JOHN DUNCAN From noise, installations, shortwave radio, field recordings, one of the masters of experimentation of the last 20 years -- Daniela Cascella; Blow Up, November 2000 In 1980 John Duncan records his operation on a radio program in which a psychologist gives direct advice to listeners who call in: his story starts with two episodes of violence to children and the indifference of the public administration, to which he gave assistance as a bus driver in South Central Los Angeles. "The first time", he says, "two people got on the bus and seemed to be dragging a sack of dirty laundry that they put under the seat. After awhile I saw there was a six-month-old baby inside it, with its eyes bruised shut. I stopped the bus and called the police. When they arrived on the scene they told me they couldn't do anything because they hadn't seen a crime committed. Another time, a woman got on with a nine year old girl who had open sores covering her arms and legs, the woman sitting next to the girl telling her, 'You're evil!'. I just drove, I didn't do anything. Later on I called the psychologist to say how much it bothered me that I couldn't react anymore." The recording of the program was published the same year with the title HAPPY HOMES on the e.p. CREED. "I wanted to make a kind of music that wasn't obvious... I wanted to get to the limits of what you expect to hear in a record". Already here you start to see the Duncan of the work to come: determined to go to the core of every experience, attracted in an unstoppable way to extreme sounds and the fabric of the human psyche; a master in the art of juxtaposing and organizing sound, cruel in the sense Artaud gives to that adjective, e.g. always capable of absolute gestures that carry within themselves "all the inevitability of life and the mysterious accidents of dreams", manifesting "an appetite for life, cosmic rigor, implacable need"; artist, then, because of his ability to push himself to the limits of a single discipline and to draw from his own true intuitions, weaknesses, passions. At the core of his projects Duncan offers infinite points of view and variations without ever allowing others, and above all himself, to dwell too long on one sound or state of being, continuously surprising expectations and always leaving a suspicion that something is about to change, that some equilibrium is about to be broken: a way to affirm the complexity of existence, to underline that it's never possible to hide behind an illusory shelter or annihilate oneself within a certainty, a way to search for limits to extract an élan, a nuance, a wound. For example the album SEEK, released in 1997 for the 'Mort aux Vaches' series. In the second track an obsessive metallic percussion receives storms of shortwave, in a strong contrast of volume and rhythm. The clashing pace, held in the background with tight percussion, creates an effect of dazed bewilderment. Following this are suffocating pulses at the lowest threshold of hearing, from which emerge an insistent hiss, intertwined with jerks from a beat that dies. And again metallic shrieks in the distance, rustling, ceaseless breathing. The audio sources Duncan prefers are shortwave, which he started using at the end of the seventies: "Shortwave was something absolutely new [to me], they seemed like the kind of sound you hear in dreams. I started to make pieces on two channel open-reel tape where I read texts of dreams mixed with shortwave recordings. For one of these, I read the text backwards and then inverted the tape, to get a surreal effect from the voice. These were very simple experiments, with voice on one channel and shortwave on the other." Shortwave has the value of outside interference, which sheds light on psychological and audio patterns that are otherwise concealed. "Later I saw I was being influenced emotionally by the sound of shortwave. This took me back to the painting studies I'd done, especially my interest in the relations between psychology and color. I was really interested in the study of light and color in terms of frequency, especially the relationship between a frequency and psychological responses to it. The use of shortwave brought me back to play with this relationship using audio frequencies instead. I decided to use myself as a guinea pig to test reactions to these frequencies, listening for a long time and trying to realize what kinds of reactions they were causing in me. Shortwave became an ideal instrument, that you didn't have to practice in order to play and that had a much more complex sound than a synthesizer, which a lot of people were using at that time. It's always different, impossible to predict. The more I listened, the more I got involved from their juxtapositions, the stratification of signals and groups of frequencies. I started studying ways that these sounds could be made to oppose or compliment each other, to see what they would do to me psychologically." From the beginning, then, Duncan decided to use himself as raw material for his work, a choice that is born from the need of continuous self-verification, and a refusal to accept the mechanisms of self denial provoked in episodes such as the one described in HAPPY HOMES . The limit is reached with BLIND DATE (1980): after having a sexual rapport with a cadaver in Tijuana, Mexico, Duncan underwent a vasectomy and then publicly reported the event in Los Angeles, broadcast live over national radio. Here the will to render nude his true intentions emerges, "to show what can happen to one who is trained to ignore their emotions". The use of one's own body as an arena for confrontation of forces, with precedents found in the art of Viennese Aktionismus, was taken to extremes by other California artists at that time (Paul McCarthy, to name one, performer of unsettling imagination, with whom Duncan produced CLOSE RADIO , a live radio program hosting musicians and artists of the caliber of Pauline Oliveros and Chris Burden, from 1976 to 1979). In the case of BLIND DATE the body becomes a place of cold contact between Eros and Thanatos; here Duncan declares his unease, reaching the limits to put his own basic beliefs into question. The recording of the radio broadcast of BLIND DATE was published in 1984 on side A of the cassette PLEASURE-ESCAPE, accompanied by a booklet with interviews, writings and images. Side B presented the soundtrack to MOVE FORWARD , one of the first films made by Duncan in Japan, where he moved following various pressures and problems connected with BLIND DATE . On the back cover of PLEASURE-ESCAPE Duncan writes, 'I'm obsessed with sex in order to escape from myself, addicted to it to avoid confronting what I know I am'. The confrontation with sex is another aspect of Duncan's will to bring to light what is usually concealed. In this sense, several of his works can be compared with work by Cosey Fanni Tutti in the mid seventies, posing for a series of porn magazines: "Cosey's work with collage, where she put herself in front of the camera to use her own image as raw material, directly inspired me to use sex as an instrument for consciousness" (with Chris and Cosey, Duncan produced an e.p. titled KOKKA in 1983). In Japan Duncan realized a series of five porn films, THE JOHN SEE SERIES (1986-87), whose soundtracks were later published under the title THE JOHN SEE SOUNDTRACKS (1994). "... I was making Super-8 films using recorded images from Japanese television. At a certain point, I felt too dependent on images produced by others. It seemed too easy to take shots from TV news, films and documentaries and find a way to subvert them - if I could use my own commercial images and subvert them..." "I really got into these films, wrote the scripts, the storyboards, acted in minor roles, directed, composed the soundtracks..." "In Japan I decided to try to make a kind of music that was impossible to listen to, pure noise, that had a structure but seemed to be entirely without one: this is how RIOT was realized, before the Japanese noise scene developed. Several Japanese musicians later told me that RIOT was an important inspiration for noise, which I was glad to hear because part of what I want my work to do is encourage other people." RIOT is in effect a real voyage to the borderline of hearing. HUNGRY-LAST WORDS-YOIKA, starts off with an incessant rhythm that repeats for 14 minutes, ruthlessly at first then more and more captivating, that leads finally to the heart of the record: here pain gradually turns to pleasure through repetition of the audio elements. Then percussion and shortwave intertwine in an organic way, insinuating themselves into the brain, with which Duncan takes his time to slowly anesthetize the ear, then immediately afterward hurl it into a different soundscape; the rhythm finally slows and weaves itself into a subdued recitation. RIOT, on the other hand, is a noise triumph, a saturation of sense of hearing that unfolds through ceaseless razor-sharp cuts of shortwave, percussion, distorted guitar. Were you aware of what other Japanese musicians were doing at that time? Did you know Masami Akita/Merzbow? At that time Masami Akita wasn't making noise per se, but a type of cut-up that was similar, if tighter, than what Etant Données were doing. Hijo Kaidan were doing great shows, presenting themselves onstage like a true rock band with everything that this implied. In one of their performances I like best the singer, wearing a wedding dress, pulled it up at one point and started pissing onstage. The other members were running back and forth and started slipping in it, including Mikawa Toshiji in his banker's business suit. For me this is a photograph of Japanese society at that time... Japanese noise is a product of a society that is an unceasing bombardment of advertising, neon light and chaos. That's why when noise is heard in Europe or the United States the listeners think of something else at first, that the musicians' energy is incredible, amazing, but after hearing one CD after another they start to think the music all sounds the same and they can't listen to it anymore. Noise is directly connected to contemporary Japanese culture, with what it means to deal with it day after day. To live in this bombardment is something that you can understand only if you're there in it, and the noise aesthetic as well as the aesthetic of RIOT comes from this: total assault, total overload. I wanted to make a music overload. The Japanese have a different way of perceiving the individual, the body, the borders between themselves and others... In Japan there's no privacy. The rooms are tiny; the spaces where everyone lives are all small. People don't show their emotions by touching, everyone maintains a distance because there's no real physical distance, there's no place where you can be alone, there's always someone around. Privacy comes by thinking of yourself in an introverted way; what you wear and show to others is not part of what you really are or feel. In Europe and the US people show themselves by how they dress, how they carry themselves, what they do. In Japan it's not like this. No matter what the fashion, what the person really feels is never demonstrated in public and this I like very much, I learned a lot from this behavior. In fact when I first arrived in Europe from Japan it was difficult to get used to hugging and kissing people in greeting... It seemed like something false, that didn't come from a genuine desire to touch the person in front of you, but from a convention, an empty ritual. To call Duncan's work extreme means that the extreme is often reached as much in bold colors as in their shades, often in the emotional assault of a sonic impact, often in the light touch or more subtle tonal compositions. It's thanks to the dynamic equilibrium between these diverse components that the resulting combination is always dense and never quite the same: to listen to a Duncan CD is like repeating a timeless formula in which each sound happens every time, as if it were the first time, always gaining new meaning. DARK MARKET BROADCAST (1985) is a scratch drawn from a sort of storm dance that proceeds through buzzing voices, choruses and shortwave, inserts of spoken word, convulsing industrial rhythms, unexpected suspension of rhythms, all to conclude in feminine groans with electrostatic discharges. SEND (1994) is a compact album that unwinds between melodic hints and rolling waves, between submerged voices (SLEEPERS) and rhythmic killer (SHATTER, track realized with Zbigniew Karkowski), until the echoes of subdued, faint sounds, the obsessive bass and the opening of the two final tracks, CRUCIBLE and TRESPASS. The title track of INCOMING (1995) testifies to Duncan's first experiments, with the elaboration of computer sounds (thanks to the help of Max Springer) and a prelude to the one to follow, THE CRACKLING . It's all elevation, and then a sudden final fall. In FLARE the voice is imprisoned by sonic shocks, VOICE FIELD is a wave on a background of percussion and distant screeching, CEREMONY a devastation that seems to evoke distant rituals. CRUCIBLE (1998) was realized on the occasion of the Topolò festival, at the border between Slovenia and the Friulian region of Italy, where Duncan moved in the mid nineties. A work with particularly delicate tones, it's an embroidery of crystalline field-recordings around the theme of water, resulting efficiently in a composition lasting about 20 minutes. "Every work has its own life. When it works, it seems to have a presence all its own and I don't know how certain elements have become part of the sound. It doesn't happen because I've forgotten the techniques I used; it's like hearing something different for the first time without knowing where it came from, without knowing it was there before. This is very important, to recognize if an event, an album, a performance, or an installation really works. This is also part of the connection between the music and the rest of the things I do... I'm part of the process because I put it in action, but when it works I'm only a part... It's as if something gets extracted from me that tells me the next move to make. At a certain point the work itself dictates 'this is what's needed'... My control becomes much less defined and at times superfluous. It's as if there were a dialogue between the work and me: sometimes it decides... I'm always ready to take control but also ready to let that go when it's necessary. It's useful to know when to respond. This quality is what I search for in all my work, to respond and to encourage others to do the same." To draw from inside yourself in order to later allow something to happen that cannot be controlled: words that seem to recall the encounter between external causality and internal purpose described by André Breton in the book 'L'amour fou' - and it is an amour fou, an insane love, that ties Duncan to all the aspects of existence, a thirst to always discover something new. Often he puts an obstacle in front of himself, to overcome it himself and encouraging whoever's listening to do the same. At times the obstacle may be enclosed in a sonic modulation or in a particular mental condition particularly appropriate to face oneself: on many occasions Duncan chooses structures and predetermined behaviors such as science, religion, sex, or at a level even broader culture, interpersonal relationships, visual and auditory perception. Have you ever dealt with religious ideas? I grew up in Kansas, in a very Calvinist environment that repressed sex... my parents never gave me any education in that sense... I learned I had to look elsewhere to find information and that it was important to be able to ask questions openly about anything: if you repress something, it always becomes heavier and in the end it controls you. The more you ask questions, the freer you are. So in my eyes religion became a source of hypocrisy that repressed impulses, something to avoid. Now I think there must be a way to explain experiences that can't be interpreted in terms of objects, of career or material instincts, a way to render every further questioning useless. I know you're a fan of Pasolini, can you tell me how you relate that to your work? The film "The Passion According to Matthew" presents a particular idea of religion, a way to encourage consciousness and challenge oneself... In that film Jesus is a very magnetic character, a strong figure who opposes structured religion, who continuously encourages the asking of questions and criticizes anyone who doesn't question themselves... A very dynamic figure, hard to get next to, who doesn't accept compromises and demands extreme actions... What he asks is to obtain as much as possible from oneself. At the opposite end there's the film, "Salò"... ...which is my favorite of his work. I don't know if I can explain it... there's something in that film that not only accepts every human activity that involves the celebration of all aspects of the body, but throws all this in your face. People in the film eat excrement and fruit with razorblades inside, a series of tortures are acted out, the women sing and caress the torturers like children. For me, "Salò" is a reflection on the emptiness of material life: the film is shot in a villa, a perfect symbol of prosperity. The place is used to commit every form of degradation on those children, to annihilate everything they have, to destroy their self-awareness and sense of dignity... It's a mirror of the hierarchy of society, where the more you seek power, the more you decompose and cause suffering in people unconnected to your own desires or suffering, who become victims... In this way they're encouraged to seek revenge, entering in their turn into the process, causing harm to someone else, perpetuating the chain of suffering. That's how I see "Salò" and I like it for the fact that it puts this in your face, scene after scene. Religion, sex, power relations: systems that Duncan explores to subvert and to become aware, moving in the interstices of the systems themselves. When he decided to visit the Stanford linear accelerator to sample its interior sounds and use them in a later CD, THE CRACKLING (1996), reflection on the idea of science was inevitable. Science in this case is seen as a form of religion, since it has something to do with processes incommensurable with respect to human experience and yet (dis)integrating parts of it. THE CRACKLING testifies to Duncan's attraction to a mechanism that puts at stake trust, a sense of the overwhelming, doubt. The linear accelerator, built for research of subatomic particles through the splitting of electrons, is an immense edifice: a longitudinal body of more than 3 kilometers that resolves in a cylindrical collision chamber with walls 20 meters thick. Here the electron is obliged to follow a course that according to Duncan reflects that of life: "isolated, constricted in a system that uses its own energy to force it along a path that draws it with ever increasing speed to certain destruction - to a point of change, a complete turning point and the start of a new process". The entire CD is a challenge to human measure, a pursuit to the threshold of perception. The sounds, never so thin in other works, design subtle architectures via equilibrations and modulations that re-echo the contrasts of the space where they were taken: at stretches the micropulsations invite you to lose yourself in the details of the infinitely small, at others a drone emerges in the foreground to measure an immense space and become meditation, infinite waiting. Insistent throbs are sustained for a long time, almost as if there were a desire to transcend the ability to resist sound - in some passages they seem to give voice to emptiness. Duncan writes in the liner notes, 'You exist in an arena of gravity and sound. You are like light, like a sea of air. You are history, and make all of history something else'. The awareness of being part of a process over which you have no control does not involve annihilation but the need to assert oneself, to absorb every experience, to instill breath in every sound. The immense space of the accelerator, projected on the interior of the human psyche, opens a space at the same time vast and rich in questions. To the exploration of such space, Duncan went through a series of installations and events in the course of the nineties, beginning with his arrival in Amsterdam in 1988. "Amsterdam couldn't have been more different from Tokyo. Tokyo was like a pressure cooker, the stress was everywhere and inescapable. Amsterdam was the absence of stress... It encouraged a kind of introspective calm." The transformation from stress to introspection, the opening of an interior space through displacement of normal exterior coordinates is witnessed by the STRESS CHAMBER installation, first realized in Amsterdam in 1993. The participant is locked nude and blind inside a shipping container, which has three motors on three sides. Once activated, the mechanism starts vibrations designed to make the container resonate and that the participant perceives as a tangible object that moves around and through his or her body. The double CD RIVER IN FLAMES - KLAAR , released the following year, overwhelming with its turbine of wild blips, ricocheting rhythms, telephone signals, sounds that cut the air, tolling bells, shortwave, confused voices, screams, shots. RIVER IN FLAMES , according to Duncan, is "a seduction. An intentional flattery". One of the tracks on KLAAR , titled THE IMMENSE ROOM, through which suspended sounds, particularly open and vaporous, seem to turn a concentrated, limited interior space into something vast. The will is to look inside oneself to the limits in order to reach untouched borders (by the way, remember Duncan's passion for Carlo Gesualdo, the madrigal composer at the end of the 16th C., who required the performers of his works to sing their parts in the dark...). In the MAZE installation (1995) the participants were locked naked in a dark, empty room without knowing when the door would be opened again. Duncan, who was also locked in the room, wanting to see "what happens when one's left alone with the mind, with no outside distractions and without knowing when it would end", to reach the border that shakes the constructions on which our ideas are based. In the wake of MAZE comes VOICE CONTACT (1998-99). "In VOICE CONTACT each participant enters a completely dark room with an audio environment that takes you to the center and makes it difficult to move around, because it removes the acoustic reference points. You're transported by the sound until you're no longer sure where you are. I'm also in the room, reacting to each person according to what I can feel from them without being able to see them." Duncan's most recent CD, TAP INTERNAL , follows the lines of the investigation of space, moving between extremely low frequencies which in two sublime moments interact with highs to create a sonic effect that seems to radiate from behind the listener's shoulders. The new installation THE FLOCKING consists of an almost entirely dark room, where a children's choir is heard coming up through the floor. Translation by John Duncan and Giuliana Stefani.