Take Note: Martin Dosh

Martin Dosh is best known as a one-man band. Amid a sea of instruments and electronics, Dosh weaves spellbinding musical soundscapes that blend jazz, techno, hip-hop, and ambient with a healthy dose of improvisation. But on May 3, the Walker Art Center is presenting The World of Dosh: Martin Dosh and Friends, an event that brings Dosh together with several of his favorite collaborators, including Michael Lewis (Happy Apple, Alpha Consumer), Andrew Broder (Fog), Jeremy Ylvisaker (Redstart), and Andrew Bird. The show features songs from every phase of Dosh’s career, including a few from his new CD, Wolves and Wishes, which is scheduled for release on May 10.

The Walker Gig: I’ve done various events at the Walker over the years, and they basically asked me who would be in my dream band. It blew me away. Everyone I invited has contributed to my recordings at one time or another, so we’re going to do a kind of This Is Your Life retrospective of songs I’ve done over the past decade or so, plus a few off the new CD.

Favorite Collaborators: I chose them because they’re all really good listeners. The type of music I do doesn’t have any words. It’s not jazz, exactly, but there’s a lot of improvisation, and all of these people know how to work with space really well.

On Looping: I used to play drums and keyboards in a couple of other bands, and I was always trying to figure out how to contribute melodically to what the others were playing. I was doing loops on keyboards, and one day I wondered what would happen if I looped some drums. So I went into my basement, set up some microphones, and did it. When I started playing with the loops, I started hearing things I had never heard before and thought, “Man, I’ve got to do this.”

The Live Dosh Experience: The basic structure of the songs—the melody and chords—is consistent, but within that structure there’s a lot of freedom. I might play it faster, or slower, or throw in a different chord. I could play the same song every night and it would sound different.

Musical Instruments: Most of the stuff I play is percussion—drums, vibraphone, keyboard, glockenspiel. If I want bass or sax, I’ll get Mike Lewis, or if I want violin, I’ll use Andrew Bird, or whatever. The rest is done with loop pedals and a few effects.

On Composing: To make a song, I’ll compose a short loop—on drums, say—and lay that down for a click track. Then I’ll do a bunch of improv over it, find the good parts, and shuffle them around until there’s a cohesive structure. After it’s structured, I go back and learn how to play them. It’s backwards, for sure, but the end result is still a song.

On Performing: Since my process is kind of backwards, performing my pieces was weird because I had to go back and learn how to do them off my own recordings, in real time, using just a few loop pedals. My first performance was kind of a calamity, but I’ve got it down now.

What Dosh is Listening to: Alpha Consumer, Herbie Hancock, Why’s Alopecia , Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, and Devo’s Whip It.