As a band, Dumbass have been performing since the mid 90s. But, influenced by the art of the happening as well as the ideas and practice of Fluxus, Fixer and Zeke have expanded their performance practice beyond just playing songs.
In addition to performances for audiences, which may take the form of straight-ahead music concerts, more theatrical pieces, or events more akin to happenings, Fixer and Zeke also perform what we classify as “actions.”
ACTIONS:
Actions are things that we do. We do them with our bodies and our minds. They are, in this sense, performances; but they are not performances directly for an audience. We developed the “actions” concept in the very early 2000s in conjunction with an album that we called “The Execution of Certain Actions.” We were exploring the idea of ritual, the place that it plays in religious systems, in magic, and in the world of meaning and action in everyday life. We then decided that the best way to explore and express the findings of our explorations for this album would be to perform a set of invented ritual actions. These actions would be the “score” for the album and would produce the music that would become the album (like a traditional musical score, when played by musicians, leads to the piece of music that the listener hears). We snuck into scrap-yards and rail-yards in the middle of the night with a portable tape-recorder, performing percussive ritual-like actions, drumming on the objects we found there. We set up situations back in the studio and performed ritual-like actions within. The resulting album is still one of our favourite works.
This focus on actions as the work of art itself, and the finished recording as merely a “record” of the actions, opened up a new creative field for us to explore. Several other “records” of actions have been created since, three of the most prominent being Stories, Summer/Winter/Two-Weeks, and The Execution of Random Actions (a sister-album to The Execution of Certain Actions).
