Graham Dunning

This afternoon I’m joining a zoom call with some first year graphic design students at Sheffield Hallam – they’re to be tasked with making a video in response to some of my music, “using experimental video, typography and use After Effects to blend videos (for the first time).” I wrote the following to see if these might be fun jumping-off points for their projects.

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There are two fictional narratives I have applied to my work. First, the escaped clanking replicator; second, the post-apocalyptic music machine.

One facet of Mechanical Techno is that of recycling existing and unwanted music. The records I use, either to sample from or to create trigger records, are white labels rescued from bargain bins and junk shops. Artefacts that may once have had cultural and monetary value but which have found themselves dispossessed, thrown away as worthless¹. Mechanical Techno recycles the physical objects and recycles the sounds stamped into them. The output is new music, and indeed new records. The machine eats old music and records and spits out new ones.

The ‘grey goo scenario’ describes the following hypothetical apocalyptic situation: Nanobots are in common use for various tasks including building and repairing technology. By their nature, large amounts of these devices are necessary. As such, an efficient way to maintain sufficient quantities of nanobots is to have them capable of reproducing: robots which can build more robots. In the grey goo scenario, these nanobots run out of control, converting all available matter into more and more nanobots, an exponentially accelerating snowball effect which eventually turns all the molecules in the universe into grey nanobot goo. Zooming out from the microscopic scale, a replicating machine could be imagined which would build clones of itself. The ‘escaped clanking replicator’ is a large machine-producing machine run amok, like a giant version of one of the nanobots in the grey goo scenario². If the Mechanical Techno machine continues to run indefinitely, perhaps it will eventually produce so much music and so many records that no others exist in the universe.

The second science fiction trope I’ve considered in relation to my work has been to think about music making post-apocalypse. In the Fallout video game franchise, much technology is salvageable from the past. Armour, weapons and ammunition can be cobbled together from leftover scrap. The results don’t look elegant or work very effectively, but they get the job done. In the post-apocalyptic wasteland depicted in the TV show Station Eleven, smartphones and computers have long been rendered useless, relegated to the status of museum exhibits. Even with the possibility of generating electricity, these devices are too complex and too reliant on external networks to have any practical use.

Whilst initially made using hardware drum machines, synthesizers and samplers, nowadays the majority of electronic music is created ‘in the box’. A program like Ableton Live can be used to generate sequences, sounds, effects and automation. Software provides emulations of classic drum machines, tape recorders, effects units, orchestras, and other technologies. Increasingly software follows a subscription model and requires authentication of purchase over an internet connection.

Mechanical Techno isn’t the usual way to make electronic music. Some of the sound sources come from commercially available synths and effects pedals. But much of it is generated from handmade devices, hacked and modified objects and repurposed vinyl records. The process is clumsy and the resulting music sometimes sounds a bit wrong, but it gets the job done. As such, Mechanical Techno could be imagined as a future-proof, post-apocalyptic music. It isn’t reliant on computers, on a software subscription, or on an internet connection.

1. As Kyle Devine writes in Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (p119), ‘Plastics perish. In addition to the challenges and hazards of producing polymer compounds, and in addition to the social inequalities and environmental infractions of record pressing facilities, plastic recordings that reach consumers eventually wear out, or become individually unwanted, culturally unfashionable, or technologically obsolete. Disposal and dispossession are the versos of newness and possession.’ ↩︎
2. Both of these are paraphrased from two Wikipedia pages, Grey Goo and Self-Replicating Machine. ↩︎