Dedications II by DJ Techné

“I think that listening is probably very close to what we call consciousness.”
—Pauline Oliveros

The Dedications series mixes, mashes, samples, spins, cuts, signifies, rhapsodizes, poetizes, layers, collages, remixes, breaks, distresses, archives, remakes, reshapes, and re-edits pieces of recorded history to create a sonic audio homage to a host of musicians and styles with a nod to the avant-garde.

Dedications II continues in the spirit of the first album. While the first Dedications project largely explored the space between poetry and music, particularly jazz and jazz-influenced poetry, Dedications II is particularly indebted to the blues and is blue-tinged throughout with a low-fi aesthetic, and a boom-bap poetics. The album takes various phonogrooves (largely from jazz, hip-hop, blues, and spoken word, to unusual recontextualized samples) and mélanges them together to create polyvalent dedications to a host of musicians and creative artists. If you listen closely you will hear J Dilla, Louis Armstrong, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Jean-Michel Basquiat (whose artwork “Now’s the Time” [1985] is recontextualized for the album cover), Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Tom Waits, Guru and DJ Premier, Nina Simone, Alice Coltrane, Martin Luther King, Jr., Pauline Oliveros, Ursula K. Le Guin, among a slew of other voices, sounds, samples, echoes, and cuts. At times I added a live-recorded layer of chant, singing bowl, beatbox, or field recordings (especially on the final track). I played most of the drums on an MPC Live, and many of the samples are recorded directly from vinyl. Dedications is an opening and a close listening exercise: it is a portal to the past and the future.

The music is FREE and is a not-for-profit creative project (although you can donate to my musical praxis and future projects when downloading).

DJ Techné is a Nanaimo-based turntable sound artist and writer.

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