— Marcelo Aguirre e/i Issue 7 (spring/summer 2006)
The search for unutterable, revelatory experience has played a conspicuous, obsessive role throughout John Duncan’s irretrievable body of work. His experimental sound compositions since the late 70s, persistently evolving out of assemblages focused on a multitude of sound sources, have been occupying the hot waters of difficult, attentive listening. Ranging from his enduring exertion on shortwave, radio static or data files, to particle accelerators, seismic and barometric data, or the unusual properties of solo and massed voice, Duncan’s music has established a signature style in its striving towards clarity via elemental means.
Continually reinforced with a sensuous touch, his disorientating audio work alienates listeners psychologically, locking them into high pitched, metallic assault, as well as subtly stirring their awareness with low frequency tides. The borders of pain and pleasure conforming a single entity: as in Kantian philosophy, a transcendental end. “I’m interested in finding out what it is to be alive. And to look into that, go wherever that sort of self-research goes” he affirmed on a talk back in November 2001 in Berlin. Like in some aspects of Australian artist Alan Lamb’s decaying telegraph line music, or Spanish absolute field recordist Francisco López’s work, Duncan approaches natural phenomena scientifically rather than as musical ingredient, looking for cause and effect, surveying the sound as physical material for a sculpture. This traces to conceptual art’s prevailing ideas over product.
“I was interested in the relationship between color and emotional responses that color encourages and pulls out of us. I compose while trying to make things that would sort of manipulate me emotionally in the way that color manipulates your emotions visually” Duncan says. “I was looking for a way to do that with the frequencies of audio”, he enthuses when inquired on his transition from abstract expressionist-like painting in the 70s to a large body of work that embraces many disciplines, from an area where hidden physics melt, and leading to installation, net-art, video and psychically intense actions that meld with controversial, disconcerting consequences. He studied with influential performance artist and painter Allan Kaprow, who later participated on his and Paul Mc Carthy’s 1977 Close Radio program on KPFK in Los Angeles, a document of which, Courtesy, resurfaced in 2000 on limited edition transparent orange vinyl on the Fluxus-specialized imprint Slowscan. Duncan notes, “Kaprow encouraged me to keep making art, and unlike so many other instructors there did not try to convince me that he was a great artist. That alone gave a useful lesson into how to tell the difference between a master and a poseur. He encouraged me to go into the CalArts library and check out Avalanche magazine (which contained photos of early performance work, minimal sculpture, and conceptual art), look up the work of the Viennese Actionists. He suggested listening to records by Mauricio Kagel, Steve Reich, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. He got me searching again, gave me suggestions on where to look”. Former Vienna actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s idiosyncratic mutilation acts; Yvonne Rainer’s open dance, and Chris Burden and Barbara Smith’s provocative, galvanizing American body and performance art were all substantive in the realization of Duncan’s early creations.
Around that time, Duncan sought to catalyze a distinctive form of music with incandescent fervor amid the Los Angeles Free Music Society, in the units C.V. Massage and The Doo-Dooettes, pre-dating the liberating sonic attitude on the DIY/noise network of the 80s. The gnostic free-fall of performances like Blind Date or Maze, and his involvement with post-industrial sound for a while – collaborating with COUM / Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni-Tutti in Kokka and with The Hafler Trio’s A. McKenzie in Contact -, faced a detour. “I tried to make things that were aggressive or abrasive, jarring really, in a sense hard to listen to in order to attack the listener with sound. After a while, the need has to be satisfied. If you keep doing this same music, the same gestures, over and over again, the benefit that you are giving the audience becomes diluted; people learn to expect that. And if you need to continue doing these kinds of things, there is something missing, something you as a creator are missing. Maybe music isn’t the way to find it”.
This early sense of urgency emerged critically intact from its experiential momentum, with no signs of mellowing out. When Duncan moved to Japan in the mid-80s, shortwave radio became an intense noisemaker, and as such a rich, ideal source for unpredictable sound gathering. Harmonic hum and static hissing moving into one another as interstellar dust, augured in, via long listening sessions, a certain illusion, one which at the time was not to be obtained from conventional instruments, even FM synthesizers, which for Duncan seemed limiting and immediately recognizable. “I was looking for something that didn’t have that, and that I didn’t had to practice in order to play. Thanks to the cold war which was going on at the time, it was a sort of free-for-all when one side would transmit a signal and the other side would try to block it and somewhere in between you would get this sort of mixed buzz; you could hear the transmission, you could hear the block, and these crossed over and under each other. At times there was just this really sensual drone, and elsewhere you could hear voices that would sing like ghosts”.
Fortuitous broadcast sessions taped onto each other through a four-channel cassette recorder configured a complex flow, until Duncan discovered that computer editing would sophisticate the proceedings. On The Crackling (1996,Trente Oiseaux) with visual artist and computer expert Max Springer, a whole new spectrum of possibilities emerged. Duncan’s recorded output bespeaks true audio research in pursue of its own singular path, herein abandoning all musical expectations of any “traditional” significance, functioning as a sensory deprivation artifact.
Even though the denomination of a genre such as sound art and its appropriate form of documentation overwhelms, Duncan makes an attempt at redefining it on The Keening Towers (Allquestions), which as an installation consisted of elevating a continually evolving composition over two 24- meter steel towers as a permanent installation in front of the Gotheborg city art museum’s façade in Sweden, providing visitors of the C.M. von Hausswolff-curated Biennial in 2003 another galvanizing twist. No bright tone here, but instead there was a rusty turbine roar, a fundamentally perilous tone. Voices of children whisper secret codes, chewed dead air, while a soloist is framed, screaming to chilling effect. “Stun Shelter” (Nicola Fornello Gallery) joins Duncan and von Hausswolff together. Video screening of adult movies Duncan did in Japan during the eighties as part of his “John See” series interact in the same space with the voluptuous presence of “The Thinner Bar and Glue Lounge” by von Hausswolff. An erotic nightmare with high pitched, drilling humming that seems tuned from tinnitus overtones, gets paired with undulating frequencies, invaded by female moans, stereo-panned feedback and rumblings.
Infrasound-Tidal (Allquestions) buries the noise in scientific sound information provided by Australian resonating sound artist Densil Cabrera. The liner notes indicate that “very low frequency acoustic or vibrational data is converted to audible sound”, including sounds derived from tidal, seismic and barometric sources. The tidal part undulates in a compelling cloud of drones that might raise smiles on the countenances of Éliane Radigue or Folke Rabe; while the seismic part is closer to the behavior of an ocean, so related to nature’s sustained pitches it acts as poetry: what plate tectonics should mean to mortals. With Elliott Sharp, Duncan released Tongue (Allquestions), the most intrinsic, intimate qualities of their voices are subjected to myriad processing, mounted on Duncan’s trademark shortwave murmurings. Quietly, constantly infiltrated by way of rainbow multiphonics splayed in an khöömeior khoomii Tuvan throat-singing idiom, coupled with diminutive gargling, swishing winds, informed by a spiritual, animistic sensitivity.
On Da sich die Machtgier… (Die Stadt), Asmus Tietchens was reluctant to accept credit for the recordings used despite Duncan’s insistence, though what yielded was a profound framework knit around E.M. Cioran’s excerpts (read in German by Tietchens) from ‘Learning from the Tyrants’ and ‘On a Winded Civilization’, the obscurantism on them deprived of their organic significance. Further, on Duncan’s collaboration with Wire’s Edvard Graham Lewis, Presence (Allquestions), heaven’s immensity seems to fit in one mouth (Lewis’); the date remains wordless, vaporous, splashed with tiny Morse code secrecy and windy throat-blows, while distant flights obstruct the forceful pace of displaced clouds. In crafting such a profound statement, the duo involves the captured ambiances of locations such as a mausoleum in Oslo and a bathtub at a Holiday Inn in Chicago- the duo’s voices dissolve at album’s end, in whispers seemingly coated in concrete.
The search for unutterable, revelatory experience has played a conspicuous, obsessive role throughout John Duncan’s irretrievable body of work. His experimental sound compositions since the late 70s, persistently evolving out of assemblages focused on a multitude of sound sources, have been occupying the hot waters of difficult, attentive listening. Ranging from his enduring exertion on shortwave, radio static or data files, to particle accelerators, seismic and barometric data, or the unusual properties of solo and massed voice, Duncan’s music has established a signature style in its striving towards clarity via elemental means.
Continually reinforced with a sensuous touch, his disorientating audio work alienates listeners psychologically, locking them into high pitched, metallic assault, as well as subtly stirring their awareness with low frequency tides. The borders of pain and pleasure conforming a single entity: as in Kantian philosophy, a transcendental end. “I’m interested in finding out what it is to be alive. And to look into that, go wherever that sort of self-research goes” he affirmed on a talk back in November 2001 in Berlin. Like in some aspects of Australian artist Alan Lamb’s decaying telegraph line music, or Spanish absolute field recordist Francisco López’s work, Duncan approaches natural phenomena scientifically rather than as musical ingredient, looking for cause and effect, surveying the sound as physical material for a sculpture. This traces to conceptual art’s prevailing ideas over product.
“I was interested in the relationship between color and emotional responses that color encourages and pulls out of us. I compose while trying to make things that would sort of manipulate me emotionally in the way that color manipulates your emotions visually” Duncan says. “I was looking for a way to do that with the frequencies of audio”, he enthuses when inquired on his transition from abstract expressionist-like painting in the 70s to a large body of work that embraces many disciplines, from an area where hidden physics melt, and leading to installation, net-art, video and psychically intense actions that meld with controversial, disconcerting consequences. He studied with influential performance artist and painter Allan Kaprow, who later participated on his and Paul Mc Carthy’s 1977 Close Radio program on KPFK in Los Angeles, a document of which, Courtesy, resurfaced in 2000 on limited edition transparent orange vinyl on the Fluxus-specialized imprint Slowscan. Duncan notes, “Kaprow encouraged me to keep making art, and unlike so many other instructors there did not try to convince me that he was a great artist. That alone gave a useful lesson into how to tell the difference between a master and a poseur. He encouraged me to go into the CalArts library and check out Avalanche magazine (which contained photos of early performance work, minimal sculpture, and conceptual art), look up the work of the Viennese Actionists. He suggested listening to records by Mauricio Kagel, Steve Reich, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. He got me searching again, gave me suggestions on where to look”. Former Vienna actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s idiosyncratic mutilation acts; Yvonne Rainer’s open dance, and Chris Burden and Barbara Smith’s provocative, galvanizing American body and performance art were all substantive in the realization of Duncan’s early creations.
Around that time, Duncan sought to catalyze a distinctive form of music with incandescent fervor amid the Los Angeles Free Music Society, in the units C.V. Massage and The Doo-Dooettes, pre-dating the liberating sonic attitude on the DIY/noise network of the 80s. The gnostic free-fall of performances like Blind Date or Maze, and his involvement with post-industrial sound for a while – collaborating with COUM / Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni-Tutti in Kokka and with The Hafler Trio’s A. McKenzie in Contact -, faced a detour. “I tried to make things that were aggressive or abrasive, jarring really, in a sense hard to listen to in order to attack the listener with sound. After a while, the need has to be satisfied. If you keep doing this same music, the same gestures, over and over again, the benefit that you are giving the audience becomes diluted; people learn to expect that. And if you need to continue doing these kinds of things, there is something missing, something you as a creator are missing. Maybe music isn’t the way to find it”.
This early sense of urgency emerged critically intact from its experiential momentum, with no signs of mellowing out. When Duncan moved to Japan in the mid-80s, shortwave radio became an intense noisemaker, and as such a rich, ideal source for unpredictable sound gathering. Harmonic hum and static hissing moving into one another as interstellar dust, augured in, via long listening sessions, a certain illusion, one which at the time was not to be obtained from conventional instruments, even FM synthesizers, which for Duncan seemed limiting and immediately recognizable. “I was looking for something that didn’t have that, and that I didn’t had to practice in order to play. Thanks to the cold war which was going on at the time, it was a sort of free-for-all when one side would transmit a signal and the other side would try to block it and somewhere in between you would get this sort of mixed buzz; you could hear the transmission, you could hear the block, and these crossed over and under each other. At times there was just this really sensual drone, and elsewhere you could hear voices that would sing like ghosts”.
Fortuitous broadcast sessions taped onto each other through a four-channel cassette recorder configured a complex flow, until Duncan discovered that computer editing would sophisticate the proceedings. On The Crackling (1996,Trente Oiseaux) with visual artist and computer expert Max Springer, a whole new spectrum of possibilities emerged. Duncan’s recorded output bespeaks true audio research in pursue of its own singular path, herein abandoning all musical expectations of any “traditional” significance, functioning as a sensory deprivation artifact.
Even though the denomination of a genre such as sound art and its appropriate form of documentation overwhelms, Duncan makes an attempt at redefining it on The Keening Towers (Allquestions), which as an installation consisted of elevating a continually evolving composition over two 24- meter steel towers as a permanent installation in front of the Gotheborg city art museum’s façade in Sweden, providing visitors of the C.M. von Hausswolff-curated Biennial in 2003 another galvanizing twist. No bright tone here, but instead there was a rusty turbine roar, a fundamentally perilous tone. Voices of children whisper secret codes, chewed dead air, while a soloist is framed, screaming to chilling effect. “Stun Shelter” (Nicola Fornello Gallery) joins Duncan and von Hausswolff together. Video screening of adult movies Duncan did in Japan during the eighties as part of his “John See” series interact in the same space with the voluptuous presence of “The Thinner Bar and Glue Lounge” by von Hausswolff. An erotic nightmare with high pitched, drilling humming that seems tuned from tinnitus overtones, gets paired with undulating frequencies, invaded by female moans, stereo-panned feedback and rumblings.
Infrasound-Tidal (Allquestions) buries the noise in scientific sound information provided by Australian resonating sound artist Densil Cabrera. The liner notes indicate that “very low frequency acoustic or vibrational data is converted to audible sound”, including sounds derived from tidal, seismic and barometric sources. The tidal part undulates in a compelling cloud of drones that might raise smiles on the countenances of Éliane Radigue or Folke Rabe; while the seismic part is closer to the behavior of an ocean, so related to nature’s sustained pitches it acts as poetry: what plate tectonics should mean to mortals. With Elliott Sharp, Duncan released Tongue (Allquestions), the most intrinsic, intimate qualities of their voices are subjected to myriad processing, mounted on Duncan’s trademark shortwave murmurings. Quietly, constantly infiltrated by way of rainbow multiphonics splayed in an khöömeior khoomii Tuvan throat-singing idiom, coupled with diminutive gargling, swishing winds, informed by a spiritual, animistic sensitivity.
On Da sich die Machtgier… (Die Stadt), Asmus Tietchens was reluctant to accept credit for the recordings used despite Duncan’s insistence, though what yielded was a profound framework knit around E.M. Cioran’s excerpts (read in German by Tietchens) from ‘Learning from the Tyrants’ and ‘On a Winded Civilization’, the obscurantism on them deprived of their organic significance. Further, on Duncan’s collaboration with Wire’s Edvard Graham Lewis, Presence (Allquestions), heaven’s immensity seems to fit in one mouth (Lewis’); the date remains wordless, vaporous, splashed with tiny Morse code secrecy and windy throat-blows, while distant flights obstruct the forceful pace of displaced clouds. In crafting such a profound statement, the duo involves the captured ambiances of locations such as a mausoleum in Oslo and a bathtub at a Holiday Inn in Chicago- the duo’s voices dissolve at album’s end, in whispers seemingly coated in concrete.
The most recent Duncan project, 9 Suggestions (Allquestions) unites him with Finland’s Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen (both on oscillators and processing) of Pan Sonic fame, obliquely rivaling The Hafler Trio’s recent pairings with Autechre. File exchanges display massive musical resources; the nine tracks are as diverse as utterly focused, constructed and sequenced. Ranging from cascading feedback (“Volume”, “Scratch Ring”) or more introspective frequency combinations in perpetual motion (“The Deepening”, “The Bristling Haze”), Duncan’s cohorts appear to mimic their collaborator’s fancies perfectly, no doubt the master’s skills as a sound artisan continue to evolve over time, either in tandem with like-minded others or simply as a lone (re)arranger of the mixing desk.
JOHN DUNCAN Ghost Patterns Arising
— Marcelo Aguirre e/i Issue 7 (spring/summer 2006)
The search for unutterable, revelatory experience has played a conspicuous, obsessive role throughout John Duncan’s irretrievable body of work. His experimental sound compositions since the late 70s, persistently evolving out of assemblages focused on a multitude of sound sources, have been occupying the hot waters of difficult, attentive listening. Ranging from his enduring exertion on shortwave, radio static or data files, to particle accelerators, seismic and barometric data, or the unusual properties of solo and massed voice, Duncan’s music has established a signature style in its striving towards clarity via elemental means.
Continually reinforced with a sensuous touch, his disorientating audio work alienates listeners psychologically, locking them into high pitched, metallic assault, as well as subtly stirring their awareness with low frequency tides. The borders of pain and pleasure conforming a single entity: as in Kantian philosophy, a transcendental end. “I’m interested in finding out what it is to be alive. And to look into that, go wherever that sort of self-research goes” he affirmed on a talk back in November 2001 in Berlin. Like in some aspects of Australian artist Alan Lamb’s decaying telegraph line music, or Spanish absolute field recordist Francisco López’s work, Duncan approaches natural phenomena scientifically rather than as musical ingredient, looking for cause and effect, surveying the sound as physical material for a sculpture. This traces to conceptual art’s prevailing ideas over product.
“I was interested in the relationship between color and emotional responses that color encourages and pulls out of us. I compose while trying to make things that would sort of manipulate me emotionally in the way that color manipulates your emotions visually” Duncan says. “I was looking for a way to do that with the frequencies of audio”, he enthuses when inquired on his transition from abstract expressionist-like painting in the 70s to a large body of work that embraces many disciplines, from an area where hidden physics melt, and leading to installation, net-art, video and psychically intense actions that meld with controversial, disconcerting consequences. He studied with influential performance artist and painter Allan Kaprow, who later participated on his and Paul Mc Carthy’s 1977 Close Radio program on KPFK in Los Angeles, a document of which, Courtesy, resurfaced in 2000 on limited edition transparent orange vinyl on the Fluxus-specialized imprint Slowscan. Duncan notes, “Kaprow encouraged me to keep making art, and unlike so many other instructors there did not try to convince me that he was a great artist. That alone gave a useful lesson into how to tell the difference between a master and a poseur. He encouraged me to go into the CalArts library and check out Avalanche magazine (which contained photos of early performance work, minimal sculpture, and conceptual art), look up the work of the Viennese Actionists. He suggested listening to records by Mauricio Kagel, Steve Reich, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. He got me searching again, gave me suggestions on where to look”. Former Vienna actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s idiosyncratic mutilation acts; Yvonne Rainer’s open dance, and Chris Burden and Barbara Smith’s provocative, galvanizing American body and performance art were all substantive in the realization of Duncan’s early creations.
Around that time, Duncan sought to catalyze a distinctive form of music with incandescent fervor amid the Los Angeles Free Music Society, in the units C.V. Massage and The Doo-Dooettes, pre-dating the liberating sonic attitude on the DIY/noise network of the 80s. The gnostic free-fall of performances like Blind Date or Maze, and his involvement with post-industrial sound for a while – collaborating with COUM / Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni-Tutti in Kokka and with The Hafler Trio’s A. McKenzie in Contact -, faced a detour. “I tried to make things that were aggressive or abrasive, jarring really, in a sense hard to listen to in order to attack the listener with sound. After a while, the need has to be satisfied. If you keep doing this same music, the same gestures, over and over again, the benefit that you are giving the audience becomes diluted; people learn to expect that. And if you need to continue doing these kinds of things, there is something missing, something you as a creator are missing. Maybe music isn’t the way to find it”.
This early sense of urgency emerged critically intact from its experiential momentum, with no signs of mellowing out. When Duncan moved to Japan in the mid-80s, shortwave radio became an intense noisemaker, and as such a rich, ideal source for unpredictable sound gathering. Harmonic hum and static hissing moving into one another as interstellar dust, augured in, via long listening sessions, a certain illusion, one which at the time was not to be obtained from conventional instruments, even FM synthesizers, which for Duncan seemed limiting and immediately recognizable. “I was looking for something that didn’t have that, and that I didn’t had to practice in order to play. Thanks to the cold war which was going on at the time, it was a sort of free-for-all when one side would transmit a signal and the other side would try to block it and somewhere in between you would get this sort of mixed buzz; you could hear the transmission, you could hear the block, and these crossed over and under each other. At times there was just this really sensual drone, and elsewhere you could hear voices that would sing like ghosts”.
Fortuitous broadcast sessions taped onto each other through a four-channel cassette recorder configured a complex flow, until Duncan discovered that computer editing would sophisticate the proceedings. On The Crackling (1996,Trente Oiseaux) with visual artist and computer expert Max Springer, a whole new spectrum of possibilities emerged. Duncan’s recorded output bespeaks true audio research in pursue of its own singular path, herein abandoning all musical expectations of any “traditional” significance, functioning as a sensory deprivation artifact.
Even though the denomination of a genre such as sound art and its appropriate form of documentation overwhelms, Duncan makes an attempt at redefining it on The Keening Towers (Allquestions), which as an installation consisted of elevating a continually evolving composition over two 24- meter steel towers as a permanent installation in front of the Gotheborg city art museum’s façade in Sweden, providing visitors of the C.M. von Hausswolff-curated Biennial in 2003 another galvanizing twist. No bright tone here, but instead there was a rusty turbine roar, a fundamentally perilous tone. Voices of children whisper secret codes, chewed dead air, while a soloist is framed, screaming to chilling effect. “Stun Shelter” (Nicola Fornello Gallery) joins Duncan and von Hausswolff together. Video screening of adult movies Duncan did in Japan during the eighties as part of his “John See” series interact in the same space with the voluptuous presence of “The Thinner Bar and Glue Lounge” by von Hausswolff. An erotic nightmare with high pitched, drilling humming that seems tuned from tinnitus overtones, gets paired with undulating frequencies, invaded by female moans, stereo-panned feedback and rumblings.
Infrasound-Tidal (Allquestions) buries the noise in scientific sound information provided by Australian resonating sound artist Densil Cabrera. The liner notes indicate that “very low frequency acoustic or vibrational data is converted to audible sound”, including sounds derived from tidal, seismic and barometric sources. The tidal part undulates in a compelling cloud of drones that might raise smiles on the countenances of Éliane Radigue or Folke Rabe; while the seismic part is closer to the behavior of an ocean, so related to nature’s sustained pitches it acts as poetry: what plate tectonics should mean to mortals. With Elliott Sharp, Duncan released Tongue (Allquestions), the most intrinsic, intimate qualities of their voices are subjected to myriad processing, mounted on Duncan’s trademark shortwave murmurings. Quietly, constantly infiltrated by way of rainbow multiphonics splayed in an khöömeior khoomii Tuvan throat-singing idiom, coupled with diminutive gargling, swishing winds, informed by a spiritual, animistic sensitivity.
On Da sich die Machtgier… (Die Stadt), Asmus Tietchens was reluctant to accept credit for the recordings used despite Duncan’s insistence, though what yielded was a profound framework knit around E.M. Cioran’s excerpts (read in German by Tietchens) from ‘Learning from the Tyrants’ and ‘On a Winded Civilization’, the obscurantism on them deprived of their organic significance. Further, on Duncan’s collaboration with Wire’s Edvard Graham Lewis, Presence (Allquestions), heaven’s immensity seems to fit in one mouth (Lewis’); the date remains wordless, vaporous, splashed with tiny Morse code secrecy and windy throat-blows, while distant flights obstruct the forceful pace of displaced clouds. In crafting such a profound statement, the duo involves the captured ambiances of locations such as a mausoleum in Oslo and a bathtub at a Holiday Inn in Chicago- the duo’s voices dissolve at album’s end, in whispers seemingly coated in concrete.
The search for unutterable, revelatory experience has played a conspicuous, obsessive role throughout John Duncan’s irretrievable body of work. His experimental sound compositions since the late 70s, persistently evolving out of assemblages focused on a multitude of sound sources, have been occupying the hot waters of difficult, attentive listening. Ranging from his enduring exertion on shortwave, radio static or data files, to particle accelerators, seismic and barometric data, or the unusual properties of solo and massed voice, Duncan’s music has established a signature style in its striving towards clarity via elemental means.
Continually reinforced with a sensuous touch, his disorientating audio work alienates listeners psychologically, locking them into high pitched, metallic assault, as well as subtly stirring their awareness with low frequency tides. The borders of pain and pleasure conforming a single entity: as in Kantian philosophy, a transcendental end. “I’m interested in finding out what it is to be alive. And to look into that, go wherever that sort of self-research goes” he affirmed on a talk back in November 2001 in Berlin. Like in some aspects of Australian artist Alan Lamb’s decaying telegraph line music, or Spanish absolute field recordist Francisco López’s work, Duncan approaches natural phenomena scientifically rather than as musical ingredient, looking for cause and effect, surveying the sound as physical material for a sculpture. This traces to conceptual art’s prevailing ideas over product.
“I was interested in the relationship between color and emotional responses that color encourages and pulls out of us. I compose while trying to make things that would sort of manipulate me emotionally in the way that color manipulates your emotions visually” Duncan says. “I was looking for a way to do that with the frequencies of audio”, he enthuses when inquired on his transition from abstract expressionist-like painting in the 70s to a large body of work that embraces many disciplines, from an area where hidden physics melt, and leading to installation, net-art, video and psychically intense actions that meld with controversial, disconcerting consequences. He studied with influential performance artist and painter Allan Kaprow, who later participated on his and Paul Mc Carthy’s 1977 Close Radio program on KPFK in Los Angeles, a document of which, Courtesy, resurfaced in 2000 on limited edition transparent orange vinyl on the Fluxus-specialized imprint Slowscan. Duncan notes, “Kaprow encouraged me to keep making art, and unlike so many other instructors there did not try to convince me that he was a great artist. That alone gave a useful lesson into how to tell the difference between a master and a poseur. He encouraged me to go into the CalArts library and check out Avalanche magazine (which contained photos of early performance work, minimal sculpture, and conceptual art), look up the work of the Viennese Actionists. He suggested listening to records by Mauricio Kagel, Steve Reich, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. He got me searching again, gave me suggestions on where to look”. Former Vienna actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s idiosyncratic mutilation acts; Yvonne Rainer’s open dance, and Chris Burden and Barbara Smith’s provocative, galvanizing American body and performance art were all substantive in the realization of Duncan’s early creations.
Around that time, Duncan sought to catalyze a distinctive form of music with incandescent fervor amid the Los Angeles Free Music Society, in the units C.V. Massage and The Doo-Dooettes, pre-dating the liberating sonic attitude on the DIY/noise network of the 80s. The gnostic free-fall of performances like Blind Date or Maze, and his involvement with post-industrial sound for a while – collaborating with COUM / Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni-Tutti in Kokka and with The Hafler Trio’s A. McKenzie in Contact -, faced a detour. “I tried to make things that were aggressive or abrasive, jarring really, in a sense hard to listen to in order to attack the listener with sound. After a while, the need has to be satisfied. If you keep doing this same music, the same gestures, over and over again, the benefit that you are giving the audience becomes diluted; people learn to expect that. And if you need to continue doing these kinds of things, there is something missing, something you as a creator are missing. Maybe music isn’t the way to find it”.
This early sense of urgency emerged critically intact from its experiential momentum, with no signs of mellowing out. When Duncan moved to Japan in the mid-80s, shortwave radio became an intense noisemaker, and as such a rich, ideal source for unpredictable sound gathering. Harmonic hum and static hissing moving into one another as interstellar dust, augured in, via long listening sessions, a certain illusion, one which at the time was not to be obtained from conventional instruments, even FM synthesizers, which for Duncan seemed limiting and immediately recognizable. “I was looking for something that didn’t have that, and that I didn’t had to practice in order to play. Thanks to the cold war which was going on at the time, it was a sort of free-for-all when one side would transmit a signal and the other side would try to block it and somewhere in between you would get this sort of mixed buzz; you could hear the transmission, you could hear the block, and these crossed over and under each other. At times there was just this really sensual drone, and elsewhere you could hear voices that would sing like ghosts”.
Fortuitous broadcast sessions taped onto each other through a four-channel cassette recorder configured a complex flow, until Duncan discovered that computer editing would sophisticate the proceedings. On The Crackling (1996,Trente Oiseaux) with visual artist and computer expert Max Springer, a whole new spectrum of possibilities emerged. Duncan’s recorded output bespeaks true audio research in pursue of its own singular path, herein abandoning all musical expectations of any “traditional” significance, functioning as a sensory deprivation artifact.
Even though the denomination of a genre such as sound art and its appropriate form of documentation overwhelms, Duncan makes an attempt at redefining it on The Keening Towers (Allquestions), which as an installation consisted of elevating a continually evolving composition over two 24- meter steel towers as a permanent installation in front of the Gotheborg city art museum’s façade in Sweden, providing visitors of the C.M. von Hausswolff-curated Biennial in 2003 another galvanizing twist. No bright tone here, but instead there was a rusty turbine roar, a fundamentally perilous tone. Voices of children whisper secret codes, chewed dead air, while a soloist is framed, screaming to chilling effect. “Stun Shelter” (Nicola Fornello Gallery) joins Duncan and von Hausswolff together. Video screening of adult movies Duncan did in Japan during the eighties as part of his “John See” series interact in the same space with the voluptuous presence of “The Thinner Bar and Glue Lounge” by von Hausswolff. An erotic nightmare with high pitched, drilling humming that seems tuned from tinnitus overtones, gets paired with undulating frequencies, invaded by female moans, stereo-panned feedback and rumblings.
Infrasound-Tidal (Allquestions) buries the noise in scientific sound information provided by Australian resonating sound artist Densil Cabrera. The liner notes indicate that “very low frequency acoustic or vibrational data is converted to audible sound”, including sounds derived from tidal, seismic and barometric sources. The tidal part undulates in a compelling cloud of drones that might raise smiles on the countenances of Éliane Radigue or Folke Rabe; while the seismic part is closer to the behavior of an ocean, so related to nature’s sustained pitches it acts as poetry: what plate tectonics should mean to mortals. With Elliott Sharp, Duncan released Tongue (Allquestions), the most intrinsic, intimate qualities of their voices are subjected to myriad processing, mounted on Duncan’s trademark shortwave murmurings. Quietly, constantly infiltrated by way of rainbow multiphonics splayed in an khöömeior khoomii Tuvan throat-singing idiom, coupled with diminutive gargling, swishing winds, informed by a spiritual, animistic sensitivity.
On Da sich die Machtgier… (Die Stadt), Asmus Tietchens was reluctant to accept credit for the recordings used despite Duncan’s insistence, though what yielded was a profound framework knit around E.M. Cioran’s excerpts (read in German by Tietchens) from ‘Learning from the Tyrants’ and ‘On a Winded Civilization’, the obscurantism on them deprived of their organic significance. Further, on Duncan’s collaboration with Wire’s Edvard Graham Lewis, Presence (Allquestions), heaven’s immensity seems to fit in one mouth (Lewis’); the date remains wordless, vaporous, splashed with tiny Morse code secrecy and windy throat-blows, while distant flights obstruct the forceful pace of displaced clouds. In crafting such a profound statement, the duo involves the captured ambiances of locations such as a mausoleum in Oslo and a bathtub at a Holiday Inn in Chicago- the duo’s voices dissolve at album’s end, in whispers seemingly coated in concrete.
The most recent Duncan project, 9 Suggestions (Allquestions) unites him with Finland’s Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen (both on oscillators and processing) of Pan Sonic fame, obliquely rivaling The Hafler Trio’s recent pairings with Autechre. File exchanges display massive musical resources; the nine tracks are as diverse as utterly focused, constructed and sequenced. Ranging from cascading feedback (“Volume”, “Scratch Ring”) or more introspective frequency combinations in perpetual motion (“The Deepening”, “The Bristling Haze”), Duncan’s cohorts appear to mimic their collaborator’s fancies perfectly, no doubt the master’s skills as a sound artisan continue to evolve over time, either in tandem with like-minded others or simply as a lone (re)arranger of the mixing desk.
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