John Duncan: Dark Market Broadcast (Staaltape)
Purchased used at Eide's, I think
I saw John Duncan in performance once, some time in the early 1990s. I'm trying to remember anything about it I can. It was at The Beehive in Oakland (formerly King's Court), upstairs, a Manny Theiner production. I haven't thought about this in years (if not decades), bits and pieces coming back to me. There were several shows I attended, did Manny make it a sort of series? Multiple billings? I saw Macronympha, for example. I don't think they performed often, and certainly not locally despite coming from Monroeville. I think I saw a silly local project too, Filet O'Feedback. Probably more.
Some of the Duncan performance was done in as close to complete darkness as possible. Some of it was sound added to a cut-up of a gay S&M loop, "Brutal Birthday." There was no explicit sex but there was nudity, reassembled in a nonlinear manner. It was a strange event, disconcerting. Probably loud too.
As a follower of industrial/noise/experimental music at the time, I knew John Duncan had something of a reputation. He had released a few scarce records which already were starting to sell at premium prices, long before discogs.com had become a thing. Hell, the internet was barely a thing at the time. I guess he was involved at some level with pornography? I've never seen any adult materials he's created. (Truthfully. I'm not trying to spare my reputation.) He was also possibly living and working in Japan? It's been so long, maybe I knew more at one time.
Here I am, on another deep dive into my music library, pulling out this artifact of the time. I guess if you associate any sound work with John Duncan, you know he likes using shortwave radio sounds. A lot. I don't think there's a moment on this disc where there isn't some shortwave source used, sometimes several simultaneously. There are other things happening: sampled loops, spoken text. But mostly shortwave sounds.
I have one or two radios still working that are able to pick up shortwave broadcasts. Years ago I actively would hunt through the dial, looking for whatever I could find: Morse code, other electronic transmissions, extreme broadcasting. I discovered that shortwave was a haven for hardline Christian fundamentalists and white Christian racist nationalists. My favorite was Brother (Harold) Camping, who would routinely tell people they were going to hell for almost any reason (including one poor guy who was really worried because he had unknowingly smoked a marijuana cigarette!). Brother Camping made news by predicting the end of the world on March 21, 2011. People quit their jobs and sold their possessions over this nonsense! When March 21 came and went, he updated the date, which I guess you've figured out also came and went. Was he unhappy that the world didn't end then either?
Shortwave broadcasts were where I discovered Alex Jones. If you think he's gotten more extreme over the years, you're wrong. He's always been ridiculous. If I remember correctly, he was actually more blatantly racist at the time.
I like the sound of shortwaves, and their unpredictable nature. I won't write into Karlheinz Stockhausen's relationship to shortwaves in this post, that could go too long. I don't stay up at night hunting through shortwave bands via analog sources any longer, but I did find this great shortwave streaming website: http://sdrpt.dynip.sapo.pt/
Of the tracks on this strange release of 1986 (this CD reissued in 1990), I prefer the noisily ambient "Purge", 27 minutes of entirely shortwave sounds (I think). Maybe it sounds the least of human hands on it, the most like found sounds, but maybe that's the appeal to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment