One sunny day we got contacted by Alan Dunn. Who was he? We didn’t care too much about biography, because our first interest was in the program he proposed. We said yes, because there is no reason what so ever to say no. We are pretty hard to find, and even harder to define. The selection procedure is already done in simply contacting us.

Here’s Alan’s words:
‘Before The sounds of ideas forming’ are sound sketches inspired by Guided by Voices, Jon Oswald’s Plunderphonics and ‘Revolution 9’. More details can be found here.

We hear The Birthday Party meets GBV, Springsteen singing ‘will tear us apart’ over backwards New Order, Scotland-Lithuania commentary, Melt Banana meets Rooney, ‘(can’) get satisfaction’ recorded under the Mersey, one-second compositions (yesyesno: Irvine Welsh meets Rod Stewart meets Public Enemy), Baghdad suicide bomb news reports, Butthole Surfers meets Hungarian folk, Neubauten meets Norah, Ricky Nelson singing ‘Gloomy Sunday’ (remixed), Velvet Underground meets Sinead O’Connor, slow Neil Diamond, Woolton bells, the artist’s dad emptying the living room with his guitar playing, Jello Biafra, Nico and Patti Smith on Jim Morrison, slow Brigitte Bardot, intro/outro, Jose Mourinho, Zappa on Jesus, Arts Council workers on a train, Kate Bush vs Halloween, Robert Wyatt & The Gonads’ revolution, Revolution #9and an exclusive 8-minute Philip Jeck remix.”

And here’s the Alan dunn biography with some words dedicated to the piece presented in this show.

“Alan Dunn studied at Glasgow School of Art and The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, graduating with a Masters’ Degree in 1991. Since then he has spent ten years working in a community art context, curated two international billboard projects and written for numerous journals.

Between 2001-7 Dunn was project manager, for the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology in Liverpool, on the Internet TV project ‘tenantspin’, developing creative content with elderly high-rise tenants along with Bill Drummond, Will Self, Margi Clarke, Wayne Hemingway, Alexei Sayle and Mike McCartney.

Between 2008-12 Dunn created the 10xCD opus ‘The sounds of ideas forming’ that explored a reworked history of sound art. This project was presented at Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles and the ICA in London. Dunn was short-listed for The Liverpool Art Prize in 2012 and is currently the art editor for the online journal ‘Stimulus Respond’.

Dunn has finished a PhD on sound art from 1913 to date. He published ten CDs across seven themes ‘silence, water, revolution, grey, catastrophe, background and numbers’ that fused content from archives, students and practitioners such as Douglas Gordon, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Yoko Ono, Lydia Lunch, The Residents, David Bowie and Brian Eno.”