Needles in Pain is a “symphony” for three turntables and an extra tone arm recorded in real time at the 2009 FIME festival in Portugal. Petit uses his own personally prepared, naturally-aged vinyl and each tone arm has its own feed to the mixer.
Philippe Petit is curator of BiP HOp, a webzine, radio show and label, whose compilation series comprises an ambitious and encyclopedic set of attractively designed volumes generously documenting glitch, clicks’n’cuts and mixed-media machine music, now into its ninth volume. Petit has since cut a very broad swath DJing, recording and collaborating with artists as diverse as Lydia Lunch, Simon Fisher Turner and the Vultures Quartet.
Needles in Pain is a “symphony” for three turntables and an extra tone arm recorded in real time at the 2009 FIME festival in Portugal. Petit uses his own personally prepared, naturally-aged vinyl and each tone arm has its own feed to the mixer. A twenty-minute movement takes up each side, clouds of proto-ambient, two grand spiral nebulae of gas and grain slowly collapsing into consonance, as Petit hectors the vinyl until a piece breaks off midway through the second movement, into a romantic, if sandpapered and wormholed, spacely drift toward fitful drowse.
Extra credit for the trippy visual design, a kaleidoscopic image that upon closer inspection turns out to be an eight-armed, eight-headed Petit, a clever and humorous contrast to the truly awful album title.
Needles in Pain is available on Alrealon Musique. [Release page | Bandcamp]
