In the third person:
David Cunningham is a record producer and musician who also makes
installation works based on real-time exploration of acoustics. His first significant
commercial success came with The Flying Lizards' single 'Money', an
international hit in 1979. Over
the years he has worked with with an eclectic range of people and
music, from pop groups (This Heat, Martin Creed) to improvisation (David Toop,
Steve Beresford) to Michael Nyman's music for Peter Greenaway's films
and work with Ute Lemper and others. The installation works have inhabited the 11th Biennale of Sydney, Tate Britain, ICC Tokyo,
Ikon Birmingham and most recently Carter Presents, London.
There is more at
David Cunningham website
In the first person:
I'm interested in what happens when time, sound and space are
explored together. Inseparable elements, but formal European
thought does not really seem to acknowledge this - acoustics as a
science dates from Helmholtz in the 1880s and the ability to
record sound dates from sometime similar. (In fact the two are
closely tied - recordings enabled the ephemeral to be formally
analysed rather than guessed at). As this technology became
accessible through the 20th century I was
fascinated by the sonic vocabulary enabled by the reel-to-reel tape recorder and its successor
technology - tools that could manipulate and shape sound like
nothing else. Most records I intuitively love involve
this sort of treatment - from Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel to The
Ronettes to Terry Riley to Donna Summer's I Feel Love and so many more.
The common thread is that this stuff is not a series of meaningless
funny noises - it is structured and shaped by acoustic factors (real
and artificial). Music that could not have happened any other way.
And I would assume that these structures and vocabularies shift our
consciousness as listeners, in some part a contribution to the
contemporary acceptance of noise and repetition
throughout pop music and elsewhere.
Recorded sound has only become commonplace within the last century so
biologically it's something new for us as a species. When I'm having
a bath I often feel strangely privileged that I can listen to music
on the radio - a century ago I would have had to have a bigger
bathroom and enough money to hire a string quartet.
Listening to something that is not there is a strange thing to do.
