CHRIS DADGE BIOGRAPHY:

Chris Dadge lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he works as a producer/engineer, percussionist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, record label operator, and concert organizer.

Over the last half-decade or so, Dadge has developed a reputation as a recording engineer, mixer, and producer in his home studio, Child Stone Studios. To date, his recordings of acts such as Ryan Bourne, Samantha Savage Smith, Stucco, Temps, Bad Bodies, Jom Comyn, Victrix, Hermitess, Sunglaciers, Beta Boys, Thomas Thomas, and Oranje have been released. As a co-producer (with Chad VanGaalen), he worked on Marlaena Moore’s sophomore album Pay Attention, Be Amazed (2020), and new albums from Eye Of Newt, Mythmaking, Samantha Savage Smith, Hermitess, and Tys Burger are in the works.

As a musician & performer, the bulk of Dadge’s output occurs in two main fields. Since 2015, Dadge has played in Sub Pop recording artist Chad VanGaalen’s backing band, The Bleach Wipes, and appears on all of the studio albums by Toronto-based indie pop darlings Alvvays, including their last two albums Antisocialites and Blue Rev, which took home Juno Awards in 2018 and 2023 for Alternative Album of the Year. Dadge also plays drums for and co-produces records with Samantha Savage Smith; her most recent album Fake Nice was released in April of 2022 to great critical acclaim. For more than a decade he led Lab Coast, a critically acclaimed bedroom pop combo know for their "short, deceptively simple drops of catchy-as-hell indie rock" (Exclaim!). They issued four albums, and their last release, a compilation on UK-based Faux Discx Records, was praised by AllMusicGuide for its "catchy lo-fi pop gems...solid from start to finish."

Concurrently in the pop music world, Dadge maintains an active schedule as a hired musician, and has logged many hours onstage and in the studio with different bands throughout the years. Some of these artists include Bennett Mitchell, Yves Jarvis, LT Leif, Luka Kuplowsky, Marlaena Moore, Maddie Storvold, Crystal Eyes, Jon Mckiel, JOYFULTALK, Hermitess, Lorrie Matheson, Jon Gant, Mike Feuerstack (aka Snailhouse), Woodpigeon, Emily Triggs, John Rutherford, Ryan Bourne, Kenna Burima, Tariq, Aaron Booth, and Clinton St. John. He has appeared on over 100 wildly diverse recordings – many of them one-off sessions at Lorrie Matheson’s Arch Audio Studios – and spent two seasons as a support musician for the Banff Centre Indie Band Residency, where he worked alongside the likes of Brendan Canning, Charles Spearin, Grammy Award-winning producer Shawn Everett, and the Tragically Hip's latter day engineer Nyles Spencer.

In the field of free improvisation, Dadge has spent the bulk of his years playing percussion, developing a voice based on an increasingly open-ended variety of sound-generating objects, integrating found items, extreme tunings, and re-purposed strings. Massimo Ricci writes, “the almost perfect balance between skin, wood and metal-derived timbres is definitely cherished,” and David Keenan (The Wire magazine) noted, “Dadge has a fleet, needling style that would transpose Milford Grave’s multi-pulse work to a looser, more thought-paced setting, working in bursts of propulsion and single emphatic sound events.” This underlying quest for a personalized vocabulary led to the broadening of the instrumental palette, adding violin, broken electronics, crude sampling, and various other small instruments to the list, which The Wire's Byron Coley called "a splendid, low-bore Improv racket in the classic pots-and-pans style."

In 2019, Dadge assembled a veritable supergroup of Calgary-based improvisors called Circular Sparrow. The group features Dadge alongside multi-instrumentalist Lydia Pineau, flute specialist Jiajia Li, and saxophonists Nate Waters and Jonathon Wilcke, and they convene to realize Dadge's compositional frameworks for improvisation. Dadge also maintains a duo with Wilcke (the two also released Rural Optimism, a trio with guitarist Joe Morris), and has additionally, in mostly ad hoc, one-off settings, worked with Peter Evans, Joe Morris, Jason Kahn, Tim Olive, Eugene Chadbourne, Jack Wright, Chris Riggs, Eric Chenaux, Mats Gustafsson, Christian Munthe, Ellwood Epps, Bill Horist, John Oswald, and Colin Fisher.

Early on, these activities in improvised music necessitated an overarching identity, which appeared under the name Bug Incision, a concert series and record label run by Dadge. Nearly 100 critically acclaimed recordings and 18 years' worth of near-monthly concerts have occurred. The series is a central and cherished part of Calgary's experimental music community, providing support, guidance, and a regular performance outlet for players of all ability and experience levels.

In addition to strictly music-based work, Dadge was also a member of Theatre Junction's Resident Company of Artists from 2010-2013, composing and performing music for original creations Lucy Lost Her Heart and Sometime Between Now and When The Sun Goes Supernova, and a production of Martin Crimp's Attempts On Her Life. He has composed three scores - PLACE/is a city written on this body? (2020), POLKA(dots) (2015), and We All Need To Say GOODBYE/ADIOS (2013) - for dance/multimedia performance artist Rosanna Terraciano, composed and recorded a soundtrack for multi-media artist Yvonne Mullock’s installation Harmonia (2021), and accompanied Montreal-based dancer/choreographer Katie Ward on theremin for her piece Reality 1.