Dadahack - TAP3

Dadahack - Fuzzy Dunlop

The two musicians who sit, sequence, dream and programme at the centre of /dadahack/, are James Banbury and Pete Davis. They have existed, professionally, as technicians, programmers, producers, consultants, mixers, arrangers, players, theorists in a number of polyglamorous popmusic contexts – The Auteurs, Gwen Stefani, U2, Art of Noise, New Order, Human League, Infantjoy. As /dadahack/ they sent each other musical ideas that they played on traditional musical instruments, on computers, samplers, on rewired electronic toys, and via various contemporary forms of communication, file sharing, time dilation and system exploitation.

Plugged into their personal systems and lifestyles, /dadahack/ blended, bled and blasted together various elements of musical form and content to produce their compositions. Occasionally their writing process involved travel, and the pair would actually meet, somewhere, in one mysterious place or another, that was for a moment the home of /dadahack/. The routes to completing a piece of music therefore combine the mental, the physical, the metaphysical, the airport, the train, the car, random architectural spaces and the studio. Their music is very much a soundtrack to such a combination, the idea of a music that solidly exists in everyday reality and also tentatively vibrates around the edges, a music that is made up using bits and pieces, parts and remants of the past, present and future which are pieced together.

‘TAP3’ is both an album and not an album, and will therefore be available as both a thing and a thing that is not a thing. You will be able to download the finished sounds to add to your play lists and you will be able to buy it as an innovative piece of product that looks as though it is a cassette - to celebrate the mysterious, practical type of physical formats that electronic music was once released on. ‘TAP3’ the physical thing you can hold in your hands and explore is a combination of romantic found object and specialised industrial product that took many months to conceive, design and manufacture. It appears to be something that might appear in a 23rd century museum of Earth’s pop culture history that got it slightly wrong – /dadahack/ have created a personal history as though the cassette was invented after the iPod.

Indeed the physical piece of /dadahack/ can be played as a cassette, although, as if it is a cousin once or twice removed of Dr.Who, and something he would have as part of his collection inside the Tardis, it also plays itself. It needs no machine for the ‘TAP3’ sounds to be heard – by pluging in headphones and utilizing it as a digital music player. ‘TAP3’ is a souvenir of a fading time when music was only finished when it appeared on an actual object, and an acceptance of a future where music is finished as soon as it is let go into the cloud above/below/all around us.

***Edited version of full biography by Paul Morley snipurl.com/dadhackpm***

LIVE: 20th March @ The Luminaire, 311 High Road, Kilburn, NW6 7JR with Bass Clef, Robert Logan, P45.

dadahack.com