Date: December 10 & 11 2004 Duration: 1 hour Venue: Tate Modern Performance Downloads Artist Talk Archive Biography d_cultuRe Umbrella Season Artistic Content in the Public Domain The Sound of Heaven and Earth

The Sounds of Christmas is an annual project by Christian Marclay, pioneer of the experimental turntable movement and leading artist operating at the intersections of art and music. Reinventing this work-in-progress for London, the artist will present his collection of over 1,200 Christmas records as a publicly accessible archive in a special Thameside pavilion, alongside projections of the record covers and footage of previous performances (exhibition open 10-22 December during gallery hours).

Combining blatant sentimentality with vanguard experimentation, Marclay suggests that the categories distinguishing 'serious' music from its opposite are both arbitrary and arcane.

Co-produced with Electra and Supported by Arts Council England

Performance Downloads

During the two-week installation, noted DJs created remixes of their own selection from Marclay's Christmas records. These recorded performances created a soundtrack for the space. Download any of six samples below, recorded live during Christian Marclay's performance for The Sounds of Christmas 2004.

These files are in 128 kb MP3 format. Clicking once on the download button will download the file to your default download folder. To select where to download the files to your computer on a (PC) right click and select save target as / on a (Mac) ctrl click and select download link to disk (download will take a few minutes). Then open the files in any mp3 compatible player.

These 6 samples by Christian Marclay, are licensed under an Attribution-Non-Commercial Share-Alike 1.0 (UK) Creative Commons Licence. As licenced via a contributors agreement with the original author. Terms of the Licence: You are free to copy and distribute the work in conjunction with this licence. You must give the original author credit. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. See here for further information on Creative Commons.

Artist Talk Archive

This talk archive is available in both narrowband 56k and broadband 256k. Click the Play button to choose your bandwidth from a pop up window. Broadband playback requires the latest Real Player 10. Follow our Real Player Guide should you have any player problems.

Copyright: The recording of this discussion is subject to copyright restrictions as outlined by the Tate Online Event Copyright Statement - as licenced to Tate by the original authors.

Christian Marclay discusses his project The Sounds Of Christmas in conversation with Rob Young of Electra and The Wire magazine. Due to the placement of a screen behind the speakers and the use of lapel microphones, during the live recording, the levels of this archive vary. We apologise for any difficulties this causes the listener.

Biography

Influential New York artist Christian Marclay has produced one of the most important bodies of work about sound and its role in contemporary culture. Legendary DJ, composer, collagist, and sculptor, Marclay creates new narratives on the threshold between the audible and the visible. His first retrospective was held at the UCLA Hammer Museum in 2003, and he has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Kunsthaus Zurich, White Cube, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Tate Modern.

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