The Jim Sharpe Project - Piece Of Wood

The Jim Sharpe Project
Piece Of Wood

Single US on Plastikville Records label
Spoken Word (Musique Concrète, Experimental)

B-side has a label including song title and 78 rpm, but this is in fact a single-sided record with no grooves on the B-side. A-side claims to be 46 rpm, but is a 45 for all intents and purposes. Sleeve is 2 pieces of sandpaper facing inward, and the record came with no innersleeve, so the vinyl is scratched-up from new (NM vinyl is impossible on this release). Comes with one or two inserts, but cover is held together in a heavyweight PVC plastic sleeve with a metal rivet in one corner, so it is very difficult to read them,. Liner notes from one of the inserts: On the threshold of a new era, it is difficult to make an account of one's position, unless one wishes to play the rather dishonorable role of prophet. While still disinclined to Nietzschean posturing. confronted with the recent work of Jim Sharpe, I will gladly risk stating that we are poised on the threshold of a new era in music. While Mr. Sharpe's work as a music producer is well known-who could forget his important early work with the Squeegies-he has up til now kept from the public car his own compositions. His two 46's on the Plastikville label, with which he has been closely associated in the past. recorded and pressed with Plastikville's patented Orthophonic® system, are more than a challenge for the ear. They are a challenge for the mind. Not since the fateful final chords of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, John Cage's famous silent compositions or the longest chord of Sergeant Pepper's has the thinking listening public been presented with such a challenge. This is clearly a final exit from musical time as it has thus far been conceived. It is an hymn to the end of vinyl, but clearly an ironic one for Plastikville and Jim Sharpe have shown us that vinyl is very much alive and kicking. Finis Coronat Opus (23) and its blank b-side come screwed into their folded aluminum sacrophagus, at once a pastiche of the Public Image film can and a droll ironic yet direct comment about the accessibility of the cultural artifact contained within. For if Finis is largely though not completely silent, then the nameless, though not grooveless b-side gives forth nothing but the clicking and popping of the empty grooves. Only the faintest, most ambiguous hint of tape hiss. This is truly the sound of silence, not as purley imagined or romantically articulated by Cage but as directly recorded by Sharpe. And before Finis goes down into the vortex of its b-side, it issues the order to vacate both to appropriative critical feminist and neo-concrète industrial music-the 23 of the title references Throbbing Gristle-creating in an effortless aside a new genre: post-industrial composition. And just when we might be inclined to think that this Warholian proceas of erasure was nearing its logical completion, we are confronted with the axe-wielding negativity of Piece of Wood and the still more utter void of its b-side, A Smooth Finish. Surely we have come a step beyond the dialectical negativity of the Situationists recycled through the pop nihilism of the Pistols and Public Image as a venal journalist such as Marcus or Ball might glibly •understand• it. Here, we have entered the realm of active destruction. From the moment we confront the abrasive sandpaper packaging. we have entered another era. For this is not the fin de siicle gesture of a negativity turned casually self-referentially outward to the rest of the books or records on the library shelf-the gesture of Debord's and Jorn's Mémories recently and slavishly recycled by the ICA in London for its commodifying Situationist catalogue-but active negativity turned within to the surface of the vinyl only the better to leap outward: the record will instantly destroy your stereo needle-the very means of commodified mechanical reproduction-if played uncleaned. We have entered the era of safe if not of easy listening. But just how safe is it? It is the genius of Jim Sharpe to have posed again this "final" question, when many had of course already taken for granted that the final moves of the postmodemist endgame of art history had already been recorded between the glossy covers of slick coffetable magazines. A Smooth Finish indeed; it is but the opening volley of the last decade of the millennium. -Jayne Austen