Artists
Album Info
Release Date: 2024-11-07Label: Household Ink Records
In 1981, Richard “Dick” Dunlap, the multi-idiom, multi-adventurous musician/pianist, visual artist, sound artist and conceptualist, took charge of transforming the McCormick Gallery of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Visitors were welcomed into to the performance space creation known as Intersphere. The darkened gallery was illuminated by Dunlap’s linear projections on the walls, with an arrangement of tube-based instruments of his devising in one corner, and a baby grand piano in another.In this meditative atmosphere, visitors were treated to ambient envelopment but also musical performances—featuring a daily afternoon ritual in which, at 3 p.m., Dunlap would freely improvise on piano. Once buried in a piano revery, Dunlap spanned areas of jazz, new music/minimalist turf, classical moves and modes of abstraction, woven into a poetic tapestry. Echoes of free-ranging solo work by Keith Jarrett and Paul Bley could be detected, but the fruits are ultimately and uniquely Dunlap-ian.
As Dunlap wrote, in a forward to an accompanying publication for the show: “This material represents a part of the process of the work coming together and my thinking as the work continues to develop.” That description aptly describes the spontaneous and mutating form of the music itself, as it develops before our ears.
Fast forward 40+ years, and a recording of one such afternoon performance/invention, cleanly mastered by renowned new music engineer Scott Fraser, is finally being released into public earspace and digital circulation by Household Ink Records. This music stands the test of time and exceeds expectations, and deserves to be heard.
Also included in the release is the transfixing contemplative 17-minute piece Fandance, for “electric fan, sound tubes and piano harp” and recorded in Dunlap’s studio in 1984, performed as an echo of the setup in the transformed 1981 gallery space.
About Richard Dunlap:
Intermedia artist Richard Dunlap was born in Seattle in 1939 and received an MFA in painting at the University of Washington in 1968. He taught in the Art Studio Department at UCSB from 1969 to 1977. Dunlap began performing visual/sound works early in the 1970s and has appeared in New York, Boston, Berlin, Stockholm, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In his musical life, he has shared stages and developed alliances with Ralph Towner, David Friesen and Mal Waldron.
He was featured in a LIFE magazine story on sound artists. He has participated in New Music America festivals in San Francisco and Hartford. In Santa Barbara, Dunlap participated in the PULSE II exhibition at UCSB and the FLUXUS and Summer Nocturne exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He has received grants and awards including a Creative Arts Fellowship from the University of California, from the Bloom, W.M. Keck and Esperia Foundations, a Tiffany Award in Painting for music compositions from the Santa Barbara Arts Fund. Dunlap released his self-reliant electro-acoustic album project Ode to the Sistrum in 1999.
He was also a critical part of the “hopelessly eclectic” Santa Barbara band Headless Household for 36 years, resulting in many live gigs and concerts, and nine feature-length albums on the Household Ink label.