ALEX DA CORTE
“Dawn”
Words had recovered their meaning, for a time, and then not. I remembered everything, until I didn’t, and even that moment of misremembering was eventually forgotten.
In the evening before bed, I routinely placed the contents of my pockets on my bedside table. To remember. A paper clip, some coins, a scrap of notepaper, and a matchbook. Night after night the contents would change, and yet the bedside table would remain the same, and then not. A seashell, a rose petal, a small gray pebble, a pen cap. Each morning, at dawn, with empty pockets, a new life was ahead of me. Year after year I believed that the bedside table remained the same, but in time I could no longer see the bedside table beneath the tower of days that had been dispersed atop it.
One morning I watched the sun rising over that towering mountain of days. Between those rays of light I could faintly see the outline of words etched on the mountainside, yet I could not remember their meanings. I searched to find my pocket, or even the bedside table, with no success. Softly, I blinked. I could feel water in my eyes, but no words could be shaped with my mouth to speak the tears. The whole of my life was spent looking, and finding, and trying to remember, carrying everything to the altar at Dawn. And in my blindness, I failed to see that Night was also a collector, and one day at Dawn it would fail to recover the meaning in me.
SUSAN LAXTON
Dada, to force ourselves to contradict ourselves in order to avoid conforming to our own preferences.
MARK POLIZZOTTI
Why not both?
EMILY WELLS
In thinking about the relationship of Dadaism and Surrealism to music, I consider both influence and application. What is more Dada than sample-based music, readymade and disruptive, or the invention of jazz, noise music, and anti-war songs? What is more Surrealist than ambient music, or minimalism? Here I’m also exploring the composers who inhabited the movements themselves (invited or not): How might those early provocations sit next to the music that they unwittingly influenced over the century that followed? What I propose is a rich and endless conversation across recorded music.
Listen to Emily Wells’ Dadaism x Surrealism playlist on Spotify.
