Biography
Ali O'May and Frazer Brown met in early 2018 while performing with their respective bands at an Electronic Music Open Mic gig in Edinburgh. Working up plans for collaboration over the subsequent twelve months, Ali eventually passed Fra a USB pen drive full of stems recorded directly from Ali’s vast modular system. Across August and September 2019, Fra used about a dozen of those stems as the foundation for an album ("You Can and You Shall"), covering a range of styles from techno, lo-fi breaks, acid house, and ambient - the feeling for the track derived by Frazer from the sounds that Ali had provided from his modular rig. By early 2020, the project was given a name. Dohnavùr were so called after the name of Ali's childhood family home.
And then two weeks later, the pandemic hit and the world came to a screeching halt, seemingly ruinously impacting the chances of the album gaining any traction. For support, Ali and Fra started looking around for allies and likeminded musicians and labels on Twitter, and Ali came across a label called Castles in Space, who were looking for submissions for a dual CD/cassette release called "The Isolation Tapes". The band submitted a long, paranoid, snarling mood piece called Surmonter (French for ‘Overcome’). The track was selected as the opening track of the cassette bonus downloads for the album(s) for reasons of space. All the great longer tracks ended up as Isolation Tapes bonus downloads.
Encouraged by this turn of events, Dohnavùr quickly followed up with a four track EP called "Pristine Environments", created with the remaining stems from Ali’s first pen drive. After hearing this EP, CiS asked the band to record their second album for the label, which is due in the next few months, preceded by an imminent 12" single.
Meanwhile CiS grabbed "Pristine Environments" for the nascent Castles in Space Subscription Library. We've added "Surmonter" from The Isolation Tapes and here we are.
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