Dedications III by DJ Techné

“Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.”
—Rick Rubin

Dedications III (2024) completes the trilogy I started back in 2013. The album builds on the previous two, continuing to explore the space between poetry/words and music, and the intersections between jazz, hip-hop, and beyond. Additionally, there is a nod to film, with the cover serving as an homage to Saul Bass’s iconic Vertigo poster. Vertigo is a film about mirroring and doubling, as well as obsession—the desire to create the perfect person, a meta-commentary on filmmaking and art, and the impossibility and danger of such an act.

In large part, Dedications III is about the creative act, an extended homage to the act of being creative. Like the other projects, the album draws from various genres. If you listen closely, you will hear J Dilla, Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, Ray Barretto, Dead Prez, Miles Davis, among a slew of other voices, sounds, samples, echoes, and cuts. The last two tracks look more outward, remixing Saul Williams’s “Not in Our Name” and ending with a simple mashup of Zeinab Shaath’s 1973 “The Urgent Call of Palestine” with Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die,” as read by the legendary actor Brian Cox. Both Shaath’s song and Alareer’s poem changed something in me the first time I heard them, and the message in each remains as urgent as ever.

As with the other two projects, I played most of the drums on an MPC Live, and many of the samples are recorded directly from vinyl. Dedications is a close listening exercise: it is a portal to the past and the future.

The music is FREE and is a not-for-profit creative project (although you can donate to my musical praxis and future projects when downloading).

DJ Techné is a Nanaimo-based turntable sound artist and writer.

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