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LONG RIDER (2008)

A 12'" dub plate recording of the looped sound of a needle stuck in a groove.

The piecewas originally shown as part ofa solo presentation of work at the Marc dePuechredon booth at Art Athina, the International Contemporary Art Fair, in May 2008. The work operates on the level of an object as well as that of a sound piece, relying as it does on the discrepancy between the behaviour of the object as seen (the record spinning smoothly on the turntable) and the sound emanating from it (that of a stuck, skipping record). Dubplates are intrinsically experimental, ephemeral objects. They are one-off recordings, usually made on pvc or plastic with a somewhat inferior sound quality to vinyl and a limited life span. They were widely used, for example, by Studio One in Jamaica when trying out new tunes in dance halls, and many dub plates never made it to become commercially-released vinyl pressings. Each dub plate will only play a finite number of times before the sound quality will start to significantly degrade and it is an important feature of LONG RIDER that the recording will gradually and slowly efface itself with each play.

Edition of 10. Each recording comes with individual sleeve artwork made from black wood-grain vinyl contact paper, of the kind that was often used to cover cheap speaker cabinets in the 1980s.