CD Review: Cut Chemist - The Audience's Listening

You wouldn't think that a hair salon or Toni Morrison or Flannery O'Connor would have much to do with turntablism. The truth is, they don't...but events can sometimes conspire to smash random thoughts together.

A couple of nights ago I was sitting in one of the free chairs at our local hair salon, waiting for TheWife™ to be finished with her pre-vacation do. I was supposed to meet her there when she was done so that we could deal with yet another pre-vacation chore, getting a tiny repair done on the Jeep (You know the kind. It involves the replacement of a 79-cent part and will undoubtedly cost $150). Somehow, I managed to get there very early, so my only choice was to find some reading material and make myself comfortable.

Not wanting to be given an endless ration of grief for picking the "most guy" magazine on the rack (which would have been an Ikea catalog...not even really sure that's very "guy" at all), I selected the summer reading issue of Oprah's magazine "O".

The very first article my thumb stopped at was an essay by Toni Morrison about how she learned the "art of reading." Morrison drew an interesting parallel between her childhood love of radio and her fascination with the printed word—that both forms of media require the consumer of ideas to provide some of their own details, making the story seem that much more rich.

Now of course this is only marginally related to turntablism. What struck me about Morrison's reading concept was that it reminded me of how some of the characters in the documentary Scratch thought of what they did. If you haven't seen this film, it deals with the roots of Hip Hop and the progression of turntablism. The key seemed to be the re-imagining of music. Not just samples of one tune yanked from one context to another. No, the players put their turntables through some impressive paces, coaxing out some pretty freakish sounds.

Article Author: Mark Saleski

Mark Saleski is a writer and music obsessive based out of the Monadnock region of New Hampshire. He is an editor and writer for Jazz.com. He also writes reviews for Blogcritics.org and produces the weekly feature The Friday Morning Listen. …

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