2003 xxxi Shortwave.
Composed by John Duncan and Peter Fleur.
Processed and mixed at Scrutto by John Duncan and in Amsterdam by Peter Fleur.
AGGREGATE mastered in Amsterdam by Peter Fleur.
THRESHOLD mastered at Scrutto by John Duncan.
CD released by edition …
THE SCATTERING is a collaborative release from the exemplary John Duncan and the little known sound artist Peter Fleur, who had a few minor league successes as L.O.S.D. with Radboud Mens. Here, the two artists collaborate on one long track and offer solo works to round out the album, always using data files and shortwave as the source material. Each of the tracks have been severely manipulated with loads of DSP effects, feedback accumulation, and resampling techniques to form plastic drones rippling with a dramatic psychic tension. As on Duncan’s previous album Da Sich Die Machtgier…, the dominant sounds are the dissonant fillibration from densely packed samples that have all been timestretched towards oblivion. The collabortive piece builds dramatically through those cracked drones with a mechnized bass pulse ominously crawling below. Fleur’s solo work splits itself between a Francisco Lopez-esque low end rumble and a cascade of digitized textures amassing into frigid wall of noise. The final track is a signature John Duncan piece, where he amplifies the unsettling nature of shortwave’s liminal spaces between the active broadcast frequencies. Shortwave has long been a favorite medium for Duncan, not only for its aesthetic qualities but its allegorical properties of psychological unrest, hidden communications, information wars, etc. In this piece for The Scattering, Duncan contextualizes shortwave static as a parallel to somatic fluctuations, where the sounds breathe, ebb, and contract in response to a subconscious intellect. Very very nice.
— Jim Haynes, Aquarius
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