John Duncan, Elliott Sharp

condition (disc/cover): NM / NM

A duo record built from a single instrument: the voice. John Duncan contributes shortwave, voice, and processing; Elliott Sharp, the New York downtown-improvisation veteran (Carbon, State of the Union, several decades of saxophone, guitar, and extended-technique work in every direction) matches him on voice and processing. No instruments in the conventional sense; everything on the record is traced back to the human larynx at some point in its history.

Tongue belongs to what Duncan has called his voice series. Starting in the same period he produced The Keening Towers (a solo voice piece also from 2003), Duncan became interested in the voice as pure sound, displaced from any recognisable linguistic reference. What remains after processing is the grain of speech itself: breath, glottal attack, nasal resonance, rendered into something closer to architecture than utterance. The method connects Duncan's practice to Meredith Monk's on one side and to the deepest end of Throbbing Gristle's psychological-acoustics work on the other.

Cover photography and design by Giuliana Stefani. Mastered under the usual Allquestions protocols. The partnership with Sharp continued across subsequent Duncan records (including Vox), but Tongue is the inaugural document and the one to have.