#douglas dunn

[girlwithlandscape]

[bodyalive]

Steve jumping over David Gordon in Grand Union, Walker Art Center. Behind him are Douglas Dunn, Trisha Brown (mostly hidden), Nancy Lewis and Barbara Dilley

* * * *

When writing this "In Memoriam" on Steve Paxton, it was hard not to be overwhelmed with his myriad brilliant activities and the force of his intellectual curiosity. I focused on the questions he asked: Where does movement come from? What does our spine do in spherical space? Does an idea start with a feeling? How can we dance mutually, against hierarchies? His curiosity helped to create three major collectives: Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union, and Contact Improvisation. Dance Magazine posted the short version here: Steve Paxton's burning questions, my "In Memoriam" is posted at https://www.dancemagazine.com/steve-paxton-obituary/ My longer version is at https://wendyperron.com/steve-paxton-1939-1924-a-life-of-burning-questions/

[Wendy Perron]

[42168]

Douglas Dunn, "The Kaleidoscope" from Elegies (1985)

[thequietabsolute]

I shall observe the moods of the great sky, The flight of herons, the coming into leaf of birches And the religious glow on ancient waves

Douglas Dunn; from Elegies (1985.)

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

Douglas Dunn ~ Cognitive Disorders

[aphe-blog]

Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because... To climb these stairs again, bearing a tray... What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why... Busy old fool, unruly sun, For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love.

[dustedmagazine]

The Body — I’ve Seen All I Need to See (Thrill Jockey)

Photo by Zachary Harrell Jones

I've Seen All I Need To See by the body

The last minutes of the Body’s previous (and excellent) LP I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer (2018) were dominated by a man’s baritone voice, reciting a long, despairing passage from Bohumil Hrabal’s Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka (1998). That voice is back, ominously intoning at the outset of the Body’s new record I’ve Seen All I Need to See, and things haven’t gotten much happier. Still in recitation mode, the voice now gives a profound and pained performance of Douglas Dunn’s poem “The Kaleidoscope” (1985), taken from the Scottish poet’s widely admired cycle of elegies for his dead wife. The presence of the voice and its moody readings of literary language draw the records together, and also suggest the increasingly highbrow ambitions for the way the Body wants its music to be received. It’s a risky move. Metal isn’t famous for its openness to intellectualism of this conspicuous a sort. But any objections to the band’s more erudite gestures won’t matter much. The music insists.

Of course, not everyone who hears I’ve Seen All I Need to See will hear music. The Body’s records have always been shot through with all kinds of upsetting and disorienting noise. Especially since All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood (2010), Chip King and Lee Buford have elaborated on their harsh and austere doom metal songs with samples, synths and drum machines, voices in operatic chorale or cry (sometimes the Assembly of Light Choir, sometimes Kristin Hayter’s singular singing) and other unidentifiable sources of drone and feedback and harsh noise. Over the past five years, Buford and King have spent more time with buttons, knobs and effect boxes than with trap sets and guitars. This new LP is less replete with synth tones, clips of political radicals fomenting revolutionary violence or the sort of clamor associated with power electronics. But that relatively stripped-down quality doesn’t signal anything like a back-to-basics metal record. If anything, the Body has become even more rigorously interested in the mechanics of musical production. The studio itself seems to function as an instrument on I’ve Seen All I Need to See. And that progression of interest has issued in disturbing, thrilling sounds.  

The aptly titled “Eschatological Imperative” is typical of the record’s contents. There is a simple beat, which is sonically treated and expanded to a gargantuan degree of resonance; there are layers of thrum that sometimes evoke the absurdly deep bass of a trap mixtape; there is King’s unearthly jabbering; eventually Buford relentlessly attacks a crash cymbal. All of those elements are fattened and amplified. The song seeks the point at which the sounds cease to cohere as legible sounds, and then it backs off just a bit. You can still tell that a drum is a drum, that a voice is a voice—but the massiveness and distortion threaten to convert the forms into something formless. Throughout the record, the Body finds the point of greatest intensity and lingers there, never quite letting the compositions degrade into complete cacophony, but never fully abandoning the sense that they are just about to do so.  

The results are deafening, oppressive. You may find yourself nostalgic for simpler times, when the band made songs like “Untitled,” which were loud and unpleasant but made a fair amount of sense as songs. According to the Body, I’ve Seen All I Need to See is an exploration of “micro-tonalities,” some of which were produced by “feeding the console back on itself.” This reviewer lacks the theoretical and technical languages to parse the success of the venture in those terms. It all sounds very high-minded (and provokingly High Modernist). But again: the music insists. There may be an idea at the center of the record, but it’s overwhelmed by the sheer visceral quality of the songs. You listen and your guts shake. The whole room seems to shake. One is reminded of a clause the Body have quoted from Hrabal’s foreboding writing: “my whole room hurts.” If that’s akin to the affect the Body are seeking, they have succeeded.  

Jonathan Shaw

[yes-lukewinter]

It is summer, and we are in a house That is not ours, sitting at a table Enjoying minutes of a rented silence, The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lull To sleep the under-tens and invalids, The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass, The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect. Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better Happiness than this, not much to show for love But how we are, and how this evening is, Unpeopled, silent, and where we are alive In a domestic love, seemingly alone, All other lives worn down to trees and sunlight, Looking forward to a visit from the cat.

– Douglas Dunn, Modern Love