Photograph by Liz Gorman
BAG
“BAG is the poetry and sound project of Dan Allison and Jody DeSchutter. The duo’s debut album, Mapping Azure, twisted flurries of abstract but never meaningless speech through webs of field recordings, brittle beats and scorched synthesis. Theirs is a world where music and language seem precariously tied together, emerging in a lyrical call and response to create something as bewildering as it is lucid. It triggers a unique effect for the listener. Never didactic, BAG’s music feels like an invitation to join them in charting the contours of a world constantly in flux. The project continues to evolve as they work towards their next album, branching into glacial, almost dub techno weight, intricate high-definition soundscapes and obliterated pop music. It all combines to further realise their ever more vivid parallel universe, one where words and sounds mean more together than they ever could apart.Mapping Azure was named one of the best tapes of 2020 in the Spool’s Out Column at The Quietus.” — Daryl Worthington
Photograph by Liz Gorman
LISTEN
BAG has finished a brand new album waiting on release and will have new live dates coming soon. Please stayed tuned!
Photography by Matteo Favero
An excerpt from the Quietus Review, Spools Out: The Best Tapes of 2020:
Daryl Worthington , December 18th, 2020 09:21
BAG - Mapping Azure
(Bloxham Tapes)
“How do you describe a colour to someone who’s never seen it? How do you map a cloudless sky? These are the sorts of questions of communication BAG, the duo of Brit Dan Allison and Canadian Jody DeSchutter seem to engage with on debut tape Mapping Azure. The combination of electronics, field recordings and poetry are simultaneously vivid and vague. Clusters of words are read, often without obvious connection, but this isn’t a completely random language soup. Constellations start to form so that even if sense doesn’t fully appear, its echo does. The accompanying soundscape has a similar effect, shifting from almost inaudible pulses to pristine arpeggios and lurking beats. It occasionally seems at odds with the poems, but maybe that distance is where the real meaning lies?
Mapping Azure seems to dig at the very essence of communication. When we reach the limit of vocabulary we resort to metaphor or describing the effect of something rather than the thing itself. That seems to be the case with BAG’s music, a weird schematic of something unknown that can only be conveyed through allusion.”
https://thequietus.com/articles/29322-the-best-of-spools-out-2020
Review by Paul Hudson, London Jazz Festival 2021
“…Today’s curation is very much a near jazz experience. Music that skirts around the edges of jazz but shares much of its ethos. Something the discerning Jazz audience seemed to engage with. Well most did, apparently two ladies left after the first act proclaiming to the volunteers on the door ‘that wasn’t jazz’. Nice to see they have such an open mind to new music.
The offending artists were BAG. They mix spoken word with various electronic sounds and music. To be fair to the two ladies. No it wasn’t ‘jazz’. But there was a theme today. Terry’s choices put vocals at the fore. In this case, the vocals used to deconstruct our expectations of musical structures – a bit like the improvisation bits in jazz. Vocals speeding up and slowing down, accenting different bits of variable length sentences. All the time, forcing the music to shift form. I can see the connection. But to be honest, who cares. It was a fascinating performance…”
Read Paul Hudson’s full review of the London Jazz Festival 2021 at Daylight Music in St John’s Bethnal Green here.
Interview and set on Soho Radio Culture Channel, 2021
Listen to an interview and set on the Silver Stream by Byzantia Harlow on Soho Radio Culture Channel here. Aired live 5 April, 2021 at 6pm GMT.
Interview and Live set on Resonance FM, 2020
Listen to an interview and recorded live set on the Hello GoodBye Show, Resonance 104.4 FM here. Played live 2 May, 2020.
An excerpt about BAG from an essay by Matthew Carey Williams on Cease Producing Stimuli:
Dan and Jody paint with words and sound. Dan makes haunting, repetitive beats that loop in and out of each other and which become impregnated with Jody’s spoken word. Jody makes a gentle, beautiful, unruffled sound when speaking, even if Dan’s sound rushes headfirst into speedier beats or slows down to a single, hovering drone. His inconsistency pushes her consistency – lexically and oratorically – to the front of our minds. We see with our ears. His variety provides the backdrop to her measured, imperturbable performance. We hear with our eyes.
And yet for all the distinction between two – as people, artistic elements, sounds, meanings – they blend as one when performing. A word is a sound. A sound means like a word.”