David Cunningham profile picture

David Cunningham

dcpiano

About Me

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.

My Interests

Music:

Member Since: 2/17/2007
Band Website: stalk.net/piano/dcbio.htm
Record Label: piano
Type of Label: Indie