Philip Jeck and Lol Sargent’s ‘Vinyl Requiem’ returns to Union Chapel
Philip Jeck and Lol Sargent’s “Vinyl Requiem” returns to Union Chapel, London on 4 November 2026, with a Touch double-vinyl reissue launching the same night.
Union Chapel in London stages “Vinyl Requiem 33.3” on 4 November 2026, a one-off return of Philip Jeck and Lol Sargent’s “Vinyl Requiem” to the venue where it premiered in 1993. Doors open at 18:30 and the programme starts at 19:30. Tickets are £18 plus booking fee through gigantic.com and are on sale now. The evening also marks the launch of a limited-edition double-vinyl reissue of “Vinyl Requiem” on Touch, the label Jeck was signed to from 1995 until his death in 2022.
Vinyl Requiem 33.3 event details
The programme centres on a full-scale projection of the 55-minute edited film of the 1993 performance, followed by a Q&A with people connected to the work and to Jeck’s creative life: Ghislaine Boddington (artistic director of the arts collective shinkansen), Mary Prestidge and Lol Sargent, the visual artist who created “Vinyl Requiem” with Jeck. Jon Wozencroft, co-founder of Touch, is also billed to take part. All profits from the night go to The Philip Jeck Foundation, a charity set up by Jeck’s family after his death to fund artists who produce experimental and creative work.
Conceived by Jeck and Sargent at the start of the 1990s under the working title “The Death of Vinyl”, “Vinyl Requiem” was built for the 1993 Union Chapel performance from an 8-by-6-metre wall of 180 white Dansette record players, combined with 9 slide projectors and 2 16mm film projectors, according to Touch’s own catalogue notes. Three “Dansette operators” walked platforms in front of the record-player wall to swap discs live during the piece. The 1993 premiere was staged with the Institute of Contemporary Arts and also travelled to Ghent’s Time Festival in Belgium, later touring the UK, Austria and Belgium with support from the Arts Council. It won the Time Out Performance Award for Best Site-Specific Event in 1993.
Sargent described the piece’s intent in an interview given around the time of its 20th anniversary: “What Philip and I created was an abstract expressionistic performance made in a very intuitive way to celebrate over 100 years of the mass public experience of the ‘record’. It was an art installation performance about a medium, using the medium.” Jeck, discussing the same period, was careful to separate the piece from nostalgia: “[Vinyl Requiem was not] a big mourning for records, I am not anti CD. It is a good starting point to mark this time of change from vinyl to other formats.” He also drew a direct line between his own practice and Sargent’s: “Lol uses his computer-controlled projectors as paint brushes. He paints with light which is similar to the way that I work with sound.”
The critic David Toop, writing about the piece at the time, described its atmosphere in a short, often-cited line: “a mood of poignancy. Perhaps sadness is intrinsic to the medium.”
About Philip Jeck and Lol Sargent
Philip Jeck was born on 15 November 1952 and studied visual arts at Dartington College of Arts in Devon. After a trip to New York in 1979 introduced him to DJs including Walter Gibbons and Larry Levan, he began building compositions from old record players and vinyl in the early 1980s, initially scoring work for dance and theatre companies, including a five-year collaboration with choreographer Laurie Booth. “Vinyl Requiem”, made with Sargent for the 1993 Union Chapel performance, became his best-known work. Jeck signed to Touch in 1995 and released a run of albums on the label including “Loopholes” (1995), “Surf” (1998), “Stoke” (2002), “7” (2003), “Sand” (2008), “An Ark for the Listener” (2010) and “Cardinal” (2015). “Sand” was named the second-best album of 2008 by The Wire. He received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers in 2009. Jeck also collaborated with Jah Wobble, Jaki Liebezeit, David Sylvian, Janek Schaefer and Gavin Bryars, among others; his final credited recording was “Stardust”, a 2021 collaboration with Faith Coloccia. He died on 25 March 2022 in Liverpool, aged 69, following a brief illness. His family, including Mary Prestidge, subsequently established The Philip Jeck Foundation in his name.
Lol Sargent is a UK visual artist who worked with Jeck on “Vinyl Requiem” from its conception, designing and hand-triggering the piece’s slide and film projections during live performances. He later oversaw the archival 55-minute edit of the 1993 film, released on DVD in 2013 with all proceeds going to The Philip Jeck Foundation. “Vinyl Requiem 33.3” reunites Sargent with the venue, the film and several of the people who worked on the original production, alongside the new Touch double-vinyl reissue of “Vinyl Requiem”.
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