The
work presented on To Look North is the result of Chris
Dooks’s six months residency at the University Of Teesside
in Newcastle, in collaboration with the Northern Region Film
& Television Archive and commissioned by ISIS Arts, an art
agency based in North Tyneside. During this period, Dooks spent
his time between Newcastle going through hundreds of hours of
films recording a hundred years of culture in the North of England,
and his recording studio in Edinburgh. The CD includes twenty
five audio tracks built around excerpts of conversations, interviews
and commentaries, as well as eleven short films.
To Look North is a very significant piece of work in
Dooks’s career as it establishes a link between his years
spent as a filmmaker and his most recent work as a digital musician.
Here, he creates an abstract documentary of his native region,
capturing fragments of lives and fit them in seemingly arbitrary
order. Each track is built around one main sample of conversation,
extracted from its context, on which Dooks applies digital alterations
and textures to extract the core meaning of the element used,
obliterating any perspective. These voices become integrant
part of the sonic substance and define the true signification
of this record that is, creating a chronicle of the life in
the North over the last hundred years. This process allows Dooks
to perfectly integrate the intrinsic abstraction of his music
with these external components. If the complexity of compositions
is still present here, the digital terrorism characterising
some of Social Electrics
has been replaced by a more insidious form of perverse alteration.
Minimalist in essence, To Look North appears luxuriant
by its constant change of ambiences. Dooks dissects his sonic
sources and randomly reassembles elements of crime investigations,
lunch time dance lessons, scientific discussions, political
activism or meaningless everyday conversations to outline the
volatile aspects of life. The eleven short films accompanying
these recordings accentuate this
Chris Dooks’s aim with this record was to present a more
human and happy vision of the North of England than the epitomic
image built by the media during the Thatcher years, when unemployment
and poverty were affecting the region. To say that he achieves
is an understatement.
The album is available to buy by contacting ISIS
ARTS on their web site.
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