Turntable Music

Turntable music is the experimental practice of using turntables and vinyl records as instruments for composition and performance, manipulating playback speed, direction, skipping and damaged or prepared records to generate new material. Its roots reach *John Cage*'s works for variable-speed turntables and musique concrète, but the modern form developed from the late 1970s, when *Christian Marclay* began performing with fragmented records outside hip hop's DJ tradition. Practitioners such as *Philip Jeck*, *Otomo Yoshihide*, *Martin Tétreault* and *Janek Schaefer* extended the method with locked grooves, multiple tonearms and obsolete players, treating the record's surface noise and cultural residue as compositional material.