Spunkle - the Prepared Vinyl Project

Spunkle was always about provocation and experimentation and perversely proved to be a very popular vehicle for my creative output, both in Oxford and the national press. Live performances and further recordings followed whilst I tried to work out what it was all about (see my CV for a full list of gigs and recordings). I had a lot of fun but after a while I got bored with the limited promise of limitless extemporisation and the problems of performing things in a rock environment.

Luckily the boundaries between sound and art were never very far away in the Spunkle laboratories, and in frustration at finding the so called boundaries of music were densely populated, no matter where I looked, in 1999 I produced the Prepared Vinyl Project, which ended up being a record you couldn't play. It consisted of charity shop 7" singles that had the grooves filled with paint. It went on to get rave reviews. You can see these and some images here.

The beauty of the Prepared Vinyl Project for me was that in searching through musical techniques and non techniques for the most extreme way of making music (and usually finding it already done by someone on John Peel or Radio Three) I found the most satisfying pathway by using no instruments at all.

In terms of a traditional music industry "release" the records remain unfinished. They are not recordings of a performance by me, but are instead an intervention into the expected chain of events; vinyl to turntable, stylus to vinyl. It's up to the owner of the record if they want to play it - if they do, the beauty is that they participate in the creation of the sound.

The painted record still inhabits the accessible space of the 7-inch, which to generations has represented entertainment and excitement, but lodges itself as damaged and mute. Paradoxically (especially depending on your musical taste) the records are ruined because if you play them you can't hear the music, yet at the same time by being charity shop purchases they were unwanted anyway. Someone asked me if I was preventing any especially bad records being played again by painting out the grooves, but it was more a genuine question of creating sound. Interestingly my first choice wasn't to paint them; instead I was going to sand them down, but that made too much dust.