Pitchfork

The title and sonic inspiration for this track, which serves as a centerpiece for Philip Jeck's upcoming album Sand, is Aaron Copland's ubiquitous "Fanfare for the Common Man". Copland wrote the brassy piece during World War II and it was obviously composed to inspire; Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who intuitively understood the tug of the piece's naked pomp, famously covered it in the 1970s. Jeck, whose working method involves mixing and processing old records via multiple turntables, usually live, takes fragments of the "Fanfare" and turns them inside out. The result retains the original's sense of nostalgia, but instead of triumph and progress it coats those feelings in decay and loss. You can almost see civilizations crumbling as the piece progresses, as the notes are caught in ever tighter and more confined loops and the droney throb of noise rises up to bury the melody. Jeck's genius here is to create a piece that evokes three or four distinct feelings simultaneously, a dazzling emotional patchwork that is both disorienting and completely addictive.

 

 

MP3:> Philip Jeck: "Fanfares"

[from Sand; due 05/18/08 on Touch]