Nick Dunston is an acoustic and electroacoustic composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist. Called an “indispensable player on the New York avant-garde” (New York Times), his performances have spanned a variety of venues and festivals across North America and Europe. His work explores notions of ancestral memory, materiality, embodiment, decolonization, and Afro-surrealism.
You have a complex body of work under your belt, with a practice that incorporates working as a composer, improviser, lecturer…How has this oeuvre been shaped?
This can be largely attributed to growing up in New York, which is a place that requires artists to wear lots of different hats. I think it‘s a byproduct of NYC hustle culture, really having to create your own opportunities. As a performer, composer, organizer, etc, I have always had the different worlds I’m a part of and the different roles I take address each other. Through my work, I’m used to facilitating creative environments where people from different scenes meet for the first time. When you think about it in those terms, then titles like ‘improviser’ or ‘composer’ start to crumble. The projects that I enjoy most are the ones that force me to use all of these different muscles, because at this point, they‘re all so interconnected.
Interestingly, you transgress the world of jazz and experimental music, whose borders – in its avant guises – are quite porous anyway. Do you perceive the differences in these realms? In terms of freedom of work, accessibility, and also livelihood?
To me, in the grand scheme of things they are basically the same. Different aesthetics and histories, but in terms of how they function in the modern world and gig economy, these two points on the spectrum share way more similarities than differences. Or at least, they are similar enough that I don‘t feel that the differences get in the way of transgressing between these two worlds.
Besides these aesthetic ‘binaries’, you are also active on two quite different music scenes – that of New York and Berlin. Can you talk about both, and how you perceive them, and your work in them?
It‘s hard to overstate New York in this context because it‘s the start of everything for me. New York gave me chops, my first working band, and my first tours, recording sessions, and interactions with beautiful weirdos. But the financial difficulties of living there also instill a work ethic and hustle mindset that come at the cost of mental and physical health. If New York is a time of rapid input and output, Berlin has me in a place that artistically is more internal. I produce work relatively quickly as a lasting habit from NYC, but Berlin has me making it with larger questions in mind in regards to what my fundamental goals within art as a sustainable career are.
It marks the beginning of my work with music production as a tool of composition, electroacoustic music, and more performance-based interdisciplinary works. These practices have arguably dominated my work at large, particularly my solo work, and I’m not sure that I necessarily would have arrived at them in the same way had I stayed in New York. Both cities really feed each other in my work. I‘ve developed a lot of work that connects people from both communities, and I perceive both in different lights now.
Thematically, your work explores the notions of ancestral memory, materiality, embodiment, decolonization, and Afro-surrealism. Could you elaborate?
My music usually isn’t ‘about’ anything. These themes came up for me over the course of developing a musical language, after noticing some patterns of thought throughout the years of my creative process. Writers in particular have an insurmountable hand in this, such as Amiri Baraka, Octavia Butler, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I often look towards work ‘outside’ of music as much as that which is ‘inside’ when recounting my influences.
A year ago, you released an “Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera” entitled COLLA VOCE. Can you talk about this release?
COLLA VOCE synthesizes improvisation and composition through the lens of music production, and really treats ‘the studio’ like a compositional element. Through an intense compositional period, a handful of days recording music on two different continents, and then about a year of post-production, COLLA VOCE is my largest recording project to date by all metrics. It has a bunch of proposed binaries that it explores: acoustic vs electronic, live vs produced, the human voice vs string instruments, Just Intonation vs equal temperament, Berlin vs New York. It features an ensemble of amazing vocalists and instrumentalists from Berlin, and JACK Quartet, one of the most adventurous and influential string quartets of the last decade plus. This release is only the first of many because the language and approaches taken in this record warrant further exploration.
You collaborate with a wide variety of artists. How do you reflect on these collaborations, and how do you search them out?
I’m much more interested in musicians than I’m interested in music. For me, music is almost the byproduct, the real thing is the process itself of working with interesting musicians. Similarly, a genre is not a substance, but just a marketing-driven set of goalposts placed somewhere on the spectrum of every musician ever. Looking at genre, style, aesthetics, whatever, in this way, places all of the importance on the individual. A free jazz musician has way more control and input over the music than a composer of orchestral music, because the free jazz musician‘s first concern is who the other members of the group are.
What are you currently up to?
I‘m primarily focusing on my solo performance and recording work, which nowadays is focused on banjos, feedback, and voice. This is also found in various interdisciplinary duo projects, such as with butoh dancer Min Yoon, vocalist Cansu Tanrikulu, or writer Yasmeen Al-Qaisi. Besides this, my Berlin-based electroacoustic band Skultura (in which I play bass) is performing regularly, my sound installation work in collaboration with Alex Schweder is continuing, as well as the various other projects and bands that I perform with more as a sideman collaborator.