A5, 40 pages, Black & white printing, Saddle stitched, Softcover, 2024

If Basic Channel wrote a screenplay ....or Hegel tried his hand at a thriller... ....perhaps even if a prime time cop show was transmitted in morse code... ....it might come out something like Dave Donnelly's 'Dialogue #8'. Designed to be acted onstage, spoken aloud, played back or read internally, it's the fictionalised account of an interrogation between two characters that features pure dialogue with no stage directions or other messaging besides the information that comes out of the characters' mouths. As such, it takes the form of a bare frame upon which you, the reader, hang the detail. Think of it as a tabula rasa, or musical elements awaiting your remix, or whatever rubric suits you. What is important is that you, reader, will decide the tone of voice, the clenched fist, the wry smile. The scaffolding may be set, but the space between the bars is wide open. Published in two parts (No Roof Only Sky 4 and 6), the dialogue is a series of conversations between A, a litigator, and B, the litigated-against. B has been found guilty and sentenced to a novel punishment: execution by suicide. Can A convince B of remorse, and therefore of the need for self-inflicted justice? Can B argue against the logic of the state, and for a path towards survival? What, ultimately, would it mean to emerge intact from this discussion over "philosophy with a gun in its hand"? The included soundtrack features Donnelly's live, one-take cello recordings looped and drifted through an off-kilter delay pedal, bouncing drones and motifs across the stereo field like lines of dialogue traded between characters. Equal parts Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, Robert Fripp and Hildur Guðnadóttir, it forms an arresting complement to the verbal back-and-forth contained in this life or death cross-examination.

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