Graham Dunning

My radio show Fractal Meat on a Spongy Bone used to be fortnightly, live and in-person. Some guests either to play live or have a chat with, and a selection of tracks which I’d usually introduce and occasionally give a bit of info about. With experimental music it often helps to have a bit of context. Chaotic clattering is all well and good, but it can hold more intrigue if you know it’s a recording of a sound installation, or a location recording, or a live set or whatever. I switched to pre-recording a few years ago. For a while I kept the track intros in, but after a while that lapsed, in part because it doesn’t feel the same editing intros into a prerecording, as opposed to doing it all live. And to my ear always sounded a bit forced. This new blog feels like a nice platform to reintroduce some of that contextual information. The full tracklist for tonight’s show is on the show blog here, and you’ll be able to listen to the archive soon via this page. Below, some info about a few of the pieces in particular.

Renata Roman – Imensa

On their track from the Amazon Reimagined release, the Brazilian artist uses calm electronic tones and single piano notes alongside a soundbed of rainforest sounds: hissing insects, numerous birdcalls and other unidentifiable creatures. There’s a clear distinction between the played instruments and the field recordings. Whilst the latter have been edited and at points layered, they don’t appear to be processed much. The bandcamp page describes the project in a bit more detail: the sounds were recorded several years previously, between 2006 and 2011, in different areas of the Amazonian rainforest, and by several different people. I find this kind of time- and space-dilation appealing, bringing together potentially disparate sources into one imaginary soundscape. Steve Roden has used the term ‘possible landscape’ to describe his compositions¹, which feels appropriate here. It’s a speculative soundscape, perhaps a snapshot of something that never really existed, which feels tragic with the knowledge of current and ongoing deforrestation.

Minimal Tears – Passing Back Into Light

Nadine Smith’s recent article about the changing way the major label music industry has embraced sampling gave me food for thought on the extent to which sampling as a process can be considered subversive. Most electronic musicians I know wouldn’t generally seek clearance for samples – the turnover is so low that most releases are likely to go under the radar, and in a scene where almost every break, synth sound or drum machine voice is already familiar, and part of what characterises certain genres, sampling feels like the raw material that makes up most of the music anyway. If sampling as appropriation without permission isn’t the straightforwardly political act it once was, perhaps sampling can work to build scenes and strengthen communities.

Maya Bouldry-Morrison (aka Octo Octa)’s Minimal Tears project is refreshing as it actively invites remixing, sampling and reuse – with explicit permission. The front page states clearly: ‘There is no copyright on this audio. Every part of it can be taken, used, edited, released, etc all without credit!’ In fact the release is under the CC0 Creative Commons licence, meaning the work is effectively in the public domain. There are complete tracks, their stems, and a collection of free samples to use too. The tunes are varied in genre, including synth-based ambient music, deep house and some with an electro feel. I chose one of the more abstract pieces for the radio show as it fit better with the rest of the stuff I wanted to include. The project continues to the positive and encouraging work both Maya and her partner Eris Drew do through their label T4T LUV NRG – check the main page for free pdfs of DJ tips, a guide to setting up a home studio, and a downloadable zine on grooveboxes.

Shirley Pegna, Emma Welton, Paul Whitty – Double-bass with Vibrating Soil

This kind of ‘does what it says on the tin’ track title is often my favourite kind of thing to include in the radio mixes. It’s a short track in comparison to the other pieces on the release, which feel more like straight up field recordings. On listening through, it’s still not entirely clear how the soil was deployed, or indeed whether there is a double bass involved at all – the liner notes on the bandcamp page list the instrumentation used as violin, field recording, objects, glass, and transducers. The title, and the release’s cover image, suggest to me a playful exploration of sound, literally out in the field.

Stephan von Huene – Totem Tone #4

Pipe organs are fascinating machines. I was lucky enough this weekend to witness a brilliant rendition of some baroque pieces on the free-to-use pipe organ at London Bridge station. Part of the joy for me is the deep, rich sub bass they can generate – I often daydream about how awe inspiring it would have been to hear such a thing hundreds of years ago, way before electronic sound reproduction.

Stephan von Huhne’s Totum Tones sculptures were built between 1969 and 1970. Each consists of a number of large, square-section organ pipes on a plinth containing an air supply and control mechanism. This recording of “Totem Tone #4”, from a 1975 LP, was made at the Vancouver Art Gallery – judging from the images on the sleeve, a large white cube space. The music itself has a lot of character. The tempo varies and the rhythm patterns don’t feel robotic, almost as though the pipes are being worked by a human player.  Dispute the information on the artist’s website, including some closer images and (slightly vague) descriptions of the mechanisms, I couldn’t work out exactly what’s happening. There are sections where the pipes begin to overblow, and what sound like beat-notes at times – again, characteristics which I’d associate with nuanced human playing rather than programmed control.

Michael Ridge – Mutant Flexi Cut-Up #2

Another self-descriptive piece, here Michael uses cutup felix-disks recorded to dictaphone cassettes, for double grunge noisy clatter. We’ve been in touch online for a few years, having some crossover in our turntable practice, and general lo-fi / hardware hacking stuff. I’m hoping we can meet in person at the weekend, as he’s due to play a show at Hundred Years Gallery (London) on Saturday evening. [Edit – no he’s not! turns out the gig is actually 24th March, not February. Hopefully can catch him next time.] One of the other things I miss now I’m pre-recording the radio show is to be able to preview and promote gigs and things happening locally. This show is organised by Mouth In Foot, who had asked if I’d give the gig a mention. I can’t find it on the venue website yet but will be heading down – a lineup of turntablists and tape manglers, including Michael Ridge and Eggblood.

Brötzmann / Bennink  – Schwarzwaldfahrt Nr. 1

A different approach to combining live instrumentation and environmental sound, here Peter Brötzmann and Han Bennink duel on wind instruments in the Black Forest. This release has been on my mind recently as I was co-writing a paper about the way improvisation works when using a system with unpredictable elements. Considering the environment itself within the ‘performance ecosystem’² as a contributing factor not just to the sounds captured on the recording but also as something the players might respond to or be influenced by. Here the saxophonists appear to be moving around the woods, their cries becoming increasingly birdlike, fading with distance and giving way to more delicate birdsong from the local species. I’ve been lucky enough to visit the Black Forest several times, on tour and an artist residency, in Sankt Georgen im Schwarzwald, which is also home to the German national phonography museum. It’s quite uncanny how evocative the sonic space feels listening to these recordings from nearly fifty years ago – the particular reverberance that seems coloured by the canopy and the floor thick with pine needles.

Chloë Sobek – Thrall
Michael-Jon Mizra – Framework

One of my favourite recent compilations, LOLTRAX001, I’ve played tracks from it in the last few episodes – this tape keeps on giving. Diverse approaches to computer music with live coding featuring heavily. Both of these pieces include drones and glitchy click-crackles, both feel equally futuristic and sort of biological.

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As this selection perhaps illustrates, I don’t generally program the radio show by theme or genre, but there do tend to be threads that connect many of the tracks. I enjoy including audio that might not otherwise get much airplay, or listening time, so particularly the sound installations. I enjoy playing very recent stuff and try to feature new releases amongst older pieces and material by more established artists. Hopefully it’s of interest to read a bit more about some of the work.³

1. Steve Roden ‘what are you doing with your music?’ in Brian Marley &  Mark Wastell (editors):  Blocks of consciousness and the unbroken continuum, 2005. ↩︎
2. Simon Waters – ‘Performance ecosystems: ecological approaches to musical interaction’  in EMS: Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (2007): 1-20.  ↩︎
3. I wasn’t planning to be rigorous about referencing etc on the blog, as it’s here mainly for me to practice at writing and hopefully get quicker and more confident with it. But it feels necessary when mentioning specific concepts like these, and again it might come in useful to someone reading. ↩︎