Review of performance at Electronic Organica

A good review from Cath Aubergine of my solo performance at the Electronic Organica night in Manchester on Friday. Read the full article at Manchester Music.

“The final performance is from Manchester’s premier analogue craftsman Graham Dunning. Sometimes to be found pushing the art-noisecore boundaries with Blood Moon, other times creating audiovisual artworks involving, for example, shattering bottles or one astonishing piece whereby he runs a stick along a very long metal railing to observe the changes in pitch and rhythm, his imagination seems boundless. Tonight he is extending the music-art sphere to include engineering; no computers here, but the three turntables and a variety of microphones and sliders look intriguing. The records in his box are not records as we know them; they’re field recordings pressed onto dubplates. We recognise a bit of the railings in there as he manipulates the speeds; natural objects become sine waves, human voices machines. And then he’s dropping marbles onto one of the turntables, their bright colours dancing as the needle skips under and over them and the clatter feeds through levels of processing. The abstract and the ambient might sound strange to unprepared ears but this genuinely sounds like nothing we have ever heard before. As he brings the relatively short piece to a close there’s a pause while people try and process what they have heard, and then a standing ovation. Yes, it’s a handful of people who would rather spend a Friday night listening to largely indescribable noises amongst furry scatter-cushions than, I dunno, go to a multiplex and eat popcorn, but none of them are going to forget this astonishing performance in a hurry.”