NASCAR vs Rudolf Diesel via Turntablism

"NASCAR vs. Rudolf Diesel via Turntablism" was made in 2003 to be part of a Sound Art lecture that I was to give in Rick Gribenas' class at CMU in Pittsburgh. I'd given this lecture, slightly revised each time, before in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, & Australia since 1997 when Michael Pestel prompted me to create it for his class at Chatham College. I'd just recently been given a video of a 1999 turntablism competition sponsored by various turntable related companies. Some of the playing was fantastic but I was put off by the ultra-capitalist/imperialist sports mentality of the competition. The MC might as well have been at some boxing championship glorying in seeing desperate people beat the shit out of each other. I was further saddened to see the great Grandmaster Flash lending his substantial street-cred presence to this crap. Given that I've been making ReRecorded Records pieces since 1978 & feel like I have some slight claim to being a part of turntablism history, I decided to intercut footage from Colin Hinz's & my turntable performance recorded in Toronto in 1995 w/ this competition. The intercutting of the NASCAR footage & of Dwayne Hedstrom discussing Rudolf Diesel was to further drive home the contrast between the vicious machinations of the capitalist endorsement of "world domination" vs the more DIY deconstruction of my astonishingly unpopular record(s) via Hinz's home-made turntable. - July 28, 2010 notes from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

Category:

Music

Tags:

• experimental music
• NASCAR
• turntablism
• Colin Hinz
• Dwayne Hedstrom
• tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE
• Rudolf Diesel

[onesownthoughts]

@szczels Hey Stefan, for reasons unknown to me yr comments were flagged as spam & removed. I've marked this one NOT SPAM but don't seem able to do that to the following 2. Don't know why. At any rate, any mass culture gets coopted by capitalism faster than the obscure - since the obscure's unpopularity isn't useful for selling crap. As such, I d liberately stay lunatic fringe. There's alotof amazing turntablism at the athletic end of things but then the critical end is like sports: zilch.

[szczels]

Yeh I was talking to Duncan Reekie about the same vacuous mentality in VJ culture, mind you we are pretty ignorant being parents so there may be a underground VJ culture out there somewhere...

Check out a recent perf of mine in Porto with Carole Chant and Keith Rowe. The text on interruption has produced some strong reaction from John Tilbury - I'm not sure if he'll agree for me to publish it all yet. ...set on Flickr