October 24, 1998

The New Sound Of Drab

[B]Dummy Run[/B] are two people with extremely short attention spans, [B]Andrew Sharpley[/B] and [B]Nic Birmingham[/B]....

6 / 10 DUMMY RUN ARE TWO people with extremely short attention spans, Andrew Sharpley and Nic Birmingham. Sharpley is also in premier cut'n'paste sample fiends Stock, Hausen & Walkman, and this is his 'fun' project; a series of brief tracks and bad jokes, sketchy but immediate. Art and arse in equal measure.

Notable for its distinct lack of quality control, 'The New Sound Of DRAB', their third album, crams in 21 tracks, many of which are under 20 seconds long and feature a voice squeaking, "nic nac" over a hi-hat. Some are snippets of other people's records shamelessly pillaged purely because they sound good (like on 'Sad', for example), while on others, like 'Chirpy', Dummy Run throw together drum'n'bass, whistling, Hawaiian guitar, birdsong and small children singing - just because they can, really. It's as simple as that.

To bandy about contrived genre definitions in a bid to categorise would be to miss the whole point. These are hastily constructed ideas made from what art students call 'found sounds', ie, the telly, a sampler, an Oxfam-approved record collection and, importantly, the comfort of knowing that a Japanese label has just paid you handsomely to make lots of 'sound collages' out of cow noises.

The cutting-edge really isn't that sharp.

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