John Duncan & Edvard Graham Lewis
Presence
All Questions

Available through the Helen Scarsdale Agency: $18.00

Within Presence, John Duncan and Edvard Graham Lewis have staged an exercise into the phenomenological relationship between the electro-magnetic spectrum and the human voice. So much of the time, the space between radio transmissions is described as empty; when in fact, it is anything but as a rich polyglot of etherial tones, ghostly languages, and caustic hisses quietly glide through the airwaves. For many years, Duncan has recoded both voice and shortwave as a means of posing a series of enigmatic yet epistomological questions. Presence appears less of a true collaboration as Lewis makes a few choice guest appearances alongside Duncan's signature coagulation of electrical drone and teutonic breath. Somewhat like the recent Duncan collaboration with Asmus Tietchens, Duncan opens the album by timestretching Lewis' voice into tense strands of energy which eventually dissolve into a gray monolith of shortwave timbres which dominate the center of the album. When Lewis' voice returns, it is a claustrophobic affair in which he whispers to the listener to "take a step forward and tell the truth." For both Duncan and Lewis, the definition of the truth has never been an absolute, but a continuous journey balancing the known and unknown, the present and absent, and the seen and unseen.