Philip Dadson

Philip Dadson is a sound and media artist, composer, performer, and instrument builder.

During 1968 and 1969, Dadson was actively involved in the United Kingdom with Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons, and others in the Foundation Group for a Scratch Orchestra. Their goal was to create new and experimental, improvisatory music that could be open equally to musicians and non-musicians. As a moving image maker, he founded the Interdigitate Videowall Festival and co-founded Alternative Cinema (Auckland). His awards include a 1991 Fulbright Fellowship to tour the United States, the prestigious title of Artist Laureate, given by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand 2001, and in 2003, an Antarctica Artist Fellowship, from which he produced Polar Projects, a video/sound series, drawings and digital imagery.

In 1974, Dadson founded From Scratch, a group that performs largely with his invented instruments. Dadson is co-author of the From Scratch Rhythm Workbook, and he has collaborated on two international-award winning films of performances by From Scratch with director Gregor Nicholas. The group has released numerous recordings over the its three-decade history, one of the more recent being Global Hockets - a collaboration between From Scratch and Supreme Particles (Germany), where sequences of computer processed imagery interact in performance with live sound processing of acoustic and electronic sounds. Recent projects include 'Pacific Plate' inspired by local tectonics, and 'Vocal Acrobats' a collaboration with Koichi Makigami and Mark van Tongeren.

Dadson is a fulltime artist, whose practice includes solo sound & intermedia performances & installations, music compositions, graphic scores, video & short film, sound-sculptures, and improvisations on his instruments. He tours extensively throughout New Zealand and internationally.