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Last Updated:
May 13th, 2008 - 11:39:01 |
Dosh
The Song Is Never The Same
Martin Dosh is the vibrant human heart in a triangulation of musical machinery. Surrounded, as he is often described, or rather immersed in the sounds of his keyboard, sequencer, pedals, synthesizers, sampler and drum kit, he swivels around on his stool to tend and percolate each new rising melody and coax a new layer from a different component, to compose a swath of looped samples with his own live instrumentation.
While we’re all asleep, Martin Dosh is hard at work. Painstakingly so, hunched on a chair in his basement/studio in his Minneapolis home, connecting wires snaked through dirty laundry piles and tipping over fragile towers of tapes of random melodies, hooks, drones, bleeps and blurts from either his own hands or his many collaborators, including Andrew Bird and My Morning Jacket.
In creating his epic (but still tight and poppy) instrumental tunes, he utilizes a method much like some sort of preternaturally meticulous, blindfolded soldier in a windowless room assembling, disassembling and reassembling some massive and winding amorphous creature of sound. Trusting in his procedure of taking chopped up recordings and looping them together — as he puts it — blurring the line such that he essentially records it before he "composes" it. Wolves And Wishes (out now) is his fourth LP for the Anticon label.
He describes working with collaborators like Bonnie Prince Billy: “They’re reacting to the piece of music and I’m reacting to their reaction by finding the things that I like.” Because of such intricately layered compositions, he sometimes ends up, “biting off more than I can chew, when I try to transition it [live], but my live band now consists of me and Mike Lewis (from Minneapolis band Happy Apples), so it’s a little bit easier to actually pull off the other stuff.
“Every time we set up it’s an adventure,” said the self-taught musician, who's referred to as an “explorative” artist. “I could go the route of having a band and just trying to recreate the music the way it is, but part of the whole process of it is that it’s really fun for me and I think people see me enjoying what I’m doing.
“I definitely feel that music is stronger than words,” he said of instrumental music. “I really love the sound of the human voice, but I would need to feel so strongly about something to actually sing it. I do have something to say, but without the words there, what I’m saying can possibly mean more to more people.”
His albums have always dabbled in measured fits of jazz, prog-rock, psychedelic-dream pop, techno and even a bit of hip-hop but each had its own trappings or apprehensions. Wolves lets loose with complete confidence and fearless experimentation. Dosh describes it, comparing it to 2006’s The Lost Take, as “the patient older brother.” He adds that, with Wolves, going back to Martin Dosh as the diligent darkroom basement sound searcher, “It took me longer to see the light.” His weary mumble surmises cryptically, captivatingly, still distinguishing his latest, “With The Lost Take, there’s less things that are … hidden.” Since he is constantly combining new loops and because of his highly unconventional creation process, Dosh may very well have the next album recorded — if not fully composed yet, “piecing together the melody … out of all this melody.” | RDW
Dosh • 5/18 • The Pike Room
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