Graham Dunning

Having passed my viva with minor corrections this week, my PhD is pretty much in the bag (wahey!). I’m looking forward to sharing Mechanical Techno: Extended turntable as live assemblage with the world once I’ve made the last few changes. In the meantime, I shared the documentation of my show in Sheffield last year which forms the basis of chapter 4 of the thesis. You can watch it here.

Working on the write-up has taken most of 2025, and I’ve put off a lot of things I wanted to do in that time in order to get it written. No complaints, that was the job I needed to do, but I’m now looking forward to spending time doing some more fun stuff again. As such, after my viva I bought the new Dungeons & Dragons boxed set, which I’ll be running with some friends from January. And a load of sci-fi and hard-boiled detective fiction to read. Three events coincide this coming weekend and I hope to attend all three. Iklectik’s annual NOISEMAS celebration is a twelve hour show with back-to-back noise sets, featuring a lot of friends performing and no doubt many others in the audience. The last BRAK of the year, a regular free improv show where Cath Roberts, Colin Webster and Tom Ward each pair up in a new duo. Always a lovely meet-up with an overlapping group of folks. And Das Booty, a rave with DJs typically playing stuff from the harder and weirder end of techno, breaks, UKG and bass music – hoping to convince some of the noise crew to come along after.

Whilst I’ve been fully immersed in music making and thinking about music recently, I’ve missed going out to gigs as often as I normally would, and haven’t been playing much at all this year. The majority of my social life usually revolves around events like these and a main plan for me going forward is to get more involved again. That also means resurrecting the tape label Fractal Meat Cuts, and I’ve got a few exciting things in the pipeline for that. Generally my plan is also just making more stuff (music, instruments, other things), sharing what I’m doing and trying to connect more with people and the scene.

One change I plan to make in 2026 is coming off instagram, which has been on the cards for a while. My main concern has been losing connections with people, being less able to share what I’m doing and finding out what others are doing. I don’t want to go into all the reasons for disconnecting from corporate social media here, perhaps that will make another blog post, but I really want to try and see if it’s possible to do things in a different way. I find way these platforms shape the users (both contributors and consumers) quite insidious. My main plan is to try to make my online output sustainable (for me to do it without feeling under pressure to do so), accessible in the long term, formatted on my own terns and not to suit the algorithm, and fun to make and engage with. I also want to be able to build and sustain networks with people. In practical terms this is going to look like: more regular blog posts, starting the monthly email list again, staying engaged with Mastodon (loving the community already there), and collating video documentation on youtube (rather than just short clips on insta).

Consider this post, then, the first of many.