David Dunn – Music, Language, And Environment

The six works represented on these two compact discs might be heard as historical artefacts in the sense that they exist as documentation of performed events that are not repeatable in the same way that notated musical works generally are. However, while they involved improvisational elements, they are not to be regarded as improvisations since they were rigorously composed for the environmental circumstances in which they took place. They represent an attempt to articulate an aesthetic of environmental interactivity through sound-making, which occupied me over a fifteen year period. During that time I generated a diverse body of work from which these six examples have been chosen in order to illustrate the range of those activities. All of these works share the characteristic of having been outdoor performances. They also demonstrate a purposeful transition that my investigations pursued over those fifteen years: a progressive expansion of context, moving from my interactions with a single member of another species toward interactions with complex environments. Foremost in these experiments was a concern for sound as a means to explore the emergent intelligence of non-human living systems. My interest was in regarding the complex web of environmental sound-making as evidence of complex

- David Dunn