THE SCATTERING
JOHN DUNCAN & PETER FLEUR
CD
Duration: 70 minutes
edition ...

Data files and shortwave, that's all it takes for John Duncan and Peter Fleur to instantly incinerate whoever tries to open the creaky door to their electroacoustic secrets. "The scattering" alternates acid textures with a subterranean low pulse projecting the music directly to the crossing of your conscient/altered states, often violently surprising with long silent pauses followed by sudden discharges. The rumble of a thousand bottled thunderstorms opens Fleur's "Aggregate", only to transform itself into an evil factory producing ultra-high frequencies and metallic laminates of scorching abrasiveness (curiously, all of the above seems to attract birds around my place; it's not the first time they start chirping loud while I listen to particular recordings). Duncan's "Threshold" closes this work starting from silence itself, slowly bringing up rippling currents of almost imperceptible shortwave emissions that inexorably affirm their power in the desolate border area where a concentrate state of shock, aural electrocution and yet again that incredible sense of belonging to nowhere meet. Mind you, this record is not useful for mass appreciation and its impact on nerves is potent; to me, it's an essential page of modern art. Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes 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