Takuro Mizuta Lippit, better known as dj sniff, has always treated the turntable less as a playback device and more as an archaeological dig site. With "Turntable Solos" he strips things to the bone: no elaborate conceptual scaffolding, no comforting studio polish, just the crackle of vinyl skin under his fingernails, the cut-and-splice of his long-evolving software instruments, and the risk of improvisation flaring in real time.

Recorded across Brussels, Cologne, Geneva, and anchored by a resonant set in Hong Kong, the album documents the turntable as both "tool of memory and weapon of dissent". Where his earlier "Parallel Traces of the Jewel Voice" sounded like a haunted archive being carefully unlocked, "Turntable Solos" throws the lock across the room. The album’s 32 minutes are a single performance-sculpture: shards of rhythm appear and vanish, voices flicker like intercepted transmissions, and the needle itself becomes a percussionist, hammering out its own Morse code of urgency.

There are no “lyrics” in the conventional sense, yet the record speaks in a brutally articulate way. Its language is protest and persistence: the skips and scratches recall streets filled with chants, then drowned in police sirens. The way fragments refuse to align neatly feels like a mirror to broken social narratives - the soundtrack to a city that won’t stay quiet. Even its moments of silence feel charged, like the brief hush before someone lifts another placard into the air.

Sniff’s personal history - bridging Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong - filters through the music as a kind of restless diaspora. You can hear both nostalgia and foreboding: the joy of improvisation and community-building, but also the dread of watching one city’s past repression foreshadow another’s future. The “safest place” he names in Hong Kong is ironic, of course. Safety here is always provisional, always fragile.
And yet, the record resists despair. It insists that even under censorship and surveillance, there’s still space for play, for sound that wriggles out of the grid. It’s funny, in a way: to imagine police baffled not by a Molotov but by a slipmat. The idea that radical energy could come from someone bending a record back and forth until it screams.

Ultimately, "Turntable Solos" is exactly what it claims to be: a solo voice, precarious and raw, stitched together from broken grooves and unstable circuits. But it also feels collective, since every scratch hints at the ghosts of collaborators, audiences, and fellow resisters. In other words: it’s one man with decks and software, but it plays like a crowd.

A question lingers when the sound stops: can noise protect us? Maybe not. But as sniff shows, it can certainly keep us awake, aware, and laughing at the absurdity of repression. And sometimes that’s the beginning of resistance.