DAVID BLOOR
David Bloor is an artist and musician interested in how people respond to limitations, each other and their environment. His work includes installations, performance and recordings under the name 'Dirch Blewn'. He works with kinetic sculpture, analog assemblage, modular synthesisers and a self-built, 63 channel, 8-bit, surround-sound, off-grid recording studio which formed the basis of '24hr Community Composition' which was in residence at Sanctuary Lab in the Galloway Forest in 2017.
He joined APT as a graduate studio award winner and co-curated the APT summer exhibition Touchstone in 2017.
Besides his performance and sculptural work, he has produced many albums, issued by labels such as Linear Obsessional from London and Game of Life from Athens. In 2018, the album Care Work was released by Soft Error, UK. Much of his recorded work is available on bandcamp.com or through his website dirchblewn.
In 2017, reflecting on the visual and the auditory experience, David Bloor wrote:
”Sound is a slippery thing, I’ve often felt the auditory is not as ordered as the visual, although our ears are as important as our eyes. Being around predominantly visual artists has informed my practice greatly during this year. Placing sound related objects within the context of a gallery can be a challenge but I feel a strong visual element can inform the audience even if the sound is abstract.
Sound spilling out, it’s like hanging a wet painting on a wall, the canvas cannot contain it however the canvas remains our initial focus. The origin of action can be abstract, ideas, thoughts, feelings and senses but we are always pulled back to the canvas and the paint on its surface… Apply a layer, wait until dry, apply a layer, disrupt. Layer upon layer, stand back, make tea, drink tea, obliterate. Visual art depends on light, light reveals, reflects and creates movement, the paint dries but the work remains fluid. Sound is the same, it moves and changes as it interacts with surface, they both spill out like ideas.”
Video by Cash Aspeek, April 2020. Snail emerging sound @dirchblewn
From a review of Care Work 2018 by the writer Ed Pinsent on thesoundprojector.com entitled Bloor’s Universal Robots:
Dirch Blewn’s cassette is not only more interesting and deep than a project lecture, but it’s also more fun to listen to. I would say that about most art music, but I’m especially glad of it today, at a time when the August sun has forgotten how to shine once again and leaves us with grey skies and a lethargic mood. .. Cogs or other machinery may whirr and buzz; at times, the overall combination of droning machine and room-ambience (if captured successfully) creates a hypnotic mood that could entrance millions, if heard from the right angle. Yet it’s also fragile; the slightest twitch and you will snap out of the trance.
For more information please visit: dirchblewn.com. For live performances visit dirchblewn.com/performance
LINKS
glassreservoir.com Examining the boundaries between electronic and acoustic sound
A previous patch on Ciat Lonbarde Plumbutter recorded through bone transducers connected to an old zither… May 2020
Recent work is heavily featured on The Whalebone Box, a full length feature film by Andrew Kötting, soon to be released in cinemas (when we’re allowed out).
Much of his work can be found on Youtube including this track Dispersal Arrangement, from forthcoming album on glassreservoir.com
Capillary Tissues, Deptford X 2019. With Lia Mazzari and Charlotte Law. Costumes by Victoria Rance
Care Work, 2019 In performance.
Linear Obsessional - A duo with Lia Mazzari at The Dirty South, February 2020
Image: Sound Installation and Making 2018
Image: Album cover of The One Who Lives in Trees, 2015
Image: Sound Installation and Making 2018
Image: Album cover of Axis, 2016 on the Linear Obsessional label