-called “real time” giving way to a backward playback of the six minutes just elapsed. In its stereo version, the installation’s visual element is transposed to the “sculptural object” of the vinyl record – the first time Coy's sound work has been issued in the recorded format – with the spinning grooves acting as a poetic allusion to the circular mechanisms of the clock.
Given the installation's thematic reflection on rigorous imposition of clock time in the modern world, it’s perfect that the flipside of the record should be a live dub expansion of the piece led by chrono-manipulator Adrian Sherwood. Together they unravel the clock's steadfast metronomy, subdividing time through all manner of delay FX, swooping horn riffs and shuffling dub beats, before passing out into the infinite loop of the locked groove. We imagine a clockface complicated to the point of redundancy, sprouting several hands that whirl in disparate directions, cogs buckling under the multidirectional flow, inciting a blissful abandonment of mechanised timekeeping altogether." - Jack Chuter
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