A Curator of Sound and Sustaining Creation with Randall Dunn
A Curator of Sound and Sustaining Creation with Randall Dunn
Producer and studio visionary Randall Dunn talks touring, risk, stewardship, and the human side of sonic innovation, charting a path for music that thrives beyond trends.
When The Blank Mag meets Randall Dunn, he’s dialling in from a Starbucks somewhere in middle America, midway through a 50-state tour with experimental vocalist, Charmaine Lee. This tour is equal parts celebration and pilgrimage: together, they are bringing their new label’s ethos - strange, boundary-pushing sounds - to communities off the well-trodden cultural map. “We’re not just doing Chicago and New York,” Dunn says, smiling into his webcam. “We’re out in Appalachia, Alaska, Kentucky. It’s about encouraging people to gather, to listen, to remember what music can do outside of the news cycle.”
For more than three decades, Dunn's life has been a continuous process of blurring lines between engineer, producer, composer, and curator. Always moving with conviction through the intensities of every medium he works within, he’s carved out a career defined by fluid movement and restless curiosity. Shaping records for Wolves in the Throne Room and Sunn O))), or collaborating with composers like the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, sits seamlessly alongside nurturing a community at his New York studio, a space that functions as both creative workshop and cultural hub.
At the core is a philosophy that treats sound as a living object, resistant to commodification. Dunn, inspired by early Brian Eno, approaches his collaborators with the impulse to inhabit sonic worlds together, rather than impose genre or expectations. “I feel more like a cabinet maker these days than a producer,” he says. “I’m trying to build objects of sound with people I love.” That instinct - to listen deeply and build together - anchors his work on equal footing with technical craft.
The origins of Dunn’s relationship with sound stretch back to childhood, when the immersive audio of David Lynch films opened his imagination. Studying film composition and sound design in Seattle led him into studios, bypassing graduation in favour of a real-world apprenticeship. Working alongside Jack Endino, a formative figure in Seattle’s grunge scene, positioned Dunn at the heart of records that would shape a generation. Later, through Critters Buggin, he absorbed the improvisatory culture of jazz, exchanging stories with musicians who oscillated between sessions with John Brion, Fiona Apple, and even David Bowie.
It was in the experimental metal community around Southern Lord Records, however, that Dunn discovered a space where boundaries of genre dissolved entirely, and sound became pure narrative material. Here, he developed a signature approach that would define his career, colliding strings with drone, shaping studio accidents into art, and letting intuition dictate direction.
"A lot of production has been replaced by the idea of just choosing samples. But real production is emotional, phenomenological. It’s about knowing a song from the ground up and creating an environment where the artist feels secure."
Dunn’s apprenticeship brought its own lessons in craft and courage. He recalls learning to slice tape under the watchful eyes of mentors, the physicality and anxiety of working analogue: alone in the studio, a razor blade, tasked with executing an edit before the engineer returned from coffee. That hands-on initiation still informs how he sees production - a careful balance of technical skill and emotional presence. “A lot of production has been replaced by the idea of just choosing samples,” he reflects. “But real production is emotional, phenomenological. It’s about knowing a song from the ground up and creating an environment where the artist feels secure.” Dunn believes that too often, the conversation around music-making ignores the earthiness and spirit at its heart.
Whether working in film, records, or experimental spaces, Dunn's practice is guided by immediacy and trust in collaboration. This comes through vividly in his approach to his label projects: four days in the studio with an artist, one day to mix, and the work is finished. He finds purity in constraint, recalling the spontaneity of old jazz records. Across disciplines, Dunn’s ability to translate between cerebral composers and instinctive songwriters has become a kind of superpower - sometimes, beginning with poetry, sometimes with sound, always searching for a foothold in the collaborators' world.
Credit: Circular Ruin Studio
Running a studio is, for Dunn, an act of community-building as much as technical stewardship. Opening his New York space just before the first COVID lockdown, he found himself mixing more records than ever, supporting artists remotely while building a hub for film scoring, record-making, and instrument design with trusted partners Arjan Miranda and Ben Greenberg. Now, education and instrument creation are on the horizon, where they’ll sit alongside production, extending the studio’s reach in new directions.
His collaboration with instrument makers like Slate + Ash began with a playful, snarky comment during lockdown, and grew into something more - a continuing effort to keep tools, samples, and libraries unpredictable and alive. “I call it a phenomenology pack,” Dunn explains. “It’s not hammer-nail-done. Leave it out too long and it dries up. It changes.” For him, preservation means keeping music wild and not letting innovation be stripped of its human fingerprints in the name of commercial scaling.
“The main priority of my life is creating and helping people make great records.”
Themes of preservation and mentorship thread repeatedly through his conversation, especially in the wake of figures like Steve Albini. Dunn sees his generation as crucial - straddling digital and analogue, bridging past experience into new contexts and tools. He advocates for the kind of elders who invite younger artists into deeper creative processes, not simply the easy solutions of sample libraries or plugins. “We’re losing a holistic sense of collaboration,” he warns. “I want to keep spaces where sound is tactile, communal, and lived.”
As he tours with Charmaine Lee, observes performances, and plans new projects, Dunn’s focus is on efficiency with sacrificing depth, sharpening his process, and listening actively. The continuum keeps evolving, but the driving ethos remains unchanged.
Credit: @randallbdunn Instagram | Randall & Zola Jesus
After nearly 30 years and over 500 records, Dunn shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, he’s expanding the frame: studio, label, film, education, instruments - all parts of one continuum. To Dunn, preservation isn’t nostalgia, but a way to keep sound alive: “It’s not about designing sound,” he says, leaning back with a half-smile. “It’s about letting it live.”
