'Felt': a turntable installation, tracks mixed by you

When Mama Cass Elliot sang "Make Your Own Kind of Music," she probably didn't have anything like "Felt" in mind.

This new sound installation by Seattle artists Gust Burns and Melanie Noel consists of four turntables, each with its own 12-inch dubplate record. Visitors are invited to play the records in any order or combination they choose. The twist: Dubplates, which are used for test pressings of recorded material, are far less durable than vinyl, so any sound palette that results is increasingly colored by the cracklings, squeakings and scrapings of disc-surface damage.

Burns' piano improvisations, on two of the discs, are hands-on-strings agitations, so they already have a ghostly, staticky, abrasive quality to them. Noel's spoken-word contributions, by contrast, offer fragmentary glimpses of beautiful but unnatural worlds. Thanks to her hushed, soothing delivery, the recordings seem to be as much about the rhythms of her words as their content, although some of the phrases ("Two suns rose and the birds flew down") are as striking in their imagery as their sound.

Play all four records at once, and you'll find yourself creating a fugue of voice, echo and decay that can be quite hypnotic in effect.

On Aug. 12, Seattle composer Christopher DeLaurenti — a self-described "new music rabble-rouser" — presents "The New Phonographers," a talk about "the exploration and modification by artists of the venerable turntable." The show stays up another nine days after that — with sound-quality deterioration guaranteed!

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com

Information in this article, originally published Aug. 6, 2009, was corrected Aug. 7, 2009. An incorrect date was given in a previous version of this story. Composer Christopher DeLaurenti will give a lecture titled "The New Phonographers" on Aug. 12.