Gagarin | 'Komorebi' - new album by UK electronic musician out 12.04.24 + additional live dates announced

Komorebi is a Japanese word that refers to how sunlight is seen and felt through leaves and branches. The new album by Gagarin takes this idea as its loose theme, evoking light and shade and combining both throughout its duration.

Gagarin is the solo project of veteran experimentalist 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. 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 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 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

2023 saw further significant developments in Dids’ career and life, beginning with an invitation to soundtrack ‘Solitude’, a film about Nico directed by Nina Danino that has yielded a radically different version of her 1981 single ‘Saeta’ that features on ‘Komorebi’. He was then commissioned to create a soundscape for the ‘Wonderdusk’ event held on Box Hill in Surrey, which 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’ will be released on 12th April, the 63rd anniversary of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human being in space. Listen to it twice while imagining yourself circling the earth at 17,000 miles per hour in Vostok 1 for a similar experience and save yourself the hassle of competing with a tech billionaire.

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

11.04.24 LONDON New River Studios

13.04.24 LINCOLN Decimal Place (Weird Garden)

26.04.24 GRAVESEND St Andrews Arts Centre (Estuary Waves)

27.04.24 LONDON Walthamstow Trades Hall (Eclectic Shock)

02.05.24 LONDON Biddle Bros

04.05.24 RUGELEY Lea Hall Pavilion (Awakenings)

11.05.24 BRIGHTON The Brunswick (Real Music Club)

25.05.24 Morphic Resonance - Livestream

15.06.24 MANCHESTER Cultplex (performing OST of ‘Solitude’, a film about Nico)

22.06.24 COLCHESTER Cuckoo Farm Studios

24.08.24 GAINSBOROUGH Church Of Sound

29.08.24 COLCHESTER Arts Centre (Control Voltage)

08.11.24-10.11.24 WHITBY Switched On Festival