Embla Quickbeam aka Rowan Forestier and Graham Dunning first collaborated together as a duo following an invitation to take part in Lorah Pierre's Experimental Sounding Board event at Westhill Community Hall in Brighton. The performance saw them improvise with an audience of participants drawing on rolls of paper connected to contact mics.

“We realised that our sounds and techniques were complementary to each other and had lots of points of intersection, including recording to four-track tape as part of the creative process,” explains Dunning. “So we began a tape swap project, exchanging cassettes through the post along with visual paraphernalia, found objects and bits of art and writing that related to the nature of the sounds we made and recorded. For each exchange we would record a single track to a tape, meaning the finished cassettes had two tracks by each of us.

“We were invited to exhibit in a group exhibition called Correspondence at Prestamax House in Brighton,” he continues. “We created a library of our sounds on individual two minute tapes, and installed them with three cassette players allowing the audience to play back the sounds themselves, swapping and listening to various versions and creating new compositions.”

The tracks that can be heard here are from an as yet unreleased project with no name. They’ll eventually be coming out on Third Kind Records.

Robert Barry wrote a full page review of three Graham Dunning records in The Wire 389.