Gagarin is the solo project of veteran experimentalist and teacher Graham ‘Dids’ Dowdall, a British musician who has spent a fruitful career operating around the edges of where rock, dance, electronic and improvised musics collide.
His forthcoming new album is entitled Komorebi, a Japanese word that refers to how sunlight is seen and felt through leaves and branches. Dids takes this idea as its loose theme, evoking light and shade and combining both throughout its duration.
A video for the track ‘Lomea’ is available now, with Dids explaining that “it started out as a piece designed for a dance event on Box Hill in Surrey. I incorporated field recordings made there that included birdsong and also some twig and stick sounds made and manipulated by some pupils of mine. However, after its initial use it took on a very different form and direction. I was reading about the fabled place Lomea – which may or may not have been a small island in the sea near where I live in Margate – and that idea of historical truth and fantasy informed my approach to changing it. I kept the field recording and main melody but added sounds and altered the tempo, so it retains a pastoral quality that was in the original version but now achieves a mix of light and dark that ties in with the Komorebi concept. dizgo also ran with this for the video, so there is a bleakness in parts of it that is tempered through optimism and lighter elements. He filmed on a piece of land that may have been how Lomea would have looked, but with a high voltage electronic topping.”
Emerging from the free improv scene of the late ‘70s, Dids joined the Manchester-based cult post-punk group Ludus in 1980 as their drummer before being recruited to join the legendary German artist Nico, with whom he spent seven years writing and performing. This tenure included the acclaimed John Cale produced studio album ‘Camera Obscura’, following which the Welshman hired him to play on his own ‘Artificial Intelligence’ record. Both were released via Beggars Banquet.
Following the untimely death of Nico in 1988, Dids formed the Faction (releasing two albums) and also played with Eric Random & The Bedlamites, Bill Pritchard, the highly experimental Infidel (including a tour in deepest Siberia) and dance pop duo Sonexuno. He also trained as a community musician at this time and has subsequently spent over thirty years in a parallel career making music with disabled people and others experiencing disadvantage, utilising his skills to enable personal and social change. It also led to a post as a lecturer at Goldsmiths University in London, where he still teaches to this day.
Returning from a visit to Russia in the ’90s, Dids felt the need to create an outlet for his electronic creativity, As Gagarin, he has since issued several acclaimed albums and EPs and performed innumerable live shows utilising a combination of hardware – samplers, drum pads, synths – to interpret his compositions in an improvisatory context. His work has been played regularly on BBC Radio 3, 6 Music and Resonance FM in the UK, as well as NDR (Germany), RCV (France), RTE (RoI), RUM (Portugal), Boiler Room and more. It has also received coverage in publications such as The Wire, The Quietus and Electronic Sound (all UK), plus Rockerilla, Impose, Bandcamp Daily, 6am, Freq, Big Shot and more overseas.
For the last twenty years Dids has also been an associate then full member of the acclaimed rock group Pere Ubu, writing and performing on their last four albums and touring extensively as electronicist and electronic drummer.
The last twelve months have seen further significant developments in Dids’ career and life. 2023 began with an invitation to soundtrack ‘Solitude’, a film about Nico directed by Nina Danino that has yielded the drastically different version of her 1981 single ‘Saeta’ that features on ‘Komorebi’. He was then commissioned to create a soundscape for the ‘Wonderdusk’ event on the iconic Box Hill in Surrey, which has generated two further pieces for the album.
However, Dids was diagnosed with advanced bladder cancer in the early summer, which led to extensive chemotherapy for the remainder of 2023. Undeterred creatively, he set about composing and recording the remainder of the album in his new studio by the sea in Margate, Kent. Optimistic and forward looking, ‘Komorebi’ conveys no sense of doom; rather, local field recordings (a Gagarin trait) feature alongside aching melodies, moody atmospherics and glitchy beats. Veering from blissed out ambience to a noisier strangeness, its ten tracks are tied together via the loose Komorebi theme of lighter melodic sounds filtered through a shaded lens.
KOMOREBI
TRACKLISTING
1 Margate Illuminati
2 Saeta
3 Cingulum
4 Wonderdusk 1
5 Hazmat
6 PAM 710
7 Lomea
8 Wonderdusk 2
9 Codeswitch
10 Stanmer
GAGARIN
LIVE
01.03.24 LONDON Biddle Bros, Hackney
16.03.24 ROCHESTER Analogue Music
04.04.24 BRIGHTON Rossi Bar (Spirit Of Gravity)
11.04.24 LONDON New River Studios
13.04.24 LINCOLN Weird Garden
26.04.24 GRAVESEND St Andrews Art Centre (4th Portal)
27.04.24 LONDON Walthamstow Trades Hall
15.06.24 MANCHESTER Plex (performing OST of ‘Solitude’, a film about Nico)