Gagarin: 'Komorebi' - new album by UK electronic musician out 12.04.24 | includes radical reworking of 1981 Nico song 'Saeta' : video available now

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 album track ‘Saeta’ has been made available today. It is a radical revamping of a 1981 single by Nico, the iconic German artist with whom Dids began recording and performing with regularly shortly after its release until her untimely death seven years later. Dids explains that “I was approached by film maker Nina Danino fifteen months ago to add to the soundtrack of her film ‘Solitude’, which is about Nico. As I had worked so closely with her, Nina thought I could add something of that experience as well as electronic sound. She wanted to include a version of ‘Saeta', which of course I had performed live many times. I reworked instrumental themes from the song to place in the narrative and later performed a live soundtrack to the film at Rich Mix in London that will be repeated at Cult Plex in Manchester this June. I had always loved the riffs in the song, so when it came to writing material for my new album I decided to create a further abstraction of it as an instrumental. This new version bears almost no resemblance to the original and only elements to the film, but it does retain the main riff as a synth arpeggio immersed in new distressed electronic melodies and a subtle distorted beat. The video features seascapes that are local to me, as well as a few ghostly evocations of Nico."

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 death of Nico in 1988, Dids formed Faction (releasing two albums), 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 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 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.

Dids’ extensive CV has been further enhanced by being an associate then full member of the acclaimed rock group Pere Ubu for the last twenty years, writing and performing on their four most recent 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 yielded the drastically different version of ‘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 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 ‘Komorebi' in his new studio by the sea in Margate, Kent. Optimistic and forward looking, the album 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

• 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)
• 22.06.24 COLCHESTER Cuckoo Farm Studios
• 24.08.24 GAINSBOROUGH Church Of Sound
• 27.08.24 COLCHESTER Arts Centre

Saeta (youtube.com)

GAGARIN LOMEA (youtube.com)