John Duncan & Elliott Sharp
Tongue
All Questions

Available through the Helen Scarsdale Agency: $16.00

John Duncan has long praised the human voice as the most powerful instrument that he's encountered, even above his beloved shortwave which has been central to almost all of his compositions. Here, Duncan and Elliott Sharp manipulate sustained vocalizations from both artists as well as quiet gurglings of saliva coagulating within the cavities of their respective mouths. While these sounds acquire a delicate tactility that recalls the likes of Steve Roden and Toshiya Tsunoda, Duncan's shortwave interrupts and ruptures the quiet passages of this record with caustic static, twin blade flutterings, and electrocuted drones. Much could be said about the dislocation of the voice by a transmitter / receiver machine, but we'll leave that for the post-structuralist, academic types. That said, Duncan's recent work has shifted toward monumental compositions of minimalism (e.g. Phantom Broadcast, Stun Shelter, Keening Towers, etc.); but with Tongue, his work privleges the fragment (perhaps in deference to Sharp), making this an album closer to his previous masterpieces Tap Internal and River In Flames.