Spontaneous avant-garage jazzy folk-art from brothers Richard and Frank Dunlap.

NEWS from The Dunlaps
in Aug 2005 The Dunlaps had a brief opportunity to record together again for the first time in 13 years.
You can hear some of the results at www.soundclick.com/theasterisklounge and www.soundclick.com/dadala
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Notes from RD:
Frank and I live in different states and on some of our occasional reunions in years past we managed to pull off a few recording sessions. Included here are selections from our sessions in Ashland, Oregon from 1985, '86 and '87, and in SoCal '86 and '89.

These tracks showcase Frank’s raw natural talent on sax especially, and for those familiar with my other projects, they offer a very different facet of RD music; rough-edged, lo-fi and on-the-fly. With few exceptions, these tracks were recorded without Midi sequencing or multi-track recording. Where overdubs were done, they were mostly performed and mixed live while copying from one cassette tape to another. Some pieces with some forethought and scheming involved notwithstanding, everything was improvised and spontaneous.

For our first session in 1985, I trekked to Ashland with only my Casio CZ-101 synthesizer mini keyboard and a small guitar practice amp, not really even expecting to record anything, just to play and have fun. But Frank had an old pre boom-box era portable deck with a built-in mic and automatic level control (in these recordings you can hear that old deck’s motor running during quieter passages) and a blank tape. So we just fired up the tape and started playing until it was full. Surprised and inspired with the results, for later sessions I brought more equipment, Frank accumulated more toys, and we explored further with overdubbing, tape looping, sampling, etc.

At various points in their journey from cassette to internet, most of these tracks have had a bit of tweaking, whether being some EQ done years ago on a cassette copy of the 1985 sessions, some small edits when these tracks were transferred to wav files in 2002, or touches of reverb and further editing/remastering done in the fall of 2004. But overall these tracks are true to the original recordings and later enhancements have been kept at a subtle level.