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Dylan Nyoukis (b. 1974) Dylan Nyoukis Blood Stereo (Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance) BIOGRAPHY Dylan Nyoukis's work exists on the fringe of contemporary avant garde art and underground DIY insurrection. As a leading light in the UK's tape/CD-R scene, Nyoukis has long functioned as a rallying point for artists working to clear a space for original, non-idiomatic sound and feral performance modes. Alongside his sister and long-term collaborator Lisa (Dora Doll), he founded the Chocolate Monk label in 1993, an early experimental music imprint that combined hi-jacks of outmoded media - cassette, CD-R, pen and paper - with cutting edge investigations of the limits of form, while functioning as a home for Nyoukis's own projects, Prick Decay, Decaer Pinga, Ceylon Mange, Blood Stereo and countless one-off collaborations. Prick Decay's 2001 album, Guidelines For Basement Non-Fidel, has long been regarded as one of the founding documents of the new weird century, alongside Harry Pussy's "Smash The Mirror" and Sun City Girls Torch Of The Mystics. Nyoukis's early material paralleled international developments in post-noise syntax but his approach has become increasingly sophisticated while still retaining a refusenik energy, interrogating sound-poetry and musique concrete strategies while always working outside of their inherited strictures. His current group, Blood Stereo, is a duo with his wife, the musician and artist Karen Constance, that explores hand-cranked 20th century technology in combination with epiglottal gymnastics and free music modes inherited as much from punk rock's mutilated aesthetic as utopian art styles. His solo vocal and tape work continues to push the envelope in terms of the expressive options offered by amplified physicality while his rejection of any kind of theoretical backdrop liberates him from servitude to any specific agenda. He remains a singular voice. Over the years he has collaborated with artists as diverse as Ludo Mich, Chris Corsano, Thurston Moore, Sun City Girls, Bill Nace, Heather Leigh Murray, Phil Minton, Neil Campbell, Usurper and Wolf Eyes. He lives in Brighton, England. David Keenan, Glasgow, June 2009