Gagarin was the solo project of veteran experimentalist Graham ‘Dids’ Dowdall, a British musician who spent a long and fruitful career operating around the edges of where rock, dance, electronic and improvised musics collide.
Emerging from the free improv scene of the late ‘70s, he 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 Faction (releasing two albums) and also played with Eric Random & The Bedlamites, Bill Pritchard, Infidel (including a tour in deepest Siberia) and Sonexuno. He also trained as a community musician at this time and 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 remained teaching until his death.
Returning from a visit to Russia in the ’90s, Dids felt the need to create an outlet for his electronic creativity, As Gagarin, he 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.
Dids was an associate then full member of the acclaimed rock group Pere Ubu for the last twenty years of his life, writing and performing on their four most recent albums and touring extensively as electronicist and electronic drummer.
KOMOREBI
(Geo Records)
stream or buy
2023 saw significant developments in Dids’ career and life, beginning with an invitation to soundtrack ‘Solitude’, a film about Nico directed by Nina Danino that yielded a radically different version of her 1981 single ‘Saeta’ that features on the final Gagarin album, ‘Komorebi’. Komorebi is a Japanese word that refers to how sunlight is seen and felt through leaves and branches. The album takes this idea as a loose theme, evoking light and shade and combining both throughout its duration. Dids was diagnosed with advanced bladder cancer in the summer of 2023, which led to extensive chemotherapy for the remainder of the year. 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.
Released in April 2024, Dids was actively promoting ‘Komorebi’ with a series of live performances in London and around the south-east until shortly before his death.
It’s a blessing that Graham Dowdall was sufficiently long lived to have experienced at first hand, in real time, the first, noisy stirrings of the layered, diffuse musical culture that envelops us today – from Telstar and The Beatles as a child, to Pink Floyd, Delia Derbyshire’s White Noise project, dub, rave. He absorbed it all and eventually became a participant. In his 69 years he lived so many lives – not just as a musician, but as a master gardener, sponsor of his beloved Arbroath FC, political radical, lawyer and teacher of SEN children. Graham was the most beloved of men. He was the drummer with Ludus – he recalls a very young Morrissey, a polite, nervously shy adolescent, making him tea. He went on to work with Nico, somehow riding the choppy waters that entailed over the years, drawing on his infinite reserves of patience as well as his musical prowess. I saw him many times with Roshi Nasehi (Roshi with Pars Radio) adding discreet electronic dimensions to her Welsh/Iranian/folk/avant pop stylings which deserved, and continue to deserve, a much wider audience. I also saw him numerous times playing electronics with Pere Ubu, a vital role in one of the world’s very greatest rock bands, carrying on a tradition of abstract intervention that began with founding Ubu member Allen Ravenstine. Finally, he was Gagarin, whose retro-futurism was encapsulated in that moniker – mapping out a unique trail amid the busy skies of ambient electronica, achieving a deep, rich, layered, raging sense of peace, a hankering for what was once promised, what could and should be, the culmination of a lifetime’s experience and absorption. His most recent album, ‘Komorebi’, was his best. Brilliant, exemplary, Graham has left us but I truly hope that somehow his journey isn’t done.
2024 photos by Brian David Stevens