At the Edge with Dave Brown and Adam Gołębiewski

Experimental musicians Dave Brown and Adam Gołębiewski meet at the edges of sound and improvisation. Brown's evolution from suburban rock bassist to avant-garde guitarist parallels Gołębiewski's path from academic musicology to raw, exploratory percussion. Their collaboration, Dog's Light, emerged from a one-off performance that revealed an immediate creative connection, producing what Brown characterizes as "left-ish songs for strange improvisers."

The musicians share an obsession with drawing vast soundscapes from minimal sources—Brown through his modified tenor guitar and effects and Gołębiewski through his approach to drum techniques. Their discussion traces key influences, from Brown's discovery of New York's no-wave scene to Gołębiewski's journey through hip-hop and European avant-garde, revealing how each artist found their path to experimental music.

Lawrence Peryer: Dave, I read about your work with sound in hospital emergency departments. How did that experience influence your approach to composition or your thinking about sound in an environment?

Dave Brown: Just to explain that project—I did it in a research project funded by the Education Department and the Australian government that was quite highly funded, but only half the required funding. I did it with my colleague, Philip Samartzis. He's a field recording artist. The project’s main premise was to use compositions you mightn't associate with music therapy, something more left-field. Thus, my role used computer-generated compositions from acoustic and instrument sources, with a specific brief of playing them to patients in the waiting rooms and cubicles in a hospital emergency department, designed to relieve their stress and anxiety while waiting.

It wasn't like music therapy, but it was trying something more pristine—field recordings and almost electroacoustic compositions—to engage people and see whether that relieved their anxiety. It was an incredibly successful project, and it worked. It did relieve people’s anxiety levels. They were tested pre- and post-listening and all that sort of thing. Seven of us were working on the project, including the hospital and the university’s research departments.

Lawrence: Did you take anything from that experience into your live performances? Are you now more aware of the somatic element for your audience?

Dave: Not really. As far as a compositional process goes, it was a real learning thing—seven people gave me feedback about how they thought the composition should lead along the way. But retrospectively, I don't think those elements are something I’m conscious of when playing. I've probably been working less on computer-based electroacoustic compositions than pure improvisation. I guess that mirrors a trajectory across my whole career.

Lawrence: Adam, how does your background in musicology fit with your life as a creative musician? Is academic training helpful in this realm?

Adam Gołębiewski: It was simply that going to conservatory wasn’t an option for me because I was equally interested in reading and researching new music. Every music—at that time, I was listening to music six hours a day, both Renaissance music, ancient music, or cultural music, and then reading books and studying scores—doing all that and making my music, playing solo or playing with people.

At some point, let's say study practice decreased or the proportion changed to doing more music, less thinking, more acting, or just doing sound itself.

Lawrence: What drew you to free music and experimental music?

Adam: I don't think it was anything special. I come from a non-musical background. My parents like music, maybe a bit more than an average family, but just a little more than average. So they've been music listeners but not with a 500-record collection—more like forty. (laughter)

Maybe some passive influence was there. This is more for a psychologist to evaluate, but I know that I felt some sort of a force at some point in the second decade of my life. It sounds naive, but something drives you to the medium.

In my community, hip-hop music was dominating. Sometimes it's punk, sometimes it's metal, whatever. And from this, it was a very direct link to more "collage" music, let's say more progressive, like turntablism stuff. And from this, it happened very quickly that I got some records of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and the post-war avant-garde side of European music.

Lawrence: Dave, your work reminds me of the New York downtown scene—Bill Laswell, the no-wave scene, artists who merged jazz, rock avant-garde, and modern classical. How did you come to creative music?

Dave: That's a fair summation. I grew up in an outer suburban, slightly upwardly mobile area, but there was no immersion in any cultural stuff. I built myself a crystal set when I was about ten and went to bed every night listening to popular radio with only one earplug. So it was, in some way, an escape from reality thing that gestated the whole process.

My early musical adventures were more like pop and rock music. I always somehow inherently had this thing of perhaps being a little more adventurous than my cohort. And I guess the transition from more rock music into more adventurous music has a natural trajectory, but it comes from listening.

I was an electric bass player, but I think I was a frustrated guitar player. So, I always had guitars. I would sit on the couch with a Stratocaster unplugged, and what appealed to me were the sounds outside the fingering, intonation, and picking, the stuff on either side of the fingers and behind the bridge.

I always worked day jobs and was also a visual artist. So I worked in art supply stores, record stores, bookstores, or whatever to finance life and music. Still, one thing that made a huge impression on me was the New York no-wave thing, which I discovered purely by accident by visiting and working in record stores. There's a little group of those groups like Mars and DNA and perhaps a couple of other things, but those things, particularly as a rock musician, had a seminal way of setting me off in another direction.

There's one sort of seminal, serendipitous thing, an experience I had where I played in a group with a jazz piano player who's dead now. He had just recently completed the Victorian College of the Arts jazz course. And by complete chance, he took me to these performance workshops. Two were the Peter Brötzmann and Peter Kowald duo, and the other was the Schlippenbach Trio. And those experiences—particularly the Schlippenbach Trio—just sent me off and showed me that this whole other thing could happen.

Adam: A little thing in a bracket regarding Dave's answer: I got the same impression when I first heard live Schlippenbach Trio, although it was probably twenty years apart. They definitely do their job.

Lawrence: Adam, what unique opportunities do you find in a drum and guitar configuration compared to other harmonic instruments?

Adam: I think it's about the musician or artist, not the instrument itself. I have collaborations with different guitarists. I released a record with Thurston Moore, who is completely different than several other guitarists I play with. And Dave is absolutely unique.

So maybe that's why our album is special: it builds a very compositional image with a pure improvising approach. However, it’s also unorthodox, in my opinion. It’s unorthodox within this improvised-slash-experimental language, which fluctuates between busyness and slowing down.

Formally, it’s pretty coherent and integrated, so it’s “left-ish songs for strange improvisers.” But seriously, there is a strong melodic element—I would say strong for the genre.

Lawrence: What elements do you look for in a collaborator? How do you choose who to work with?

Dave: There are a couple of different ways that happens. One is by choice, and that's as simple as you might see someone else's projects and say, "Oh, I could work with the way that person does it." So then you instigate it from that point of view. But then there's all the more serendipitous accidental thing of just by chance being thrown with someone and discovering that there is this way that you can instantaneously respond to each other with a sensitivity or something like that.

I was going to see these punk-jazz bands and stuff like that, and I saw this one drummer, Sean Baxter. I loved his approach to playing and his adventurousness—iconoclastic stuff, even as a rock drummer. So I asked him to join my band, bucketrider, when the existing drummer left to join a circus. That relationship lasted for thirty years until his death. I had included him in every musical project for thirty years. So that's one example of the choice thing working. Even though our relationship may have become slightly more prickly later in those thirty years, whenever we got on stage, that instantaneous rapport from the very start was always present.

Adam and I met almost accidentally. He was here for another project. We were asked to do a gig together, and it seemed obvious we could do something good as a duo. The gig was a trio with a saxophone player, and maybe it didn’t work one hundred percent well as a trio, but I could see that something could happen with us as a duo.

Lawrence: Adam, you mentioned using the bass drum as a tom and playing a big cymbal with a small stick. When did you start experimenting with the drum kit?

Adam: I never play conventionally, not the typical way somebody plays in a big band or school band. As I mentioned, I just feel some sort of need to make a sound like something non-verbal. I don't want to romanticize it too much, but it is an inner force that drives you to create something.

It was important for me not to use a computer, not to use too much gear, and not to use electricity-dependent stuff like that. But I like music when it’s big or intense. So, a lot of the music I make is indeed loud or at least rich in, let’s say, saturation or pigment of sound. These factors are important to me.

I work a lot alone and discovered that you can have better resonance or better reverberation of small sounds on bigger toms, like how painters see how a very thin color looks when put on different canvases. It’s interesting.

Lawrence: Dave, you also seem interested in making small sounds big. What possibilities does that open up when you're working with Adam, who shares that sensibility?

Dave: I've always had a fascination with opposing elements. I suppose you could relate it to juxtaposing high and low art elements. So, for instance, extreme distortion with acoustic sounds and things like that. Rather than music being in one band of intensity all the time, there's so much opportunity to utilize the extremities of the possibilities.

Playing a solid-body electric guitar unplugged and hearing the other sounds it makes naturally progressed to using a semi-acoustic jazz box on my laptop with pickups on the body, the headstock, and the regular pickups, getting a mix of all those sources. Playing the body and guitar with other utensils rather than just the strings with a pick.

The other version of that, which is more what I seemed to be concentrating on the last few years and what was present on the record with Adam, is that I've had this tenor guitar built from an old broken Japanese guitar. I had a guy put a four-string neck on it. He built it as a more traditional tenor guitar, high-strung. I didn't like the string tension, so I changed it to low-strung, and I could bend the pitch behind the bridge and all that. But for me, now, this is my other approach—it's like the guitar is a tone generator, and the same can be said for playing electric guitar as well, but then the bank of effects and things like that is the thing that gets played as much as the guitar.

Lawrence: How fluid is your setup? Are you constantly evolving your rig?

Dave: Yeah. It depends on the setting. I tend to stick to one setup for one collaborative group or have a couple of solo setups, such as one with the tenor guitar. I've also been doing a thing with electric guitar but with a completely different set of stomp boxes. But even those things may not be grandly evolving but gently evolving. I might get bored with one setup and say, "Oh, how can I elaborate on this and bring another voice to it?"

Lawrence: How do you think about the boundary between music and noise?

Adam: I don't find the term "noise " negative. However, there is a tendency to juxtapose music and noise.

I’d rather focus on sound itself. The sound art genre is problematic because it brings a lot of non-interesting stuff from different fields, but it's too easy to say that music is layered rhythm and harmony and all that stuff and noise is chaos. So, I’d rather avoid judging. The best result combines these elements, which may come from some orthodox definition of music and something completely from junk, the pile of rubbish, music-wise.

Lawrence: Do the song titles on Dog’s Light have particular meaning?

Adam: I proposed the order of tracks, and Dave named them. Dave created song titles and album titles and wrote a little poem. These all fit my tastes.

Dave: I always find titling things difficult. From a very early age, I've kept lists of song titles, but the process that I arrive at is just from my reading, whatever that may be. I always have a notebook beside the bed or whatever, and for some reason, some phrase will just strike me. It might be two words, a whole sentence, or somewhere between. And I'll write that down. So I have these little black books full of song title lists.

When mixing or listening, I consult those lists as things come to fruition. I try to find some, for want of a better word, "poetic correlation" between the sound and this written thing. It has to do with the shape of the words and the shape of the sound or something like that.

There was a little to-and-froing about the decision to use these titles. Some of mine may have been more elaborate, and then Adam would write back and say, “Oh, let’s use just the first half of it,” so there was a whittling process as well.

Dave Brown and Adam Gołębiewski's Dog's Light is available on vinyl from Instant Classic. You can purchase the album digitally from Bandcamp.