Coming to you live from beyond the official broadcast band, PRINCESS DASHA is a top-40 bottom-feeder Frequency Modulation Mother Fucker! Drawing on techniques and traditions of ghost-channeling, plunderphonics, experimental turntable-ism, and illegal leftist radio transmissions, PRINCESS DASHA re-dj’s the radio, bringing you high-femme glossolalias conjured from—what else!—the dying light of daytime fm itself. No gods, no mastering! Radio pirate, genre mystic, 100% improvisation guaranteed, PRINCESS DASHA is scanning the waves and as far as the eye can see it’s EIGHTIES, NINETIES, WHATEVER, FOREVER.

fmmf (album release est 2025) takes two live fm radio feeds and feeds them into a laptop where analog haze meets digital destruction. performances (decompositions) are totally improvised and range from 15-60 minutes. radio is the ultimate medium of nostalgia, an increasingly obsolete form that is redolent of childhood memories, empty malls, waiting rooms, long drives, and highschool dances. by dragging the past kicking and screaming into the emergent present, fmmf breaks the veneer of mainstream pop/rock/country/classical audio production, and with it, cracks open the memories we associate with these sonic textures, inviting an individual and collective reckoning with the songs that “made us”, by remaking them in real-time. an experiment in positioning the performer on the same temporal plane as the audience–not knowing what will happen next–fmmf is an embodied practice of unknowing and a prayer for liberation from oppressive systematizations of knowledge. the real isn’t locked in, but princess dasha is.

Stream or buy digital and limited cassette release of HERBERT on bandcamp.

FAST CARS

HERBERT is a companion album to a dance piece I worked on with Alexandra Elliott from 2019-2023, called CONDUCT. Alex was interested in the choreographic language of conducting, and her research quickly led her to Herbert von Karajan. CONDUCT’s sound design was created by sampling old cassette recordings conducted by Karajan, and then improvising using a combination of Euclidean sequencers and digital effects. HERBERT is a raw, cinematic, archival sliver of the material we generated.

Herbert von Karajan was a conductor. He was a member of the Nazi party, but said during his denazification trial he only joined to help his career. Goebbels called him blessed by god. After WW2 he received forty Grammy nominations. He was a husband, and he owned a custom Porsche.

I’ve always thought of Alex’s piece as essentially an exploration of the inner life of power. But if it is a portrait of facism’s bugs bunny fantasies and delusions, it is also the knife in the portrait, the cup that will collect whatever bleeds out, and the camera crew who films the whole thing. I hope that’s what the music is like too.

Sometimes beauty isn’t enough. During the Cold War, the CIA loved secretly funding exhibitions of abstract art because changing how the work was framed made it easy to turn into propaganda. Our conduct will be remembered. Sometimes you have to pick a side. So let me be perfectly clear. You will find me among the degenerates. This album is a warning and a dreaming, for myself and others. Think what we could do with all the police cruisers. I am a wife, and I like fast cars.

princess dasha
feb 20, 2023

Alexandra Elliott – Performer + Co-Creator

Dasha Plett – Composer + Co-Creator

Max Mummery – Lighting Designer

Jillian Groening – Artistic Advisor

Ali Robson – Movement Dramaturge

Brenda McLean – Costume + Set Designer

Alex Elliott – Choreographer + Dancer

Leif Norman – Photographer

Etudes for Keyboard is a performance for typist and laptop keyboard. A possessed Macbook – a late night talk show scandal – a dance party that is yet to come – a finger-tapping ecstasy of silicone prosthetics, DIY mourning rituals, and the criminality of nonsense – Etudes for Keyboard puts the piano recital in the office tower. A trans / medial performance for the key-bored and the typing weary created with the assistance of Winnipeg director and playwright Frances Koncan and Toronto pianist Darren Creech, and first presented at Winnipeg’s Cluster Festival, Etudes for Keyboard turns the Macbook desktop into a kaleidoscope of poetry, found footage, and glitched out beats. This is our unknown language. I don’t care if I never go back.

Etudes for Keyboard
Created and Performed by Dasha Plett
Edited and directed by Frances Koncan
Piano etudes consultation by Darren Creech.

Created with the assistance of the Winnipeg Film Group, Video Pool Media Arts Centre, aceartinc., and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Winner of Best New Prairie Work at WNDX 2019

A collection of my composition and sound design work from 2019-2023. Thank you to all of the wonderful collaborators who brought these pieces to life! Featuring design work for the Stratford Festival, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, and Alexandra Elliott.