Maestro Dave, Toronto, 1987

Dave Scurr was the maestro of found sounds. He and his collection of musical instruments, audio-visual implements, and weird bric-a-brac occupied a warehouse studio on King Street West. Partial renovations had not entirely erased the former industrial purpose of the space, echoes of which remained in the abraded floorboards and a faint metallic odour mixed with the reek of tobacco.

I was fascinated by Dave’s surrealist approach to music, or at least soundscapes, since I too had collected sounds with a portable (though huge by today’s standards) tape recorder as far back as the early seventies, perhaps inspired by the 1969 Karlheinz Stockhausen album Hymnen (embedded below), which I owned.

I don’t know if Dave is still around, but if he is I’m sure he has embraced the digital age of sound recording. He was a few years ahead of the samplers and scratchers. As it was, he pushed the boundaries of the analogue processes used to create his audio and visual compositions.

I believe, in the picture, he is creating a film loop — perhaps the one that was projected onto the interpretive dance duo in the collage below. I suspect he cultivated or played up his outré image. As if to acknowledge that, he placed in the hands of his mannequin housemaid a copy of Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics.

On one collaborative visit, I laid down a melancholy, country and western flavoured harmonica track that wove through a cacophony of urban street noise, electronic feedback, pulsing keyboards, and dissonant percussion.

Satyric Dancers

I thought at the time, after the film was developed and contacted, that these stills didn’t really capture the strange event as well as the videotaped documentary. Now, it may well be that these 35mm frames, seen here for the first time outside my archives, are the only remaining visual record of that multimedia performance. Somewhere on my travels, I lost the cassette tapes of Dave’s work. I hope that somewhere, out in the sonic universe, Dave’s experiments survive.