Alien Jams with Guest Graham Dunning

This Sunday I had Graham Dunning as a guest on the Alien Jams show.  Graham is a sound artist and musician originally from Manchester but now based here in London.  He makes some really interesting music, much of his recent work involves found tapes and a lo-fi aesthetic, live sampling with cheap delay pedals and recording to 4-track tape. Throughout the show Graham plays some of his music, along with collaborative work he has done with other artists.

“My working practice deals with temporality, memory and narrative through sound, performance and installation. I am interested in people’s discarded memories and the function of archiving. Found objects, photographs and recordings feature in my work investigating notions of the artefact and implied narrative. Experimentation is fundamental, and my practice is often informed by scientific or archaeological protocol. 

Various themes and processes recur in my work including: sound and its relation to loss, nostalgia as mourning; exploring the world through listening and the specific sonic topographies of specific places; the questionable historical or other “objectivity” of an object; organising, arranging, and composing versus unpredictable inputs, random factors and chance operations; archiving, collecting and documentation in tension with ambiguity and open interpretation; and analogue and digital technologies and their (exploitable) limitations.

I consider myself an autodidact in the artistic field having studied physics, acoustics, English literature, philosophy, politics and history as an undergraduate, and engaging in art via experimental music and recording techniques, live composition and improvisation, and a lifelong interest in collecting and archiving found objects. 

 Most of my recent works have been site-specific installations including an interactive installation commissioned for Luton, featuring ten turntables with dubplates of local environmental sound recordings to be played individually or in combination by the audience; a “listening post” in rural West Wales enabling visitors to hear the sounds of the site through surrogate ears mounted in birdboxes ten feet high; and a work on board a decommissioned light-ship which invited viewers to read from an annotated copy of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim into a microphone, their voices altered through a remote reverberation chamber built in the bowels of the ship from existing structures.

 My performances explore the relationship between sound and music with rhythmical elements and drone, repetition and variation. I perform using modified turntables, altered and adapted records, field recordings pressed to dubplates and self-built electronics. I also make sounds using other objects on the turntables, using the stylus as a primitive pick-up. The sounds present on the records I use are less important to me than the sounds I can impose onto them. As such, a metal disk with a hole in the middle is as valid a sound source as a pristine vinyl recording.”