MUSIC
Talk with fast-fingered DJs of the my-decks-are-my-instrument school, and you'll hear that turntablism isn't just music, it's the free jazz of the future. But while virtuoso scratching moved toward the pop culture mainstream, turntablists' artistry wasn't being celebrated because their performances couldn't be duplicated. Enter Jason Bellmont, aka DJ Radar.
"The turntable deserves respect as an actual, valid musical instrument," says Bellmont, a trained pianist and student of computer science. "The best way to do that is to show that it can use the classical staff system, which has been around for about 400 years."
Bellmont, who interrupted his CS studies in at Arizona State University to devote himself to music, has invented a set of symbols, called articulations, that maps out a DJ's hand position for each note in a musical score. "When I show a composer or arranger the notes, they know exactly what it sounds like," explains Bellmont. "It's instant communication."
In March, Bellmont and collaborator Raul Yanez will debut Concerto for Turntables #1 with the ASU student orchestra. Flooded with 16th and 32nd "scratch" notes, the performance would be impossible without Bellmont's articulations. The musician doesn't see his two sides - programmer geek and turntable star - as being all that different: "Programmers and people who scratch are both really obsessive," he says. "It's a perfection thing. Or maybe an obsessive-compulsive disorder."
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