David Cunningham

In the third person:



David Cunningham is a record producer and musician who 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, Carter Presents, London and most recently 1M3, Lausanne.



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.