Strange the noise-turntablist thing didn't really happen sooner than the 80s (outside of the academic artworld). It seems so obvious. Punk teenager staring at her record player long enough has to see the elegance of the solution. Instant noise, unpredictable results, low investment, direct response to a glut of commercial recordings that don't speak to her -- making them your own. The turntable stylus becomes a mystical sort of microphone/decoder ring amplifying tactile heiroglyphics in the grooves that, if incomprehensible, are readily alterable for the greater good of sonic nihilsm and resistance. Asking for it. No technique required. Found poetry. Misuse the turntable, abuse the records. Aural dystopia at arms reach, bought for a song (to destroy a song), physically and sonically post-industrial poetic. In contrast, it was around 1980 when Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt (in the kind of moment that comes with or is necessitated by an unhealthy surplus of maturity) attempted to codify their most successful working habits, constructing a deck of playing cards with fortune cookie commandments. Pulling cards randomly in the studio would help counteract the staid "common-sense" reactions resulting from high-pressure studio stress. They say things like: "Be Dirty" "Bridges -build -burn" "Humanize something free of error" "Emphasize the flaws" "Work at a different speed"
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		"Repetition is a form of change" "Honour thy error as a hidden intention" etc. "The card", said Eno, "is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear". In his liner notes to the collected Gum recordings Jim Haynes romantically describes the young Philip Samartzis' (one half of the shortlived post-industrial duo known as Gum) 'eureka-in-the-bathtub' moment as an Eno-inspired Eno-esque encounter with a badly warped copy of Here Come The Warm Jets. The neat irony. And so the story goes that as Samartzis attempted to play his damaged record and the mottled opening bars of "On Some Farway Beach" gave way to the mangled infinite loop resulting from the stylus' entrapment in a locked groove pattern in the vinyl, Samartzis heard his calling to create music of damaged vinyl, textural abrasion, emphasizing repetetition and the distance between surface noise and drowned signals. Emphasize the flaws. ^&*(^(!*%@&*^!%@ Be Dirty. But if the "Oblique Strategies" were a working technique ultimately concerned with unlocking the artists' itentions, let us in good faith acknowledge an important disconnect here: Gum were a couple of bored, curious Australian teenage Throbbing Gristle fans in (Andrew Cutris and Philip Samartzis) perhaps more initially concerned with the punx-as-fuck act of 'playing' destroyed vinyl then the resulting kunstwerk or the processes of artistic invention. Which is not to say they weren't bright, weren't on to something, didn't have some inkling of the rich, sexy semiotic intrigue of the thing. But Gum were (and Eno was not so much) anarchic composers of blemish. With Gum the error in the transmission was treated as no "hidden intention". Rather Gum's music plays out as a resistance to, if not disavowal of, the composer's will, the scraps and leavings of authorial intentions vandalized. Vandal art may well be beautiful, but that's not all there is to it is there? Gum plundered and derailed the original intentions of others to satisfy their need for mayhem. Emphasize the flaws? Gum created a music predicated on randomness and error, free of syntax and ego, and therein the idea of 'error' loses all semantic relevance. Murdered records bring noise without facility, without the trappings of rockstar posture (and all that "music" stuff).