I was asked to play a noise show downtown Cincinnati at a place called BASE Gallery. Instead of trying the stuff I’d been doing in The Black Fives, I wanted to do something new: play a dj set with pieces of sandpaper instead of records.

I used normal turntables & needles, along with a Kaoss Pad for effects. Someone asked, in a myspace comment, something to the effect of, “Wouldn’t that mess up your needles?”

In short, yes:

The blue needle on the left of the low-quality scanner image is a new needle; the two black ones were old, worn out needles i hadn’t yet thrown away. As you can see, the sandpaper completely ravaged them. 🙂

And for the record (no pun), I used multiple grits of sandpaper over the course of the set, and some with masking tape in a plus-sign shape across the sandpaper to make a kind of rhythmic sound.