Graham Dunning

Typically I enjoy logging things and keeping records. I track what films I’ve watched with Letterboxd. I have list of what fiction I’ve read, which I started in January 2022 in a notebook and recently switched to a spreadsheet. I track my running and climbing too. I find the accumulation of this kind of information satisfying in itself, but it also serves other purposes. For films I’ve watched, it’s a very practical thing. My memory is really not what it used to be and the list serves to remind me what I’ve actually seen. I’m working through the classic 40s and 50s film noirs, for example, and they do tend to blend into one. I’ll often refer to the list in in-person conversations if the topic of films comes up. Tracking fiction is similar, though I do tend to remember what I’ve read more readily than what I’ve watched. I sometimes refer to the list when I’m buying a new book to read, reminding myself about authors or series I’ve enjoyed. Or giving me a nudge to switch genres if I’m in a run of sci-fi. Tracking exercise is quite practical. My monthly climbing wall membership only makes sense if I go at least six times a month, so I started it to monitor that. Logging my running distance is a good motivator – I’m aiming to run one mega-meter (1000km) this year, and currently just need to get another 64km done in the next two weeks.

I have tried logging my music listening in the past, but found it wasn’t for me. My first encounter with algorithmic recommendations was via Last FM, a website which tracked your listening stats and compared this to other members. They invented the verb to “scrobble” for this, so new did they consider the concept. Scrobbling could be done via the website itself, which allowed for artists to upload their discography for streaming (feeling a bit like MySpace from an artist perspective, as I recall. Checking now seems like my artist profile is still there, though I’ve not thought to look at it for years now). Or via a plugin for your favourite media player. VLC player still has inbuilt settings to log your plays. I got quite into Last FM and scrobbling, and enjoyed seeing my stats. Some familiar issues occurred, like hour-long tracks counting as one play comparable in the numbers to listening to a two-minute song. I remember the recommendation algorithm being pretty good but fairly rudimentary, and not always useful in finding new artists. For example, anything rock-based would always generate the Beatles, Radiohead and Bowie in the top artists, however obscure the origin, just by the sheer weight of numbers those major artists would draw. But the reason I finally stopped was when I noticed my listening behaviour being affected by scrobbling. Putting a record on to listen to I hesitated because I realised it wouldn’t get added to my stats. I considered finding the mp3s and listening to the same album that way instead. With that I decided I needed to pull away from the scrobble.

I’ve listened to a couple of interviews with Liz Pelly this year, who has extensively researched the way Spotify works for her book Mood Machine (she was on No Tags podcast back in February and more recently Politics Theory Other), and find it fascinating the way in which the streaming platform has changed the way people listen. I’m not a playlist listener myself, preferring either complete albums (to get a feel of the artist’s bigger body of work) or DJ mixes (to feel how different tunes fit together in a considered way). My brief trial of Spotify ended quite briefly when it didn’t have anything by Om on there, and when the only version of a Joy Division album was a recent remaster which sounded completely different than the original. I understand the ubiquity of the platform but it wasn’t for me. Spotify focuses on the individual listener rather than the genre, scene or artist, tailoring playlists and recommendations to the listener’s sense of self rather than their connection with others. And the end-of-year stats it provides are part of that. I recoil slightly every time someone posts their Spotify Wrapped list – it doesn’t feel to me like a celebration of the music or a contribution to the community, it’s a celebration of their individual taste and a presentation of their personality.

I think the other factor that puts me off the Wrapped-style year-end review is the focus on the importance of the numbers. To a large degree I’m more interested in what’s new than revisiting music. I’m lucky that I get to put together a monthly radio show which gives me the impetus to go looking for new underground and experimental music. I can play anything I like on the show – there’s no pressure or direction whatsoever from the station – but I have some self-imposed guidelines that affect what I play. I try not to ever repeat tracks from show to show. I won’t usually play more than one track by the same artist in a show. And I try and find new artists to play as much as I can, avoiding over-playing the same people. This isn’t something I currently track, though I do have a spreadsheet for this, it’s jut not been updated for a couple of years. If I were to analyse the numbers for the listening that goes into making the show, there wouldn’t be clear trends with tracks or artists moving to the top of the list. Some of these I might only listen to a couple of times. Or it might take me a few listens to an album before I realise I’m not into it, potentially generating bigger numbers that don’t map onto my enjoyment of the work.

This blog post is inspired by a post on mastodon by C. Reider, describing their listening habits as somewhat incompatible with the concept of the year-end list. “i’m constantly listening to music that’s new to me, but not necessarily a lot of music that was released in the last 12 months. might make a big recommendation list of things i liked this year, but 90% of it will be not brand new.”
My own listening is somewhat similar. I don’t think I will make any formal recommendations, however, I kind of think the radio show is how I do that throughout the year (the tracklist for each show is on the blog and I think the bandcamp library page does a good job of showing most of what I’ve bought, despite the issues with it being a closed system).

I mostly listen to DJ mixes when I’m out running. This year I enjoyed digging into the archives of Field Maneuvers festival, with favourites from Jay Duncan, Ben Simms and Local Group. I also really like the live mixes posted by south London record shop Planet Wax on youtube, and highlights were by Louise Plus One and Jerome Hill. In terms of bigger numbers, the stuff I end up listening to often is also context dependent. I’m excited to be going to see Pharaoh Overlord live for the first time next year, so have been going back over their stuff and checking newer releases on their bandcamp page. Because I’m moving house soon I’ve been looking through my CDs and records, listening to some albums I’m less familiar with, which is one of the benefits of physical media. Similar to what C. Reider said, not everything I listen to is newly released, but often it’s new to me. All this is to say, I’m not writing an end-of-year list, but if I was, this would have been it.

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.

This week I’m at the NIME conference in Utrech – New Interfaces for Musical Expression. I’ve had a busy few months with gigging, conference presentations and co-writing a paper, so not had the energy or inclination to keep up to date with blogging. But after a couple of conversations yesterday about the benefits of regular informal writing and and posting, I’m back again with a few notes from the conference. These are accumlated thoughts, points of reference and idea-seeds rather than particualry well formulated notes. Presented here roughly in chronological order.
(as of date of wrting the papers aren’t publically available, I’ll add links later to access them)

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Excellent to see Christian Faubel perform live with his piece titled “songs from my analogue utopia”. The setup is a series of tiny actuators flicking stretched elastic bands, which are amplified with contact mics. The whole array is set up on an overhead projector giving a zero-latency real-time projection of each individual percussive strike. The osciallating motors are triggered by analogue clock signals from a modular synth. I’ve come across some of Christian’s writing about entrainment of oscillators previously – so there may have been some of that going on. Clocks were running in and out of phase, generating interesting polyrhthyms with the delicate but rich pings. Great to see the processes up close, as we were invited as an audience to gather round for the set.

Also glad to watch Dylan Beattie perform live, my first experience in a concert setting having visited his studio previously.

Impressed Dylan brought 60kg of vinyl lathe equipment across on the train! His set featured real-time cutting of grooves into vinyl dubs, using a handheld homemade stylus/tattoo gun. Some great textures and serendipitous moments. I liked the liveness of the set, with certain abrupt drop-outs and dynamic changes which belied the intricate and fragile nature of the process.

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Zeynep Özcan & Anıl Çamcı gave a really interesting paper on use of juggling with physical-digital interfaces. Neither of these are particularly areas of interest for me but the parallels between the rhythms and cycles of juggling and those of musical rhythms and loops were intriguing. The research involved voicing three juggling balls in different ways, with sensors responding to accelration, jerk and impact, and each of the balls given a specific different sounding voice. Of most interest was the discussion of failure – neither of the paper’s authors were experienced jugglers and, as such, their attempts at testing the interfaces involved many drops, fubmles, clashing and impacts which skilled jugglers would not incur. As their reserach progressed their juggling skills also improved – but they found the musical ouput of the devices became less interesting. They began to deliberately fail sometimes, dropping balls on purpose, acting out errors, reverting to less-skilled behaviour in order to reintegrate the more interesting musical gestures. “Feigning mistakes to retain some of the sonic affordances of failure,” to quote the paper. This isn’t something i’ve come across before, something to think about further.

You can now watch the paper presentation/video here:

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I also gave my own paper on Wednesday morning, titled Ironing In The Creases: Developing An Idiosyncratic Electro-mechanical Musical Instrument By Reinforcing Its Faults. My intention was to talk about my making process and how it works in a cycle, including the key decision points where I acknowledge the aspects of a new development which are causing problems or issues, which can also potentially be benefits or produce interesting musical effects. My paper ended up being quite long, as I wanted to include lots of contextual information about thinking relating to the process, and also needed to establish some of the precedents and context for the project itself. Neeless to say it was tricky then to get it all into the 10 minutes allocated for the presentation. There’s a video version here which is essentially the same as what I presented:

I had some good feedback from other attendees including some questions that got me thinking. Responding to one question in the room I mentioned that I had some personal rules or an unwritten manifesto which had been guiding the project. I’ve never formally written this out, but have started to make notes towards doing so for myself.

Specifically these are things like:

• No direct playing. All sounds are played by the machine: I wouldn’t, for example, set up a beat and then do a synth solo over the top.
• No backing track. This has been a rule of mine for so long it’s second nature. Performing along to a linear recording restricts the option for pacing, live arranging the material, which is fundamental to any performance for me.

I’m not going to write them all out here, just a couple of points by way of illustration.

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At the first evening concert, John Bowers played a few short sets using some strategies developed with Robin Foster around rummaging with various digital and algorithmic augmentations. The weird little garage unit at the venue gave it a classic noise gig vibe which worked realy well. Part of John’s approach is running several different mappings from the sensor inputs concurrently, then mixing between the outputs. This creates a system which is both responsive and playable, with seemingly infinite variation available.

An intense finish to the day came from Transsonic (Viola Yip/Nicola Hein) who played an absolutely searing noise set with handheld lasers and an integrated system of sound controller and distorted guitar. A dark room with only red lasers to provide light, I couln’t see quite what was happening – but the responsivity was apparent and the soundscape flitting around the powerful club system worked amazingly well.
Here’s a video version of their performance, submitted prior to the conference as far as I’m aware – play it loud!

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The days are long and intense at NIME. The first day’s programme started at 9am and finished at 11pm. I think I counted about 16 papers and 12 performances I’d seen during the day, plus all the poster presentations and demos. So, necessarily this is just a sample of the highlights. I’ll likely post more later in the week, depending if I run out of energy beforehand. Luckily most of the venues here sell Club Mate.