John Duncan, Bernhard Günter

Home, Unspeakable is a collaboration between Duncan and Günter based on Samuel Beckett's last work, an opera libretto entitled Neither that he wrote on the back of a card for Morton Feldman. Although Günter and Duncan both claim Feldman as strong influences, this work sounds little like Feldman, but is instead a "series of musical 'places,' which in their entirety form the topography of a 'landscape' we feel might be described by the final words of Beckett's text: unspeakable home" (from the liner notes). Making a heavy use of silence (even for Günter), the work features several sonic episodes that only occasionally rise out of the fog. It is easy to connect this piece to Beckett's late work, where communication is reduced to a minimum, and every attempt to do so is doomed to failure. A listener can easily connect the episodes to communicative events, as they overlap and mutate into each other, or fade into silence. The last event, which takes the last third of the piece, starts with soft brief whistles and concludes with almost inaudible rustles, as if the whistler finally gave up and crawled off into the darkness.