John Duncan

John Duncan was born in Wichita, Kansas and arrived in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, where he became closely associated with the Los Angeles Free Music Society, working with Tom Recchion, Fredrik Nilsen, and Joe Potts. His early practice combined radical performance work, live radio experimentation over KPFK's Close Radio with Paul McCarthy, and an obsessive engagement with shortwave radio that would define his sound for decades. He left the United States for Tokyo in 1982, continued work with pirate FM transmission, collaborated with Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter on the track Kokka (National Anthem), and built close relationships with Masami Akita, Keiji Haino, and Hijokaidan. His work has since appeared on Touch, Die Stadt, and Staalplaat, with collaborations extending to The Hafler Trio's Andrew McKenzie, Zeitkratzer, and Pan Sonic.

This 5LP + 7" box set (VOD94, 2012) is the comprehensive second VOD chapter, gathering all of Duncan's vinyl and tape releases produced between 1978 and 1985 on his own AQM label: the Organic 12", the Creed and Nicki 7", and the Riot LP, alongside material from his 1982 to 1985 tape releases including Music You Finish, Supplement, Move Forward, Brutal Birthday Soundtrack, Phantom, and Purge. The bonus 7" collects earliest collaboration recordings from 1978 and 1979 as Doo-Doettes and CV Massage with Michael LeDonne-Bhennet, Dennis Duck, Paul McCarthy, Fredrik Nilsen, and Tom Recchion. Boomkat described the arc from the primordial noise of Broken Promise through the pirate FM transmissions, the extended noise abstractions of Riot and Brutal Birthday Soundtrack, to the "disturbing acousmatic erotica and swampy VHS-tape noise" of Phantom and Purge. Limited to 600 individually numbered copies.