Browse by Artist: DUNN, DAVID

Artist:	DUNN, DAVID
Title:	Autonomous and Dynamical Systems
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80660CD

"A relentless explorer, composer, performer and theorist, David Dunn (b. 1953) uses electro-acoustic resources, voice, non-human living systems, as well as traditional instruments. A creator of text-sound compositions, environmental installations, and works for radio and video, he has also written and published extensively. Underlying all his work is a common regard for music as a communicative source with a living world. Growing up in San Diego in the '60s and '70s, he encountered people like Harry Partch and Kenneth Gaburo. He worked with Partch for about five years, and continued to be in his ensemble for a decade after his death. His association with Gaburo was even longer, and lasted until Gaburo's death in the early 1990s. This CD features four new compositions, all for electronic sound makers of one sort or another, and all four reveal his innate musicality. These are works that live between the arts and the sciences, coming from his lifelong involvement with interdisciplinary ideas. 'Lorenz' (2005) is a collaboration between Dunn and chaos scientist James Crutchfield. In 'Nine Strange Attractors' (2006), Dunn guides us through a whole zoo of chaotic attractions. Each one has different behavior, and each produces a different sound world. This is a work that is not simply about playing with new mathematical toys -- it's a work that exemplifies the structure of those toys, placing human, computer, and sound-making machine into a feedback loop that embodies the essential characteristics of that new science (chaos), and then lets us live within it for an extended period of time. 'Gradients' (1999) is a work Dunn made with a freeware graphics-to-sound conversion program. In this program, graphic lines become sounding sines, each single pixel-wide line being realized as one sounding pure electronic sine wave."

Artist:	DUNN, DAVID
Title:	Four Electroacoustic Compositions
Label:	POGUS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	POGUS 21026

"'...with zitterings of flight released,' (in memoriam Kenneth Gaburo) was composed over an intense and continuous five-day period (including nights). While working on the piece I had in mind various images and metaphors for the drama of the spirit's separation from the body as described by a variety of shamanic and spiritual traditions. It is a memorial for my teacher Kenneth Gaburo. Simu760342102625lation 1: (Sonic Mirror) was an attempt to model a utopian project yet to be built. The original concept was conceived as a stationary cybernetic sound sculpture capable of processing acoustic data within an outdoor environment. Eventually the sculpture might function as an autonomous system structurally coupled to its surrounding environment in a manner that might allow for 'learning' between components. This initial modeling was generated from a soundscape recording of the Cuyamaca Mountains of California. Wildflowers is a bit of nostalgia for the 20th century composer's search for the unique sonic and expressive attributes of electronic technology, an ideal mostly out of fashion. I wanted to compose a reclamation of the sounds of circuitry as material substance, those 'sci-fi' clichés and glissandi now banished to the video game parlors. Ennoia 2 is a computer-generated composition that explores the time-domain synthesis algorithms created by Arun Chandra's Wigout program. These algorithms generate continuously changing waveforms with unique structural behaviors over time. The resulting sounds have continuously changing interdependent parameters that are controlled by very few variables."

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