Pioneering turntablist/artist Christian Marclay on Night Music, 1989. John Cage’s clearest creative descendant, I think.

From Daniel Zalewski’s recent New Yorker piece about Marclay’s epic work, “The Clock,” a passage about his DJ beginnings: “Marclay liked to make something new by lovingly vandalizing something old. He remixed music—turning it inside out to foreground crackles and hisses—and he remixed objects that created music. He’d based dozens of projects on the vinyl records alone: scarring them with images, using a phonograph stylus like a lathe; melting them into cubes; piling them into menacing black columns. He even strapped a revolving turntable to his chest, as if it were a guitar, and videotaped himself whaling on a Jimi Hendrix LP. He says that his governing impulse as an artist has been to take ‘images and sounds that we’re all familiar with and reorganize them in a way that is unfamiliar.’ In a 1991 collage, he arranged album covers so that Michael Jackson’s face and torso joined, uncannily, with the glistening bare legs of two women (one black, one white). Marclay, a fixture of the East Village music scene of the eighties, was particularly renowned as an avant-garde d.j.—in the late seventies, he’d been one of the first people to scratch records in performance, treating the turntable as an instrument. During sets, he sometimes smashed LPs, Frankensteined shards together with tape, and played the hiccupping results. To keep advancing as an artist, Marclay needed not just his mischievous imagination; he needed material to manipulate.”