Introduction: Groove, Pit and Wave

Despite the Comet Kahoutek-like anticlimax of Y2K, the rollover of the millennial odometer was accompanied by dramatic reports of one apparently earthshaking transformation of our culture. The salient fact byte, repeated in mainstream and music presses, web sites and even the odd Ph.D. dissertation, was that in 1999 more turntables were sold than guitars [1]. The news was all the more notable as it came at a time when the vinyl LP had been almost universally supplanted by the CD as a format for the distribution and consumption of music. These turntables were not purchased to be stockpiled by the few remaining vinyl purists in anticipation of future shortages; they were bought by disc jockeys. They were not bought in order to listen to records, but to perform records. Many hours spent revving my surf engine have yet to yield an authoritative primary source, nor indeed any evidence to raise the status of this statistic above urban legend. But whether or not this fact is fiction, all the popular willingness to accept it reveals a fundamental change in public attitude as to what constitutes a musical instrument. The medium is no longer the message—it has become the instrument. The couch potato has shuffled onstage to displace the guitar god.

The vast majority of music we hear arrives not directly from a shimmying violin string or an undulating column of air, but from grooves on vinyl, particles on tape, pits in plastic, electromagnetic waves and pulses of light. Long before McLuhan, composers were already aware of the influence of recording and transmission on their music. The first piece of electronic music I performed, as a college student, was John Cage's Cartridge Music (1960), a piece in which performers act as discless jockeys, amplifying tiny sounds with pickups severed from the arms of record players. Much of my own work has been based on the manipulation of found recordings or radio transmissions, the quirky behavior of hacked CD players, and extensions of DJ-style cutting and mixing. And while my musical sensibility was largely shaped by the post-Cagean experimental music of the 1970s and the improvised music of the 1980s, many of the same concerns about the artifacts of electronic mediation are resurfacing in new genres and scenes. The pervasive chatter about the inversion of the guitar/turntable ratio suggested that the time had come to devote an issue of Leonardo Music Journal to the musical implications of grooves, pits and waves.

As Sérgio Freire, Peter Manning and Guy-Marc Hinant recount in this issue, composers have used records and film soundtracks as compositional tools since the 1930s at least. The subsequent advent of the tape recorder was essential to the development of electronic music in post-war Europe. By the 1960s, pop producers had refined studio technique to the point where records were no longer mere reproductions of performances; some records were so dependent on the possibilities of tape that there was no possibility of approximating them in concert. The record player became a device for experiencing performances that did not exist in real time, but for the most part it was not a performance instrument in itself. John Cage put a DJ onstage in 1939 for his Imaginary Landscape No. 1, written for piano, cymbals, turntables and frequency records, and the radio disc jockey Cousin Brucie proclaimed himself the "Fifth Beatle" for his role in breaking the Fab Four's singles into the U.S. market in 1964, but such overt acknowledgments of the creative potential of record players would remain anomalous until well into the 1970s.

As Yasunao Tone writes in this issue, records for Cage were not "a neutral reproducing device." Cage's influence was felt among avant-garde composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Alvin Lucier, Hugh Davies and Gavin Bryars, who began using turntables and tape recorders as instruments for the live manipulation of sound—in contrast to (and sometimes in conscious reaction against) the prevailing tradition of pre-recorded electronic music. Simultaneously, in early discotheques, such as Sanctuary in New York City, disc jockeys developed the...