2025
Marc Hurtado & John Duncan
Eight tracks: lyrics, shortwave and vocals by John Duncan, audio mixes and vocals by Marc Hurtado
https://www.erototox.com/hurtado-duncan
CD and LP released by Erototox Decodings
Mastered by Ivan FU Pjevcevic for Short Straw Studio, Bologna
John Duncan (b. 1953, Wichita, Kansas) is an American multi-platform artist lives and works in Bologna, Italy. Having studied at CalArts, Duncan’s practice has explored the cutting edge of performance, video, experimental music, installation, pirate radio and television. In the 1970’s. His work often addresses issues of power, authority, and control, often involving elements of personal risk and danger. Duncan played a pivotal role in the development of performance art in Los Angeles, of experimental music as a member of the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS), and of Japanese noise and pirate radio in Tokyo. His collaborations, iterations and performances live and documented are numerous. For years he has been an explorer and navigator of short wave radio, employing it’s varying textures into his own compositions.
His music and performance work has been presented at Nicodim Gallery (Bucharest and Los Angeles), Fylkingen, Gallery Niklas Belenius, ZKM, MAK (Vienna), MOT (Tokyo), MACBA (Barcelona), Super Deluxe (Tokyo), CCA Kitakyushu, MOCA, KPFK, The Getty Center, and The Box (Los Angeles), L’Arsenic and LUFF (Lausanne), Raum, Netmage, Decadence and Angelica (Bologna), Ars Electronica and the 2nd Gothenburg Biennial.
Marc Hurtado (b. 1962, Rabbat, Morocco) is a a key figure in the French experimental music scene. He is one half of the French experimental duo Étant Donnés with his brother Éric Hurtado. He is also a producer, poet, visual artist and filmmaker.
Hurtado (sometimes with his project Étant Donnés),has collaborated with Alan Vega , Michael Gira , Genesis P-Orridge , trumpeter Mark Cunningham and Lydia Lunch in 2016 on the album My Lover the Killer. He also composed and produced the music for the films: Hotel by Jessica Hausner and Memento Mori by Mathieu Dufois, Met , Grenoble by Philippe Grandrieux and it was during the production of the soundtrack for the feature film La Vie nouvelle in 2002, and again by Philippe Grandrieux, that Marc Hurtado founded the Sol ixent project .
Soon to be available on vinyl and currently available as a CD and as a digital release.
Serpents enlacés is the sound of heaven and earth mating, the tearing of a bird’s wings burned by the sound waves of space, the wail of a cicada drowning in the black water of a torrent. An infinite night, an infinite sun, an infinite construction, an infinite destruction. Everything is in everything, and nothing is in this everything.
The path of the visible is the voice of the invisible.
Motionless, invisible, the sound feeds on its own atomic explosion. Two serpents ignite, two serpents embrace, two serpents devour each other, two serpents become one infinite serpent.
Eternity and infinity, intertwined in the blood of sound, in the sound of blood.
The appearance of an email notice of the new joint release of Marc Hurtardo and John Duncan may cause, as I did, to awaken animal instinct. The natural force of each of us, often “hidden” or suppressed by the generally accepted social ethics.
For years, both artists have been penetrating a wide spectrum of performance, experimental and visual music with emphasis – in short – on radical creativity, sensory depravity. Yes, this trip into the unknown has been going on since the late 1970s, when Marc and his brother Ericski established the “tant Donn’s, one of the most important French groups penetrating experimental-industrial areas. John Duncan, on the same period, began in the ranks of the legendary Los Angeles Free Music Society, then pursuing a solo career, of course, densely speculating with other progressive counterculture activists.
Serpents Enlaces is a perfect example of how tenacity, passion for action and creation lead to impressive results. It is worth adding that mainly John’s instrumental activity for several good years has been enriched with his own voice, melodectlamations, half chants, intonations.
As a duo armed with Hurtado: sounds, voice and Duncan: shortwaves, voice, gentlemen, draw us into an endless vortex of a piling-up sound mass made of short radio waves extraction (in which Duncan is a master) complemented by the found ambient sound, process. Meeting this album is like a head-on collision with an ethereal mass that lives and develops every second. The intensity of this phenomenon brings us closer to the aesthetics of the noise that has been brought on Serpents Enlaces, which has been abbreviated by a delay, putting an end to the experience or the endless aspect of the audio ritual rather than destruction.
Both men write their voices into the slow structures of the composition, making them an integral part of the message. Monologium, whispers and screams – intertwined with emotions – drive the listener into the seat, leaving no space for his breath or escape. An interesting treatment is the bilingualism of the album: French and English. When the more capturative, advanced English Duncana dominates, from the background, in the abyss, the French equivalent of Hurtado, processed and vice versa.
Smooth exchange in the sonic ether or rather a magnetic explosion caused by the flow of radio waves packed with the sounds of a storm or volcanic eruption. Here, the imagination works all over the whole, and nothing strange – defeated, or exposed to something like a blitzkrieg, falls – and we, together with her, become a victim of sensory depravity.
Additional temporal spatial disorientation is added by the fact that each of the pieces ends unexpectedly, suddenly, like cutting or rather cutting off from the light source. A testimony to the craftsmanship of both artists is to come, the longest composition on the album The Beacon / Monde where the intensity is translated into the monumentality of sound – a massive, rolling radio-drone crouched in the distance, in which you can hear at the base of bells, fragments of conversations, analog preparators. In such a prepared field, the voices of the musicians fill such broad swathes that it is difficult to capture where they end or where they reach.
We have to listen, listen and listen – discover the next levels – until we reach the end of the self or even deeper. Id, ego and superego.
Marek “Lokis” Nawrot
