The following was written for the upcoming release of a dk compilation called The Least of dk:

dk: the mystery of history

I can’t remember the first time I met dk. Sometimes I am not sure I ever did meet him. It’s difficult at my advanced age to imagine that I was ever young, had the kind of life that would take me deep into the dark night of the soul, down into a spiralling bohemian madness of some kind of quasi-avant-garde sleaze.

Toronto was a dreary place in the 70s (was it the 70s?). It was in a hangover from years of Orange Order morality and hypocrisy. All the stores on Queen Street were covered in dust. The street would be quiet and sun soaked grey. The storeowners were old and didn’t expect customers, nor want them it seemed to me. The old warehouse district was mostly inscrutable, often empty, imposing and quiet. Perhaps such dull vacancy gave birth to the disturbing dissonant character of dk.

But the story of dk doesn’t begin here. Perhaps this story has no beginning. dk is like the eternal return of incompetence, the revenge of inadequacy and frustration. This lack was nurtured in a satellite town north of Toronto, Litmus Hill. Litmus Hill was one of those small towns whose suburban accretions swallowed it. Litmus Hill was a tedious municipality that was without hope or fortune, desperately unfunny. What was once a haven of grease monkeys and trailer trash had become a wet dream of class mobility without an idea. It became the middling ennui of a conspicuous lack of interest. Strip malls and car dealers. Into this land of lurid expectations of bungalow violence and matching avocado fridge and stove culture came one shy guy.

dk kept his head down to avoid the punches of farmers from Cedar Creek bused into the blackboard rainforest of Mudview Secondary School. Here dk made his first ventures into mass culture with a number of musical non-events. There were bands with bad names and no performances. There were years of practicing In Da Gada daVida and Communication Breakdown. Before the mass murder and the burning of the school dk spent time listening to The Move, Chicken Shack, Stockhausen, Pharoah Sanders and Cornelius Cardew and reading R.D.Laing and Letters of Van Gogh. Lack of sleep and dull conversation made him selective with his social contacts.

But what did this really have to do with dk. dk never lived in Litmus Hill. Because dangerous cable TV wiring and resulting barbecue conflagration obliterated Litmus Hill, it appealed to those spreading rumours about dk. The high school mass murder just before that added to the mystique. A teen named Dirk Kuyts disappeared before the bomb went off. Dirk Kuyts was a known follower of Bakunin, Kropotkin and Ernie Kovacs. The Fluxus Artists Public Relations and Dada Wire Services made up most of what was written about dk in the press.

dk must have, it would seem to me, spent time laughing it up at that humorous masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . Songs such as Floating in the Caribbean do show a deep understanding of Gilbert Sorrentino and Wyndham Lewis. Musically, he may be less than incompetent, but his pretensions certainly speak to thoughtful appreciation of Earle Brown and the Kinks.

I may be amongst the few individuals who are thought to know dk personally. I am not sure you can know dk personally. dk is a phantom, a kind of wispy presence of non-thought, a Cartesian demon, a Leibnizian, monad, a placeholder in an ontological lack. Gianluca Vialli has argued that dk represents a real slippage of a monstrous musical machine. dk’s music, if you can call it that (it’s more of a category mistake), empties itself of being. It kind of sounds like music but feels more like pain. Its like a mosquito caught in your ear.

Robert Ashley, hearing an early composition by dk, knitted his brows thoughtfully and generously offered words of encouragement. Perhaps if he knew know what he had encouraged he might have thought twice. John Bentley Mays also heard early dk pieces and suggested they were soundtracks. Yes, soundtracks in a way, they are perhaps soundtracks for an interminable post-modern paradox. John Oswald once told him that he preferred his trumpet playing to his sax playing. George Manupelli, filmmaker of the Once Group, certainly heard some of his work but whether he enjoyed it, it’s hard to say.

dk may work on the boundary of pleasure. His work may refer to pleasure, but his work is certainly not about pleasure. As an empty stomach elicits the call for some alimentation, perhaps his work served to fill some yawning cavernous lack in him - the desire to be happy as a soccer hooligan.

The question might be why now? Why bring out this compilation of dubious material after some 20 years of silence? It’s not as though people are clamouring for more dk. Neither were they back then in the dark days of the 80s, after the Reagan-Thatcher coup d’etat, and the hucksterist corruption of Mulroney. It was the dawning of the dark ages of trickle down culture. Perhaps dk’s Liberationist Winternational leanings were silenced by this triumph of the swill. Perhaps the world and dk were no longer on speaking terms. The rise of globalization and the metaphysical audacity of dk’s attack on technique and beauty were not capable of kissing and making up. Maybe dk was crushed by the weight of the oncoming metacyborg’s digitization of culture. There was no hope for music without short skirts and buff abs.

On the other hand dk was, let’s face it, irritating. He had what they call in the radio biz, high irritation factor. Good for selling beer, sometimes, but not that good for selling the idea of selling beer. And dk was hardly a blip on the radar of those musicians who were as huge as musicians can be. dk was never as profound as U2 nor as deep as Peter Gabriel. Most importantly, the musicians that should be most challenged by his approach weren’t listening. Neither was anyone else for that matter. The people who were listening can be counted. Easily. It doesn’t require calculus or Bayesian probability theory to estimate the impact of dk. Virtually nil. In fact dk barely had an impact on dk. He was a rebel in a vacuum, or a vacuum of a rebel.

I often heard dk talk about music but I am not sure I ever listened to him. He would give me these cheesy handmade cassettes, but I used to tape over them. The slogan of the day for guerrilla artists like me, was Home Taping is Killing Music. I waived that flag high. I was making as many copies of Motorhead records as I could. I didn’t sell them or even give them to friends. I just kept them. 100,000 copies of Motorhead were in boxes in my garage. I was happy at the thought that I was killing music. I thumbed my nose at music.

Music was a cancer on the arse of the world. It was very irritating to walk down the street and constantly hear Scritti Poltitti’s Jacques Derrida dance track. You could never get away from it. The ubiquity of music as soundtrack, and an advertisement to consumerism, was galling. As Adorno pointed out so brilliantly, pop music is advertisement for itself. Pop radio was in fact all advertisement all the time. Maybe it was dk who said that. No I think it was Donal McGraith. Anyways I did what I could to kill music. Perhaps dk was trying to kill music too in his own misguided and confused way.

So here is a CDR of the least of dk. Perhaps it’s a small festering wound on the giant arse of culture or just an infinitesimally small quantum accident of evolution. Nobody knows the answer to the question. Nobody really cares. I certainly don’t care. We are drowning in drivel. Do we need anymore little discs? dk may have thought at some point it was better to give it a try. I am not so sure. Maybe he should have left it to the experts, the real musicians, those who understand how to sell music. Maybe dk can be a lesson to those who think music should be a gift, playful and open to failure. Stop now and let iTunes take care of that business.

--Greg Thompson.

Statement from dk:

I don’t know Greg Thompson. I never met Robert Ashley, John Bentley Mays, John Oswald or George Manupelli. None of the other named people or places are familiar to me, if they exist. I haven’t the faintest idea what Greg Thompson is talking about except for the idea that Home Taping is Killing Music. That idea is certainly something I am for. In fact Home Taping is the only source of a freedom from, a release, from the pain of music. The rest, the market of music, the buying and selling of culture by art pimps and whores -- that is noise. Music can only be freely offered as a gift or it is in fact noise, toxic waste. It’s the music business that is killing music. Anyone who thinks they own music is out of their minds. They own nothing and what they think they have is stolen.

--dk