Artist: dadala
Album: recycles
Tags: collage, dada, experimental, drone,
WTF Qualities: Mixing of many materials from different recordings and different times, manipulation through tape mixed with improvisation and musique concrete composition
Year: 2004
Country:
Link: http://www.peripheralmusic.org/rdunlap/
"Kaleidescopic dadaist collage"
The multifaceted world of dadala centers around RDunlap (R for Richard) who works in consort with a plethora of musical minds to create a kind of collage remix modern day digital musique concrete. The results are broad, diverse, expansive, far-reaching, and yet a quality of precision and an aesthetic of cohesion keeps the music rotating within a gravitational swirl. The arms of the vortex are glinting with colors and debris and the detritus of the eternal void.
Dada that funny anti-art ism which had its day almost 100 years ago, where did it go, what's it doing these days, where does it hang out, what kind of cigars does it smoke? Since the spirit of what we call dada historically relates to an artistic reaction to the first world war, it's only really a funny word, and its relevance ties into a broader realm of pushing the bounds and breaking the rules and norms of what art is and should be. We could call this the avant-garde, but even that sounds too much like an official form or movement; or we could call it progress, or experimentation, or challenging our sensibilities, or simply the creative spirit. We don't need to call it anything, only to recognize it, and that's how I see it relating to dadala. Sound collage is the medium. It lies outside of the established camps of musical modes, on the fringes. It lives by its own fragmented logic into which the influences of modern music seep. In the polygonal surfaces of the kaleidoscope lens are aspects of jazz, neoclassical chamber, urban beats, glitch electronic, folk, ambient, drone, and various textures of noises and musical utterances.
Source material, as far as I can tell, and from reading what I could find about dadala's constructional process, is largely from a collective of musicians in the dadala circle who have recorded various composed or improvised material, anywhere from 25 years ago to the present. These source recordings are layered and spliced with field recordings, other improvisers, or further layers of composed material. The result is simultaneously organic and synthetic.
Dadala's first album from 2004 contains the essence of this concept and is aptly titled "recycles." The bed of textures in this album and the alternate realities they convey, while separated into tracks and spread out over about an hour, seem to intertwine and revolve around one another. Themes appear and resurface - wailing echoes of a sax, tribal percussion, deep ambient dark rumblings, non-rhythmical slicing and cut electronic sounds, cold synth sounds, bell-like tones, sped up and reversed sounds, abstract beats, and so on. Occasionally other natural sounds pop up. At other moments throughout the album I imagine the sounds of machinery. A swirl of colors.
Subsequent albums add further dimensions to the nebulous system, and now it seems the project has mutated into a full fledged ensemble. This is very exciting, as I'd love to hear this music performed in live. The dynamic of real time interaction could launch this music into new unseen territory. We look forward to the next dadala release.
If you'd like to hear the music, there's lots of it available for download from the internet archives. Please go to the above link to find it all.
- Jeemobon
