Paul Dickow

On Chandler and Dickow Play Fischer, David Chandler and Paul Dickow treat Marcus Fischer’s graphic scores as a lab problem rather than a script, using tracing paper, chalk, piezo styli, EEG data and a 1970s modular synth to probe what it means to “play” an image without simply projecting themselves onto it.

Portlander Paul Dickow, as Strategy, presents his latest album— A Cooler World. Fascinated by the unfamiliar limitations and inherent playability of a hand-me-down, 1989 model sampling keyboard, he played these pieces by hand, mostly abandoning the sequencer driven framework of sampling based music; he plays the sampler here the way a guitarist approaches the guitar. A Cooler World is a deep dive into glacial, pensive soundscapes that navigate the boundaries between experimental, ambient, and da…

180-gram LP. Includes printed inner sleeve. Like some ingenious combination of John Cage's chance operations and the numbers station data stream captured on The Conet Project, Strategy's Information Pollution immerses listeners in baffling sonic waters. It's a riveting work that converts the enigmatic effluvia of shortwave and dispatch radio chatter into thrumming, static-riddled clouds of ambience. An undercurrent of unease wafts through Information Pollution's four lengthy tracks, as barely au…

Pods of Punishment, like parallel collection Seeds of Paradise (Idle Hands), is a journey into tube-amped molten bass and media fragments. It reveals Strategy’s strong science fiction threads and fixation on radio as a musical medium: its ghostly disembodiment, its persistent familiarity, and its spontaneous impact on the sounds around it. "The unstoppable Paul Dickow a.k.a. Strategy shapeshifts between dub, techno and the ambient spaces between on 'Pods of Punishment' for Entr'acte. Covering al…