Artist Profile: Blue Lake

Multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Jason Dungan, under the alias Blue Lake, crafts spacious and engaging string-based compositions that experiment and play joyously within the sacrosanct realm of sound.

His newest project, Weft, shows the Copenhagen-based musician at his most exploratory; the further one attempts to parse out the plethora of sounds enmeshed into each track, the more the indelible multitude grows.

For such a specially talented musician, Dungan’s journey began very typically. Like many, he picked up a guitar for the first time as a teenager. He had played cello as a younger boy in a school program, but, after moving to another city, had decided that guitar was more accessible. 

He went to college in Vermont, earning his degree in film, and, for much of his 20s, he worked as a filmmaker and visual artist. In college, he was involved in the local music scene, and his yearning for and interest in the possibilities of sound slowly developed as he worked with various bands in that time.

His experiences with Squares and Triangles, a band and music collective that has been working together since 2007, helped to cement this interest in his mind.

“I never went to music school or anything, but playing in that band, for me, I think was the turning point of really thinking about what it meant to make music: what it meant to make records.”

As music began to take over a larger part of his life, Dungan found himself taking it more and more seriously. By the time the COVID-19 Pandemic began, he had already returned to recording solo music on a four-track and experimenting with instrument building.

“I started getting into instrument building because I had this light-bulb moment where I realized you could get access to sounds that were unconventional…If you're a non-musician, instrument building is attractive because there's no history to the instrument; there's no right or wrong way of playing it.” 

While Dungan plays a variety of instruments, he says that he has long been attracted to the versatility and depth of sound that string instruments possess. He specializes in making zithers, a flat instrument with any number of strings stretched across its soundboard that embody this variability in sound and timbre.

Concomitantly, each instrument is itself a work of physical art, taking on the properties of its spatial and temporal occupancies.

Dungan, whose wife is also an artist, has a deep understanding of this valuable interplay, and it manifests itself in myriad ways on his most recent project. Even the album cover, which was designed by his wife, possesses complex allusions to the soundscape of Weft.

“She and I have shared conversations for more than 20 years, and I think, because I make my work and she makes her work and we do that in a kind of conversation, for me it becomes a natural visual connector to the music. I can see a lot of connections to the music in the work just because we're so close.”

In short, it is this grasp on the inherent connectedness in art, the web-like structures that make up our experiences in and with art, that best displays Dungan’s special skill as an artist and musician. As he works on his newest project, which he has just finished recording, it is certain that this theme will continue to pervade his work.