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.”
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
