2001 AQ02
John Duncan and Francisco López.
Data files, shortwave.
Double CD in doublefold digipak cover.
Honorable Mention, 2000 Prix Ars Electronica.
Released by .absolute. and Allquestions.
Double CD by John Duncan and Francisco López, who have worked on sound materials recorded and produced together with the other musician. Duncan’s piece, “FLEX”, is the more elusive of the two: capturing our thoughts and leading them into a universe made of extremely subtle shades, deep and hidden pulsations, suspended breaths of sound. An organic work, FLEX develops for over an hour, expanding as if it were living material following a strong, determined interior tension. Here Duncan seems to return to the discourse of THE CRACKLING, going even deeper into reflections on invisible forces with extra-human dimensions that regulate the course of existence, a theme confronted in an original way through the creation of strong sonic metaphors: microscopic impulses or immense spaces drawn from broad sounds, with a forceful presence and at the same time full of allusion: reminding us of certain films by Herzog in which the painstaking description of the climbing of a mountain is not only a climb, and the struggle against a river is never only a struggle against a river. The austere structure of FLEX challenges us with a sound that slowly unfolds, assuming diverse forms but always consequential to the others, filling the entire audio spectrum or drifting in an immense emptiness: a flow of lava, overwhelming in its progress and devastating in its calm. The work, fruit of the attention to every slight detail and of extremely worked sound, poses an intriguing challenge to those who like to lose themselves in complex sound structures.
— Daniela Cascella, Blow Up, September 2001
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