John Duncan
John Duncan, born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1953, has worked for decades at the cutting edge of performance, video, experimental music, installation and pirate radio and television. He played a pivotal role in the performance art of 1970s Los Angeles, often at the limit of the bearable, in the experimental music of the LAFMS, and later in the noise and pirate broadcasting of Tokyo. His sound work uses shortwave, voice and signals at the very edge of hearing to unsettle the listener, on records such as Riot and the disquieting The Crackling, made with particle-accelerator recordings.
Da sich die Machtgier
Compiling the results of what was originally intended to be a compositional collaboration between John Duncan and renowned sound artist Asmus Tietchens, Da Sich Die Machtgier… transcends its tumultuous creation to stand as a distinctive addition to the catalogue of both artists "Asmus Tietchens proposed that he and I work together years ago — many years ago. For a variety of reasons it didn't happen , and at this point I don't remember any of them. Finally we agreed to start: I asked him to send…
Phantom Broadcast
Following the records made in collaboration with Francisco López and the instrumental ensemble Zeitkratzer, John Duncan returns to solo work and to exploring further the sound source he's always preferred, shortwave. We know nothing about the actual radio transmission that Duncan picked up on 18 April 2002 in the course of a single recording that gave life to this work. Only shadows remain, taking on the aspect of bells, resonating into infinity, together with reverberations and apparent choruse…
The Nazca Transmissions
** Limited to 380 copies, with embossed total-black cover, insert and full-color inner sleeve with wonderful space images of the Nazca Lines. ** On Christmas Eve, 2004, John Duncan received a mysterious email from an archaeologist working at the site of the Nazca Lines in Peru. He claimed to have discovered, and over time recorded, a variety of sounds actually generated by the enigmatic lines themselves. Familiar with Duncan’s “Infrasound-Tidal”, composed from source recordings taken from tides,…
Incoming
Long out of print, John Duncan's release Incoming continues his work exploring the inner qualities of electronic drones in conjunction with shortwave radio, itself an extension of his work in pirate media, including both radio and television. The title track builds from metallic scrapes, layered with intense electronics, garbled vocals, descending electronic whines reminiscent of the final section of Karlheinz Stockhausen's masterpiece Hymnen, shortwaves, white noise, and digital pops. It is one…
John See soundtracks
CD including the full soundtrack from 'Move forward' and all soundtracks from the limited-edition picturedisc LP 'The John See Series' released on RRRecords.
s/t
Released in conjunction with a live performance that took place at the 'Lagerhaus' Bremen on 26. September 2003. Exclusive tracks by all three artists. John Duncan's 'The Gossamer Dispatch' is another fine example of his work with Shortwave sounds and a sort of more aggressive version of his acclaimed 'Phantom Broadcast' CD. C.M. von Hausswolff delivers a spoken word piece for the first time 'The way The Breeze Lays'. 'The Gobblestone Is The Weapon Of The Proletariat. No 8' by Leif Elggren is a …
Auftauchen
John Duncan: Mayday (1983) / Le Donne-Bhennet: Might Find Land 1980) / Tom Marioni: Drum Crushing (on Sand Paper) ( 1978). Edition of 99 copies.
Untitled
Released in conjunction with a live concert on the 2. October 2005 in the“Lagerhaus' Bremen”. The 2x7inch feat. four exclusive tracks for this project. Z'EV provides another intense mix of material which partly originates from a live recording from the “Atonal Festival” in Berlin back in 1983. Side B feat. John Duncan with a strange static sound-noise piece, whereas both Aidan Baker on Side C and Fear Falls Burning (a new project by Vidna Obmana) on Side D give fine examples of their slowly buil…
Our telluric conversation
'23five Incorporated proudly presents Our Telluric Conversation - the second collaborative album from John Duncan and Carl Michael von Hausswolff. This is an album which Duncan describes as having been galvanized by magnetism. In a semantic sleight of hand, Duncan and Hausswolff reveal magnetism through a duality of meanings. One on hand, they speak of the physical phenomenon of charged objects that exert an attraction or repulsion upon other objects; yet on the other, magnetism can be defined t…
Home, unspeakable
Home, Unspeakable is a collaboration between Duncan and Günter based on Samuel Beckett's last work, an opera libretto entitled Neither that he wrote on the back of a card for Morton Feldman. Although Günter and Duncan both claim Feldman as strong influences, this work sounds little like Feldman, but is instead a "series of musical 'places,' which in their entirety form the topography of a 'landscape' we feel might be described by the final words of Beckett's text: unspeakable home" (from the lin…
Early recordings 1978-1985
This is the limited friends edition of 33 numbered copies in a red Box Set with silver or golden imprints instead of the black Box Set with black imprints, especially for the artist and a few other people in relation to VOD - a gorgeous box covering john duncan’s early sound/film work - of the vod releases in the last year, this is the nicest on a presentation-scale (the included medias are of course lovely as well.)
Tap internal
Have you ever asked yourself 'What is the sound of energy?' John duncan has been trying for years to explain the composition of matter through sound, and not everyone can understand this -- but once the door is opened everything suddenly becomes easy. tap Internal is beautiful and, in classic duncan style, cruel -- in that it puts you in contact with our deepest psyche and lays it bare, turning the auricular membrane inside out, leaving an indelible mark of new frequencies that are beautiful to …
Works: 1975 to 2005
An unstoppable attraction for extreme sounds, in line with the passions that emerged from the international underground at the end of the Seventies, carried John Duncan through complex paths and artistic practices (from Los Angeles to Amsterdam, then Tokyo, then Italy, in Scrutto San Leonardo, Tuscany). More and more contaminated territories, close to a certain kind of performing art which, in the Viennese actionism and body art, the transgre…