thuunderboy!

Thuunderboy!

Recorded and produced by Tony Conrad in 1973. Thuunderboy is Tony's son, Ted Conrad, and these are recordings of his turntable manipulations from the ages of 22 to 30 months, in 1973-74. "What, after all, does one make of a two-year-old boy, a child who ultimately comes to be armed with two turntables and a microphone, creating a sonic collage through his instinctive abuse of a stylus and various 45 rpm vinyl recordings -- including that of a popular novelty tune sung by 1970s Mormon pre-adolescent media sensation Donny Osmond? Does the resultant accumulation of scratching sounds, surface noise, and reiterations of fragmented vocal phrases -- offered up in varying turntable speeds: slow, fast and juuuuust right -- constitute a signal moment in the age of mechanical reproduction? Is it fair to argue that a precocious Ted, the once and future Thuunderboy, anticipated in these excursions of the early '70s everything from the rise of turntablism and hip-hop to the creative strategies of such disparate entertainers and/or conceptualists as Fatboy Slim, Christian Marclay and that erstwhile Savior of Pop (circa 1997), Beck? And if so, then what sort of volatile questions might this pose about the creative appropriation and manipulation of pre-recorded sources, about artistic intent, about the virtues of repetition and about the subversive deployment of consumer electronics in the dark and wild years before Napster? If, to paraphrase the archetypal Philistine's response to an abstract painting, a two-year-old can do it, does that diminish the accomplishment of the seasoned turntablist who has dedicated years to mastering the wheels of steel and cultivating its staccato language? Or, rather, does it affirm some unerringly democratic quality inherent in the very act of scratching and spinning, that a mere toddler could create hypnotic and deconstruct pop banalities into perversely humorous after-the-fact commentaries on the star-making machinery? What a splendidly infantile provocation!