David Last : iSOUND.COM™

Biography

David Last was raised in University towns in the Midwest, the son of a professor and a standup comic. In Austin Texas, as a kid at the end of the 1970s he was intensely interested in drawing, music making, and projected super 8 images. At this time he discovered Kraftwerk and a love for rhythmic music, as well as having an appetite for orchestral film soundtrack records. As a teen living in Madison Wisconsin in 1984, under the influence of electro hip hop from New York City radio, he began making electronic music with a small analog synthesizer and a couple of tape machines. In 1996, after earning a bachelors degree in Art, he headed out to NYC. In New York, he began making books with the art books collective Brooklyn, and playing drums and electronics with bands, and at L.E.S. pirate radio station "Steal This Radio." Since, he has continued producing tracks and live video projections. His video work reacts to sound, and includes animated drawings, paintings, collage, photos, and camera footage. His organic-electronic musical approach is an expression of his interest in many musical forms, and an expression of his sense of humor. Not satisfied with just the squared-off robot rhythms of most electronic music, most of his tracks have a natural rhythm feel that comes from his own percussion playing. Not happy with the purely synthetic palette chosen by many electronic artists, David arranges string parts, brings in friends to play instruments, and plays instruments himself on his tracks, chopping up the end result and re-arranging everything into hypnotic new hybrids. His use of textures, rhythms, or sounds from non-western music is a natural outgrowth of his location, in New York City, where the entire world co-exists in the same space. To ignore these sounds, foods, and culture is difficult or impossible in this town. As such, he doesn't feel these sounds are "exotic" sounds at all... merely the sounds of people living their lives in the city, listening to their music, bumping into one another, and creating a new kind of community. David continues to do solo and collaborative work in North America and Japan, and is preparing for work in Europe this summer. His work was shown and purchased by collections in the USA, including the Metropolitan Museum and MOMA. He has worked with institutions such as the Film Society of Lincoln Center on video/music events, and is continuing to explore the relationship between sound and image, with a focus on hand-made imagery in a digital context. He is currently using a translucent scrim to create performance environments where performers and live audio-activated video merge to create a new hybrid live graphic space. He makes a living as a graphic designer and illustrator. Live Performance David's interest in electro-organic audio and visual systems has led him into collaborations with many artists. He has collaborated on live visual and/or audio performances with the Kompakt and Rephlex labels, Dabrye, Osborne, DJ Olive, qpe, Elysian Fields, Alex Patterson (the Orb), Colin Newman (Wire) and Malka Spigel, Charles Cohen, Mumbleboy, Erimba, Yusuke Yamamoto, David Linton, Takuya Nakamura, The Primrose, Benton-C Bainbridge, Hahn Rowe, and Spoozys, among others. He has performed at venues all over NYC including Tonic, Lincoln Center, Volume, The Kitchen, Galapagos, Roulette, Halcyon, Chashama's, CBGB and CB's Gallery, Open Air, Void, and Remote. Outside of New York: Lee's Palace (Toronto), Club Que (Tokyo), Live Square (Osaka), Club Quatro (Nagoya), and festivals in Nagano and New Jersey. Upcoming shows in Amsterdam and in the UK.