The lights in your living room begin to dim, the neon vinyl player fills the space with ambient music, and interwoven LED lights within its acrylic body create a mystifying “Colourscape.” This is a scenario the new amalgamation of sound and visual fusion – Turntable II – sitting in your living room wants to create.
The brainchild of Brian Eno, a British musician and visual artist, recognized for his experiments with “light as a medium,” and for coining the term ambient music: A soft, mood-influencing music made for passive listening. Eno first enthralled us with a similar amalgamation in a rectangular turntable in 2021.
For 2024, the musician, composer, and record producer, has breathed a lease of inventive life into a more rounded Turntable II that extended his fascination with light sources to a new dimension. Bringing an unfathomed visual experience of music to life, the color-changing LED turntable is bound to transform routine house parties into an evening at a nightclub. And when not in use, it sits there in your living room as a piece of art ready to kick off conversations.
Therefore, as Eno himself puts it, the Turntable II is not only a functional record player “but also a piece of art” that creates infinite combinations of seductive light play both on the round platter and base. The LEDs inside the Turntable II’s acrylic body are programmed to change color independently in a slow and random routine creating what Eno terms “Colorscapes.”
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Turntable II measures 45cm in diameter and 15cm high, has feet measuring 1.8cm, and can play both 33 and 45rpm vinyl. Running on a 15v DC power supply, the record player uses Arduino for its brain which controls the pattern and speed at which the light changes.
This vinyl record player, for its given ingenuity, is priced at £20,000 (about $25,000). At that price, of course, it’s not an everyday player; the Turntable II is strictly limited to 150 examples signed with the designer’s name and an exclusive number. If you don’t have the pocket for it outrightly, you can catch a glimpse of it at the Paul Stolper Gallery in London through March 9, 2024.
