Installation with found materials, green tarpaulin, electrical components, 2015
Dogtanion - The Infinite Shallows
The Infinite Shallows is an hour long, 17 track mixtape I made. It contains a selection of songs I made over the past two or so years. I am very proud of it, and happy to have the music off my hard drive and in the world (which, I guess, is just loads more hard drives, but that's fine by me).
The title is from a half-finished lecture about objects, inauthenticity and performed being. Maybe one day I'll finish writing the lecture but for now it can just be the title for this. The images used for the videos are all designs for green screen backgrounds I made for my recent film work Abjection, Transcendence, Desire & Disgust (2015).
The songs were written through a period of uncertainty and strange strangeness where at moments I thought London might chew me down into mush and excrete me out onto the pavement. Some of the songs are about the same person, a lot of them aren't about people.
One of my favourite songs on the mixtape is Neutral Walls which features Dan Blackett from Landshapes on vocals and drums. That song seems to be about Ikea and gentrification but it's hard to say.
The tracks are a mixture of instrumentals, songs written on guitar, songs written over beats, songs written for other people that they never ended up using. (I have a version of Silent Conversation with Shola Ama's vocals. It's good. We also did a demo using Guitar K3 (instrumental) which never turned into anything.)
It didn't happen, the being chewed into mush and excreted onto the pavement thing. I just carried on being a generally vertical human object and new problems took over from the old ones,
I wanted it to be a full length mixtape, with no track divides because I really liked the ARCA &&& mixtape and often ended up listening to the whole thing when it came on my phone. I'm not a conservative. I don't really care about the disappearance of the album format, but I do like having the tyranny of choice removed for an hour or so occasionally. It's useful to not have to choose what you're listening to every now and again.
If you download the mixtape then I hope you listen to it on night buses, on train journeys to places you've never been and on long unnerving walks back home after being awake all night.
You can download the whole thing from http://bit.ly/TheInfiniteShallows
Thanks for listening.