Live Duo and Live Streaming with Graham Dunning
A live laboratory of tape loops, crackle, iridescence and decay. Projecting textures, synths, and experiments with archives - including home-made instruments, camping torches and specimen contraptions. Some favourite feedback comments on the set: "Jeff Goldblum at the fly disco" / "Monet's water garden glitching" / "Lament of the lost Clanger" / "Hello beetle my old friend" / "Stone tape era sci-fi" / "This is MTV for the bacterium”. WATCH ONLINE: 11th April - Live for I Am An Instrument Panopticon (watch video here) / 9th May - Live for Further_In Broken20 Festival (watch video here) / 22nd May - Live for The Old Police House (TOPH Housebound) / 16th July - Live for SonitusLive (watch video here)
As a duo, Amy Cutler and Graham Dunning performed live improvisations with an evolving set which includes deadly nightshade “film soup”, greenhouse field-recordings after dark, visuals with toy goo (aka “glow in the dark ectoplasm”), tape hiss, Dunning’s invented instruments, such as the Featherphone, and the B-movie sounds achieved from just a bow on a pinecone. The collaboration was based on the artists’ shared sense of tinkering.
The live set was an outgrowth from the daily collaboration of recorded films and sound pieces, PILOTS, online here. PILOTS were named after the pilot fish, the spiny-finned jackfish said to precede the shark, but also pilot holes, pilot lights, and the pilot episode or experimental broadcast. PILOTS are a series of lock-down windowsill experiments, B-roll jingles/idents, mudlarks, and petridish horizons. Like scratches or rushes, they are micro-improvisations which test out environments. Inspired by early hand-cranked cinema specimens, they often use household objects, freezer ice, phosphorescence, reading lights, and plant matter. They also feature Cutler’s collections of magic lantern and 35mm slides from private and public archives and botanical collections of the 1940s-1970s, turned into murky re-interpretations of hothouse morality tales. As a live performance the set was different each time, but evolved to include plant spores, archival footage, safety diagrams, glitchy swamps, home-made torches, lullaby machines, test tubes, uncertain species, and creepy pastorals of the public domain. The genre appears to be science fiction.
