condition (disc/cover): NM / NM
One of the warmer, more meditative records in John Duncan's catalogue, which is saying something: Duncan (born Wichita 1957, Bologna-based since 2005) has spent more than four decades sharpening the confrontational end of American experimental music, from his earliest shortwave experiments in late-Seventies Los Angeles Free Music Society circles through his notorious Tokyo years to his long European phase. Phantom Broadcast is what the shortwave practice sounds like when Duncan lets it sit.
The source material is a single shortwave transmission recorded on 18 April 2002 at Duncan's Scrutto studio in the Friuli hills. Recorded once, captured in full, processed and mixed at Thomas Nordanstad's studio in Stockholm, and premiered at Fylkingen in Stockholm on 20 September 2002 as a six-channel solo concert organised by Ingrid Engarås (to whose daughter Saga the CD is dedicated). Forty-seven minutes unbroken; the original transmission's origin and purpose are deliberately withheld.
What remains after Duncan's minimal treatments are phantom choral forms, bells resonating into infinity, breath-like densifications and thinnings. Duncan himself has compared the method to the surrealist practice of automatic writing: found sound pressed into psychoanalytical service, offered back to the listener not as information but as atmospheric residue. The embossed fold-over sleeve on Allquestions is exactly right. One of the records of 2002.
