Sam Dunscombe is a performer, composer, sound artist, and audio engineer. Sam is interested in the multi-dimensional perception of time, which has led her to explorations in spectralism, just-intonation, improvisation, the performance of complex-notated repertoire, field recording, audio engineering, and live electronic performance.
Sam has performed at major festivals and concert series around the world, including conducting the opening night concert of the 2019 MaerzMusik festival in Berlin, being an artist-in-residence at Ilan Volkov’s Tectonics Festival in Tel Aviv, presenting a three day performance and sound installation at the Tokyo Experimental Festival, and many others.
Sam is an avid field recordist: her 2021 album Outside Ludlow / Desert Disco (Black Truffle) combined field recordings with audio taken from scraps of 1/4″ tape found tangled around a cactus in the Mojave Desert. A second album, Two Forests / Oceanic, uses field recordings and rational tuning practice to reimagine the music used for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy sessions, and is due for release on Nov 14, 2023 (also on Black Truffle). Alongside these hybrid works, Sam is also engaged in more traditional acoustic ecology practice, particularly with her ongoing ultra-large-scale field recording work “California Grid.”
In June 2022, Sam released Horatiu Radulescu: Plasmatic Works Vol. 1 on Mode Records. This album focusses on Radulescu’s early spectral works for winds and electronics, and will be followed by two more records in this series. She was awarded a Doctor of Musical Arts from UC San Diego in 2018, with a thesis exploring Radulescu’s clarinet works, and has worked as the archivist to his estate since 2018. She is currently working on developing new methods for sound synthesis based on Radulescu’s spectral techniques, which she calls “Mass Plasma Synthesis.” Preliminary studies in this methodology can be heard on Bandcamp.
She is a member of several musical groups, including Berlin’s Harmonic Space Orchestra, the Australian performer-composer trio Golden Fur (together with James Rushford and Judith Hamann), Oren Ambarchi’s Carpe Diem, and duo projects with Michiko Ogawa, Rebecca Lane, Julia Reidy, and others.
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OUTSIDE LUDLOW / DESERT DISCO
“Against the dusty drift of the tape, its rawness and brutality is startling” – The Wire
“Dunscombe has crafted two works of mesmeric and haunting ambient beauty that hearken back to their source and look forward to transformation and rebirth.” – The Sound Projector
“Its layers dynamically weave to reveal a tapestry seemingly depicting associations of manifest destiny and its post-apocalypse in the desert. The violent progress of military and mining and trains and western religion across the desert matching and exceeding that hostile environment’s desiccating heat, disintegrating wind, bold exhibition of death in its preservation of bones to mold a scape of desolation reflected in this bleak sound.” – harmonicseries.substack
Listen now on Bandcamp
Or order from one of the following distributors:
US – Forced Exposure
EU – KOMPAKT
UK – Boomkat