The second instalment of Matière Mémoire Éditions’ MMXX series - Panic@11000 Feet - comes from John Duncan, a near legend who, since his emergence during the 1970s, has straddled the complex territories of performance art, installation, avant-garde music, video art, and experimental film.
Many will remember the widely heralded reissue of his debut LP from 1979, Organic, released in 2018 as part of Superior Viaduct’s États-Unis series, but Duncan’s practice began years before, carving a furious path across numerous continents and the decades since. Initially connected to the scene in LA surrounding the artist Paul McCarthy and Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS), he moved to Tokyo in 1982, leading to collaborations with Masami Akita, Keiji Haino and Hijokaidan, with his solo efforts becoming the first by a non-Japanese artist to contribute to indigenous noise scene.
Today, a number of geographic leaps later, Duncan lives and works in Bologna (Italy), continuously sculpting a body of fascinating music from shortwave radio artifacts, field recordings and voice. Often explicitly confrontational in nature, he is astoundingly prolific, leaving an vast catalog of solo recordings in his wake, not to mention notable collaborations with Jim O'Rourke, Mika Vainio, Graham Lewis, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Elliott Sharp, Cosey Fanni-Tutti, Chris Carter, Z'EV, and numerous others.
Panic@11000 Feet, his 20 minute single-sided contribution to the MMXX series, is a slowly evolving work of rippling ambience. Nail bitingly tense at moments, and entirely immersive, its blanket of sound pulls the ear into its depths, requiring focus and attention to draw the intricate sonic collisions within. Yet another fascinating effort from out of the great outliers in experimental sound practice, Duncan’s Panic@11000 Feet is not to be missed.
Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series. In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 great artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls, available individually or as a bundle. Each record is limited at 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each contained in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, and each coming with a print of the artist artwork.
