Undead Air
John Duncan’s experimental music: an oasis of disturbance
Graeme Thomson
Phantom Broadcast, 2002 | Fresh, 2002
«The ear knows how to lose track». Michel Serres The ear attends to its distraction, is distracted by its attention. Erring amid the distant glitter of asperities and aspersions, it seeks out a port of call, however unfamiliar, only to discover that the more stable such reference points appear, the more they are in the end like obstacles, interference in the desire for what lies beyond their shores, unmoored, farther out. An unspeakable frisson in losing contact, sucked back into the heave and surge of roiled surf, lured by half-drowned voices and alien storms.
This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true
Such are the pleasures of listening to (or playing) the shortwave band. And yet at the same time there is the nagging feeling that one is constrained to abandon each passing citadel of sense, already under siege and crumbling at the edges, to move on like an aural refugee, and that what appeared to be desire was nothing more than a tactical reversal of impending loss. Time in its autophagy.
Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true.
Don DeLillo in his novel Underworld defines what has become a predominant feature of much contemporary art practice, which bereft of a meaningful ‘event’ horizon seems to have turned to a metaphysics of the real, seeking the ‘soul’ of phenomena no longer in some platonic beyond, but within the very cracks and folds of their proteiform im/materiality.
In a recent work, Phantom Broadcast, one of a number of pieces he has made using shortwave transmissions, sound artist John Duncan sampled a single broadcast of a utility signal which he then subjected to a number of digital processes that tampered with its physical structure, reconfiguring the original source as an imperceptibly shifting soundfield of virtual projections and spectral voices: an inner beyond. From the insistent bell-like clamour of its opening, Phantom Broadcast proceeds by a series of phenomenological ‘resurgences’, with each successive modulation in the sound’s shape already gestating in the womb of its passing present.
The metallic bells smear into a distant, unearthly choral haze which after several minutes is swept up in a jet-engine like glissando that on closer inspection results to be an anamorphically time-stretched human voice mouthing some indecipherable phrase (the only “foreign” body in the work). Throughout the disc’s 47 minute duration a single, shimmering, ecstatic note appears to be “held” suspended in, and suspending time, producing an unresolved tension between flux and stasis, identity and multiplicity. Most remarkably, no matter how loud one plays it, Phantom Broadcast appears to retreat from hearing like an aural hallucination, a fringeless cloud that drifts tantalizingly out of reach, lost in its own inner distances.
«Our nature lies in movement», says Pascal, «complete calm is death». Duncan’s work moves beyond this dialectic to suggest a subtler more involutive sense of being in time: an oasis of disturbance.
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John Duncan
American artist John Duncan schooled himself in shock tactics before becoming fully immersed in exploring the sound properties of phenomena ranging from particle accelerators to suboceanic tidal currents, and the psychic states they produce. Phantom Broadcast, the most recent of Duncan’s works using shortwave radio, transforms a recording of a utility signal, made in Sweden, into a sprawling ‘choral’ work of tonal minimalism that hovers around the key of E major before modulating imperceptibly to B major, a process repeated several times over the piece’s 47 minute duration. The CD is available on Duncan’s own label All Questions based at his home in S. Leonardo, Udine.
