Description
DOGS LIGHT is a duo recording from Australian guitarist and sound artist Dave Brown and Polish drummer and percussionist Adam Golebiewski.
“DOGS LIGHT” is a collection of 8 improvised pieces that at the same time feel very cinematic and alive. It’s a perfect soundtrack to an abstract noir movie that never existed. Rich with surprising tonal interplays, almost ambient-like, it projects a multitude of black and white images that keep morphing as the sounds evolve through time.
“Adam and I had not met before his visit to Melbourne and I hadn’t been familiar with his work beforehand, but he had been collaborating with My Disco on another project immediately before we met,” Brown recalls. “Rohan Rebeiro, from that group, had suggested that we get together, so a gig at Melbourne’s regular improvisational night ’Make It Up Club’ was organised. This was a trio with another local Melbourne saxophonist, Scott McConnachie. Almost instantaneously, it laid the foundation for performance and listening rapport between Adam and I, a mix of Adam’s textural, gestural and performative percussions and my off-kilter melodies and electronic transformations of the semi-acoustic guitar,” he adds.
“The most memorable thing was a feeling of natural order and a sort of even proportions of activities related to our recording session, not just the recording itself but also preparations, breaks, a dinner, playing music, then having coffee. It seemed like a very natural process, quite similar to how morning turns into day and then day turns into night. To put it simply: human relations translated into music in a very natural way,” Golebiewski explains.
“After the Make It Up Club performance had tweaked our interest, and after a tour of the hidden bowels of an old convent, where we walked amongst aged infrastructure and collected Adam’s borrowed drum kit, we set ourselves up in my back room and asked my old trombone playing colleague and master sound engineer, James Wilkinson to bring over his portable recording gear,” Brown continues. “Then we spent an afternoon responding to each other’s various approaches to improvisation, learning and listening all the while. Our musics ebbed and flowed, we found common ground, and odd diversions, all the while our sounds coalesced on a meandering journey to create this album.”
There was no pre-planned concept before they pressed the record button. However, Golebiewski admits that their music has a sort of compositional character but it is strictly improvised and spontaneous. “Post recording there was quite a bit of editing, firstly with James and I on board; then a mixing process which led to an open, atmospheric and almost ‘New Age’ like result with minimal post-production intervention. Then, a subsequent, more involved mixing stage, at Adam’s suggestion, beefed everything up and resulted in Adam’s percussive contributions being way more present and in your face, belying the simple two microphone technique his drums were recorded with. James W’s role in this aural enhancement can’t be understated. Lastly; we undertook a three way interchange, with some back and forth, making decisions about what worked, and in which sequence, this all drew us to the final version of DOGS LIGHT,” Brown concludes.
