David Dunn’s name immediately rings an important bell! I vividly remember the amazement I felt when I first heard his Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond on a CD from Nonsequitur Foundation’s series The Aerial (# 2, 1990), later released on Dunn’s solo CD Angels & Insects on Nonsequitur Foundation’s label What Next (1992). The piece was “an audio collage of digital field recordings of the sounds generated by microscopic aquatic insects, recorded in freshwater ponds around North America and Africa”.
Those years have rolled on steadily, but I still rate that Dunn piece as one of the most interesting contemporary works, and I vividly recall how I almost wasn’t allowed to play it on a radio show I hosted, because the technician thought the peculiar phase shifts in the music would blank out the sound for anyone listening in mono – but I was permitted the broadcast anyway, and no mono relic raised any trouble about it.

This is a more recent Pogus Productions release from 2002, but age hasn’t worn Dunn down. Dunn’s not done yet!

The first piece presented on this CD is from 1993; …with zitterings of flight released, with the subtitle n memoriam Kenneth Gaburo – and except the name in lower-case letters, according to the will of the composer. Late Kenneth Gaburo is an important name in modern music. A couple of his CDs have been presented at Sonoloco under the Innova label and here at Pogus.

Dunn on …with zitterings of flight released:

It - ...with zitterings of flight relased - emerges out of silence, a siren that starts to wobble and vibrate, before it dies away and a vibrating plane of rubbery matter shakes off any dust – until the alarm call reappears, only this time with attached electronic laughing gulls and lots of poles for the boats to attach their lines.
Matters get worse, and the music sounds like something out of the unreleased oeuvre of Rune Lindblad, and towards the end of the piece of another Swedish pioneer; Ralph Lundsten. I know it, I have those copies that Lindblad made for me many years ago on the shelf here at Sonoloco. Dunn’s piece especially reminds me of Lindblad’s Attack series, of which Attack III has been commercially released. In that series he used contact microphones to record the sound of flapping insect wings inside glass jars.

What I mean is that there is a raw, devilish, penetrating feel to this audio, and a sordid intensity that you cannot escape. It’s no joy ride to travel this piece; it’s an expedition!

You have these quite clean, shrill sounds stretching out, only to start vibrating and collapsing into themselves in downward glissandi, imploding into black hole audio…
It’s really very electronic, the way I haven’t heard electronic music in a while, and therefore quite inspiring, with those rough edges and that sparkling sharpness about it, that early science fiction space kind of music; fun and pleasurable. It’s a kind of incisive auditory torture that rinses your auditory meatuses from all residues of recent tendencies. You name it, we like it, as my friend Jon Ross in Dallas used to say whenever he got the chance…

Track 2 is Simulation 1: (Sonic Mirror).

Dunn:

Now this is hard to even try to describe, but it’s a hit! A real hit! I listen through earphones right now, and the placement of the sounds is peculiar, sort of up to the left and down towards the right. The sounds are incredibly clear, bell-like and rubber-like and water-like and bird-like. Man, I am at loss of words here. It’s so incredibly complex and tight, yet simultaneously dangerously beautiful and transparent. To understand a statement like that you’d have to listen.

Many of the sounds to the upper left (later shifting position) are embellished, glaring spheres out of Stockhausen musician Antonio Pérez Abellán’s synthesizer, like elves’ bells and gluey resin off of coniferous trees, while the sounds at lower right are shadowy reflections of those Stockhausen synthesizer sounds, with the addition of formless, gray or white noise sounds – and a humming engine provides some ground level audio too, if it’s not a purring cat rolled up in its basket. I’m amazed by this piece. I will play this sucker many times, praise be! I so seldom get surprised, since I hear so much audio, but Dunn has done it again. Who done it? Dunn’s done it! It’s new stuff! Listen up!

What I can’t figure out is how the hell he could program the sounds to appear in these strange positions in space, since I hear this without using a surround system. Absolutely magnificent!
Another astonishing quality of this piece is the conversational property of its sounds. The darn sounds are talking back at each other in the most persuasive manner, using unheard-of morphemes of brilliant timbres. Holy smoke, Mr. Man!

Number 3 is simply entitled Wildflowers.

Dunn:

Tiny, tiny mouse electronics appear at first far away at left, but more charged mice show up here and there, moving hither and thither, penetrating your poor old hear-wares, looking around in your curving auditory meatuses, and it’s sometimes like testing your hearing at a hearing-lab at the local hospital – but more fun.
Besides fun, this is really good stuff, startling mice electroacoustics, again (I think I said something before to the same effect) reminding me of some artistic aspects inherent in painter and chemist and electronic music pioneer Rune Lindblad’s oeuvre. It’s a darn and damn and right-on audio, scaring the crows way off, and gluing me and myself to an erect and attentive listening posture at my favorite angle and distance vis-à-vis them mighty speakers!

Further into the piece mice give way, somewhat and somehow, to rougher electronic creatures, dressed in hum and static and wheezing opportunities of white and gray noise, at times tightening and condensing into elastic and immensely strong strands of harshness.

This is like someone – Dunn, that is! – pregnant with all these decades of electronic experience, turning back to by-gone days, picking up somewhere in the 1960s or early 1970s, bent on having some really good fun with the gear of those days; the gear of those days handled by someone – Dunn again! – who has returned from the future to really show off! Man, these borderline mice are a pleasing menace to one and all! It hurts so good!

The last piece, number 4, is Ennoia 2.

David Dunn:

Like a bellish fairytale Ennoia emerges through the Fern at Fern Hill, the Welsh poet hung-over but brilliant in the pasture, as the elasticity of last night’s glorious intoxication resolves itself in innumerable downward glissandi that never stops but never reaches a bottom, like the falling of ancient spaceships through deep angles of nameless, theoretical geometries.

The thought curves into itself in a screwing motion, a spiral boring ever deeper down the narrowing lanes of nerve-paths, screeching down subcortical switchyards of connective tissue, loosing itself in the slow vibrations of the lower chakras, a retro-path of spirit into matter, a flesh-and-humus retreat, way, way down into the glaring jitter of atomic structures at the core of mineral kingdoms, praise be!