We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christopher and Hannah Lynch a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Christopher and Hannah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Each quarterly volume of Dada Duende Record Club starts with a theme that prompts ideas for contributing artists. We invite a group of artists–one musical act, several visual artists, and 1-2 literary artists who we feel will do well with the given theme–and it takes off from there!
What is especially meaningful about our project for us is that it lifts OTHER artists and allows them to play and experiment in a relatively low-pressure setting. It hopefully exposes them to a few other artists who they may not have otherwise gotten to know. We intentionally include both established and emerging artists when we cast our net for contributors for a new theme. Because our current output is so minimal—we only offer 100 membership subscriptions as of now—what we are hoping to offer to our artistic contributors is more of an opportunity to play and try something different than to network and hustle to further their careers (though its nice if that happens, too!). We sincerely hope to create a sense of artistic community with this project, for everyone involved—the contributing artists, ourselves, and DDRC subscribing members, several of whom are also contributors or will be in the future. It’s nice that we are not beholden to anyone other than ourselves with regard to meeting some sort of bottom line—if we break even financially with this project we feel like it’s a success for us.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Dada Duende Record Club is a quarterly subscription (billed monthly) to sets that contain a theme-prompted lathe-cut record, a softcover visual and literary art book, and an archival print of one of the visual artworks from the book. All are sized to roughly 8″x8″ dimensions. Even though we are billed as a “record club” like the old monthly record and tape clubs from the 70s and 80s, what we offer is more of an artistic document/record based on a prompt given to the several invited contributors who make art in different mediums. We see each set as a beautiful artifact.
There are four of us: Chris and Hannah Lynch, Luca Gunther, and Steve Price. Dada Duende Record Club is the brainchild of Chris Lynch, a veteran of the Minneapolis music scene who after many years of writing pop songs decided that “he was sick of words” and shifted his focus to writing neo-classical instrumental songs based on French Musette music from the 30s and 40s. Luckily, you can’t swing a guitar in Minneapolis without hitting a musician of some sort, and Chris was able to put together a formidable quintet of string instrumentalists to perform these songs–if you are interested in following this digression, check out www.dustofsuns.com. Chris’s wife Hannah is a portrait and fine art photographer and multimedia visual artist herself, as well as being a curious arts enthusiast and “novice curator”. After the two collaborated on their own musical and visual art box set a few years back, they felt it would be a natural and worthwhile progression to continue making similar work but to bring in OTHER artists and collaborators to contribute work based on given themes. When Chris stumbled upon the relatively recent trend of using vintage record lathe machines to cut homemade records, he enlisted his friends Luca Gunther and Steve Price to help learn how to use this equipment and to record contributing musical performers in a manner that works with this somewhat antiquated technology. Luca is a musician, an art enthusiast, and a collector of visual art and oddball musical equipment and “things that go ‘bleep-bloop'”. Steve is a mainstay in the local Twin Cities music scene who plays in multiple bands and makes a living as a professional producer and recording engineer.
These four are longtime friends who are happily jumping into the deep end of a pool that they do not have a whole lot of experience swimming in, with the earnest intention of fostering a creative community centered on collaboration, play and experimentation rather than the usual competitive hustle of “making it” in the art world.
What we make: Each record is cut by hand in real-time and played back to confirm that it is up to snuff, with production help and input from Steve and Luca. The book is curated and lovingly put together by Hannah, who is in the habit of saying, “I’m a photographer, not a designer!” but who is nonetheless learning a bit more about design with each volume made. The limited-run prints are made by Hannah at home using an archival pigment-based printer. Each set comes in a simple card stock wrap designed by another local artist and musician, Pete Rivard, and hand-stamped with a rubber stamp made for each theme. Because so much of this is done at home alongside our creative “day jobs”, we are currently only offering 100 membership subscriptions, though we will likely flex up a bit on that number down the line because we are getting close to selling out our subscriptions. We make 100 of each set, plus several artist-proof copies that are given to each contributing artist.
It should also be said that DDRC’s brand and aesthetic have benefited immensely from input provided by Faride Mereb and Oriana Nuzzi of Letra Muerta, Inc. based in NYC. Hannah and Faride met online when Faride taught a class about photo book design, and have since become friends and collaborators on this project. Faride and Oriana have designed all of our covers so far, as well as helping with curation. They are passionate about creating books that are works of art, and we highly recommend them to any artist out there who is looking into publishing a book of either visual or literary art. Please see https://letramuerta.nyc/ for more info!
Please note that there is further bio information for each of us and for ALL of our contributing artists on our website, it’s well worth checking out the artists’ bios on the pages for each published volume.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
While social media can be problematic in a lot of ways in our current cultural landscape, we have found it invaluable for both getting the word out about our project AND a very positive resource for meeting and being exposed to a wide variety of artists whom we have wound up befriending and inviting to contribute to this project. A fair number of the artists who have contributed so far are visual and literary artists that Hannah has met quite by accident in the process of curating her own “arts community feed” on Instagram. We have never paid for advertising for our project, but have relied on word of mouth and especially social media sharing of what we are working on. I’m not sure this would work so well for a larger enterprise, but because we are relatively small and as of right now do not intend to mass-produce what we make, it is working out great for us to use social media in this way.
We also send out a weekly newsletter (which is free, of course) to everyone who subscribes to it via our website. Rather than being a junk email that is prodding you to buy something, we use it to feature information about our artist contributors and share tidbits about things we find interesting and quirky rabbit holes that we like to go down. We have an old-timey blog that we share some of these things on, as well. So far, feedback on the newsletter and blog has been quite positive, and it’s an email that people look forward to opening and reading every Sunday morning. Your readers are welcome to sign up here: https://www.dadaduenderecordclub.com/dada-duende-journal
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
It would be lovely if the current arts “ecosystem” was valued more for what it contributes to culture at large. It’s hard to make a living as an artist in our culture, especially if you are not white and male–it has to be said. Museums and arts institutions need to listen to and invest in artists who represent marginalized communities whose artwork they have a long history of co-opting and capitalizing on. This has thankfully been brought to light in the last few years but needs to continue to be a priority and be truly implemented beyond lip service. So, in our pie-in-the-sky view, society can best support artists by actively investing financial support for the arts locally/nationally/globally, from grade schools to galleries and museums, and by making a concerted effort to include both emerging and established artists from a wide range of cultural experiences and perspectives.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.dadaduenderecordclub.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dadaduenderecordclub/
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/p/Dada-Duende-Record-Club-100076855144062/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3_cHvIOebDJ2U8x4lnEzQA –you can see a demo of Chris lathe cutting a record here!
- Other: https://www.instagram.com/hannahlynchphotography/ https://www.threads.net/@dadaduenderecordclub
Image Credits
Hannah Lynch