DMG is the alias of Blackburn born, Edinburgh based producer and digital artist Daniel McGurty whose music is built on a commitment to sonic-curiousity and sheer defiance to easy categorisation. He has released his new album Live the Dream, a homage to hometowns. Live the Dream channels the atmosphere and energy of Blackburn’s seminal Rave scene, weaving meticulously sampled found-footage and contemporaneous electronic instrumentation into evocative sonic tapestries. This positions the individual pieces within a soundworld created directly from the sights and sounds recorded by those who attended, through the camcorders and microphones they had to hand at that time.
Few cultural moments are memorialised with the intensity of language and feeling as the rave-era. Live the Dream illuminates the position that the acid rave explosion occupies within collective memory and the nature of contribution to folklore as a social act. By asking questions about nostalgia, and the right to a sense of connection.
Live the Dream builds on DMG’s 2022 release Megaliths which explored the interface between electronic ambience and beat-driven music. Megaliths sits at the periphery of the dancefloor friendly beats, instead honing in on rhythm as melody and ambience as acoustic space. Live the Dream marks a shift towards a beat-driven style, reassembling the components of early 90s dance through a stream-of-consciousness approach with a keen sonic-curiosity. It questions how, as individuals, we develop a sense of connection to a cultural moment, how the nature of that connection can bridge a feeling of abstraction, and whether it poses a barrier to contribute to the cannon of nostalgia associated with a past event.
His music blends an eclectic range of disparate influences together creating vibrant, euphoric dance music collages. Hugely influenced by the music of Djrum, SOPHIE, Photek and the audiovisual work of Mark Leckey, DMG carves out a niche exploring the impact of low-fidelity digital technology, the aesthetics of sonic artefacts and an evocation of the golden mid-90s era of hard-hitting big beats. DMG’s focus has moved towards dancefloor friendly, sonically-curious sound which has characterised his releases to date.
In parallel with his free composition work, DMG has scored for screen and stage, delivering the sound design and score for Juri Krutii’s ‘Eudaimonia’ and Teuchter company’s ‘Tiger and ADA’ which toured the international Fringe Festival circuit. He continues to foster a vibrant network of collaborative relationships with musicians around the world. He is the co-founder of the web-based digital imprint Melor Records alongside Berlin-based Tef Dara and Seattle-based Cameron McNair.
For more information on DMG please check his instagram, website and youtube.