Satie’s “Véritables Préludes Flasques (pour un chien)”, 1912

Dave Allen doesn’t exactly make art about music, and he doesn’t use music or rock culture to stand in for something else. He makes art that uses the materials and situations of rock and roll to expand its own idea of itself, because that idea is still one of our few remaining concepts of autonomous, rebellious communal activity. At the same time, he uses these ideas to make art that works within another, newer tradition. His Hansa Studios Version 1 draws attention to the supposed silence, or rather ambient background sound present in the deserted studios where David Bowie recorded Heroes and Low. For the Dogs is a version of ‘Véritables Préludes Flasques (pour un chien)’, the 1912 score by Eric Satie, rendered at tone frequencies above 18KHz.