David Dunn – Music, Language and Environment. Environmental Sound Works 1973 – 1985 2CD

The six works represented on these two compact discs might be heard as
historical artefacts in the sense that they exist as documentation of
performed events that are not repeatable in the same way that notated
musical works generally are. However, while they involved
improvisational elements, they are not to be regarded as improvisations
since they were rigorously composed for the environmental circumstances
in which they took place. They represent an attempt to articulate an
aesthetic of environmental interactivity through sound-making, which
occupied me over a fifteen year period. During that time I generated a
diverse body of work from which these six examples have been chosen in
order to illustrate the range of those activities. All of these works
share the characteristic of having been outdoor performances. They also
demonstrate a purposeful transition that my investigations pursued over
those fifteen years: a progressive expansion of context, moving from my
interactions with a single member of another species toward interactions
with complex environments. Foremost in these experiments was a concern
for sound as a means to explore the emergent intelligence of non-human
living systems. My interest was in regarding the complex web of
environmental sound-making as evidence of complex-minded systems – a way of experiencing what Gregory Bateson has called “the integrated fabric of mind that envelopes us.”

These recordings were often made under less-than-ideal technical
circumstances. The listener must tolerate a wide range of unusual
acoustic spaces and an even greater range of technical quality. I
recommend that listeners adjust their audio expectations to accommodate
these eccentric demands through understanding that the non-studio
production values were intentional and inseparable from the reality of
the art.

– David Dunn