Graham Dunning has been utilising stacks of turntables, electric motors, automatic contraptions, and found objects to create music since at least 2008. However, the time of the London-based musician’s concept of mechanical techno might only now be truly upon us. As recent articles and social media chatter suggest, the pixel-born members of Gen Z are increasingly looking to exit digital hellscapes, rediscovering physical interfaces and material artefacts in the hope of anchoring themselves in reality. Dunning’s stupendously imperfect dance cuts and analogue subversions of electronic music, which once fought so hard to be digitised, might show a way out.
Opening Dunning’s new album Quern, ‘Suboptimal Beats’ stumbles languidly, supported on each side by wobbly bass lines and reverb-laden clatter. The track could be classified under minimal techno, in the broadest sense. Idiosyncratic but not unfamiliar, it’s the sort of IDM-infected and borderline deconstructed thing you might find on Sheffield’s Central Processing Unit label (see Noumen’s Altum, for example). Yet, as the staggered rhythm stops and starts, stops and starts, the leading edge’s sharp cliff resembles more and more the capricious stutter of a skipping record player, while the occasional ping of a monosynth note begins to feel suspiciously unbalanced. Soon, these imperfections and sense of elasticity take over the cut. In place of bit-perfect precision, we find sounds rippling in time and space.
The malleability and swaying polyrhythms in Dunning’s music evoke highly aestheticised experimental electronics such as those of Bruno Silva’s projects Serpente and Ondness. His use of record decks, meanwhile, often had him categorised alongside noise and free improv turntablists like Mariam Rezaei and Vic Shen. Dunning’s world-building methodology, however, arrives from a different direction altogether, veering closer to the approach of sound artist Simon Whetham, improviser Jean-Philippe Gross, and composer Jasna Veličković, who craft sonic worlds from the broken loops of electronic detritus, actuators, induction fields, and electromagnetic interference.
But where his peers take their gadgets onto abstract excursions, Dunning digs out bangers from basement dancefloors, inspired by 90s techno, hiphop, and EBM. On ‘Chronic Data Poisoning’, he makes a detour into acid braindance. Here, chewed-up and spit-out 8-bit pulses engage in a tug of war with irregular rhythms. ‘Wandering Nerve’ embraces dub, shaping static and crackle into distinct lines, surrounded by a stomp of kicks and reverberating skanks. Meanwhile, the more delirious, high on life ravers ‘Tentacle Motion Study’ and ‘Perpetuum Mobile’ push aside any notions of machinic or cerebral limitations in Dunning’s expression – the album is built atop research conducted for his PhD – by revealing his warmer, even euphoric side, with wild hi-hats, synth pads, and sumptuous background textures growing into fuzzy house – like something off of Jamal Moss’s Hieroglyphic Being albums.
Across the album, Dunning remains a trickster unburdened by particular styles or traditions. ‘Flatness’ is straight up four-to-the-floor techno, no bullshit. ‘Graveturner’ goes Global South, concocting a heady, Principe-esque hybrid of baile funk, kuduro and footwork: angular beats haunted by square waves, all of them staggering and bending in slow-mo. ‘Soil Robot’ drops into bass and garage, complete with a too cool for school attitude. Its menacing exterior is only eclipsed by the hard-hitting, mean polyrhythms of ‘Grabber Arm Part 1 (Hydraulic)’ and ‘Grabber Arm Part 2 (Legacy Hand)’.
Meanwhile, ‘Discoid Rotary Quern’ closes the album with a repetitive bassline and distorted percussion that suggest an utterly deranged take on Mr Oizo’s ‘Flat Beat’. Here, as elsewhere on the album, Dunning betrays his noise rock roots (check out Blood Moon). Mirroring the intensity found in the music of Ren Schofield’s Container and Jamie Roberts’s Blawan, this punk sensibility lends Dunning’s work a gritty, kinetic edge.
Recordings of Dunning’s live sets can be found on YouTube, but past works reveal very little as to which contraptions were used to make the tracks on Quern. This cryptic character, in fact, makes home listening such a blast. Each spin reveals a new clue, even though the music really longs to be heard on a club’s floor.
