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John Duncan, "Da sich die Machtgier..."
Prolific sound artist John Duncan's newest disc finds him in a kind of half-collaboration with Asmus Tietchens, whose readings from two E.M. Cioran texts become sources for the voice manipulation that has characterized Duncan's work as of late. Cioran's name should sound familiar to Tietchens listeners, as quotes from the modern philosophe/aphorist frequently appear on the musician's sleeve notes. Duncan's notes here, however, express a clear distaste for the fatalism that dominates Cioran's philosophy, a kind of a-philosophy often abbreviated in cheeky, opaque aphorisms like the one displayed on Tietchens' new FT+: "It is simple to be "deep," just follow your own false bents."Die Stadt
Part of Tietchens' reading for Da sich die Machtgier? comes from Cioran's examination of tyranny in the modern world, explaining the hamster-wheel trend in which humanity submits to the will of a great and "pitiless" dictator, degenerates into "primal disorder", and then begins again by embracing another tyrant. Strange that Duncan, who disagrees with such fatalism and actually did not even receive a translation of the text until after finishing recording, has produced a record that feels much closer to the man's doomed words than anything Tietchens ever prefaced with a Cioran quote. For three of the disc's four tracks, Duncan completely obliterates not only words themselves, but any evidence of the vocal origin of the sounds. He's taken Tietchens' original recording, presented "more or less intact" on the remaining track, and transformed it into three utterly inhuman compositions. Inhuman not because they are desolate in composition, or even because they lack expression or an emotional core, but because of the obtrusive and unforgiving way each one crowds the listening space. The noisy opener "Freih zein hoem macht" pushes miniscule fragments of vocal sound into endless repeat, a bombardment of clicking surges that somehow resists the retreat into a more atmospheric or patterned industrial space. Each sound arrives in charged, unhesitant succession, as if eager fill the gap left by its predecessor. Silence in this music, rather than offering relief or resolution, seems only to emphasize the void, offering nothing but a blank stare into the next numbing assault. Duncan's other tracks are less abrasive, though no easier to ignore. The closing "Aber..." is essentially a short, buzzing drone cycle, molded and amplified over the song's 30-min. length, but the sprawl never reaches an apex of textural complexity, nor does it develop in any kind of organic fashion. The fuzzy hum of the tones have more in common with Tietchens' voice than the other two tracks, but they are far from sounding human or even comfortable. The track becomes an endless churn, like faraway factory noise, or the sound of Cioran's wheel of history, scraping on and on. While Da sich does not lend itself to similar repetition, it does make for a thoroughly alien experience, especially in conjunction with the textual foundation.
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