First we must agree upon
what a Turntablist is. DJ Babu is credited with being the first to coin the term
turntablism to describe a form of advanced turntable music stemming from Hip-Hop
DJ'ing.
"My definition of a Turntablist is a person who uses the turntables not to play
music, but to manipulate sound and create music."(Interview with Christo Macias, Palo
Alto, CA, May 1996)
It all began with a man namged John Cage. He had a revolutionary idea that would mpact
the lives of many people. His work is traced all the way back to 1937 where he presented a
speech to a Seattle arts society.
"With a... phonograph it is now possible to control... any one of these sounds and
give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of imagination. Given... four phonographs we
can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, hearbeat, and
landslide."("The Future of Music: Credo" by John Cage, 1937.)
Eleven years later Pierre Schaeffer, a French avant-garde composer, was also showing
the implications of this new technique.
"Using multiple turntables Schaeffer would cue desired sounds from existing
recordings... His only means for altering the sounds of the discs were through changing
the speeds of the turntables, creating repeating loops or grooves in the disc... and
adjusting the volume and playing sounds backwards."(Electronic and Experimental
Music, Thomas B. Holmes, p.120)
By 1977 our most influential pioneer, Grandwizard Theodore, was at work.
"I just came home from messing around.. I was about 13 or 14 years old, and my
mother was banging on the door. So I stop the music and she opened the door and she was
talking to me. At the same time she was talking to me I felt myself moving the record back
and forth and forth and back while she was talking to me, because I wanted to keep that
same groove I was on. I was talking to her and I was listening to the record.. and I said
to myself... Hey.. this sound really good.
So I kept practicing it.. and it became a scratch."(Grand Wizard Theodore, Battle
Sounds documentary.)
Thus the first half of turntablism was invented. |
