I saw Christian Marclay perform with Toshio Kajiwara at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a very interesting performance and the first time I really perceived the possible musicality of experimental noise.
Christian Marclay is primarily a turntablist, but his work is multidisciplinary, with live performance intersecting visual exhibition. He began experimenting with sound collage in the late 1970s. His approach is to be aware not only of the recorded content of an LP but of the materiality of the vinyl itself. He foregrounds the sounds that are created from the often deliberate degradation of a recording. The line between the sounds of recorded content and the sounds that result from the degradation of the material is blurred. The distinction between "music" and "noise" is challenged. One of the things that makes his performance so provocative is that the very meaningfulness of such strict categories is questioned.
Marclay's latest sculpture]s are "impossible instruments." Currently being displayed at the Chicago MCA are Drumkit (1999), a thirteen feet high set of drums with its parts positioned according to their respective pitches, and Virtuoso (2000), a twenty-five feet long accordion. Marclay says that although it may seem contradictory, he is interested in ways of seeing sound. A past exhibit of Marclay’s, called Footsteps (1989), integrated both the notions of sight and sound in an evolving display that seemed visually static, but was actually an ever-changing sound project. He glued 3,500 vinyl LPs (recordings of his own footsteps) to the floor of the Shedhalle museum in Zurich, and invited viewers to walk on the exhibit. After the exhibit closed, each record was sold as a one-of-a-kind limited edition -- records of the prerecorded sound of footsteps plus sounds ingrained into the material due to footsteps. I like this sort of audacious pun, even if I wouldn't necessarily want to play the result at home.