The American sound artist who carried the Los Angeles performance underground into the Tokyo noise scene, and built a body of work from shortwave radio, field recording and the human voice aimed directly at the listener.
John Duncan is the American sound and performance artist I keep at Tier II as a connector between two undergrounds and an early codifier of shortwave-and-voice composition. Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1953 and trained at the California Institute of the Arts, he fell in with the Los Angeles experimental scene in the late 1970s, where the people closest to his interests, Tom Recchion, Fredrik Nilsen, Joe Potts, turned out to be the loose collective known as the Los Angeles Free Music Society. From 1978 he was part of that circle; his first solo LP, Organic, appeared in 1979.
His lasting material is the shortwave radio. Duncan likened its drifting signal to the sound of half-dreaming, and from the early 1980s he built compositions out of broadcast static, field recording and his own heavily processed voice, often recording text read backwards and inverting the tape. The EP Creed (1982) carried his first solo shortwave recordings. The aim was never melody or rhythm; it was atmosphere with a direct psychological effect, sound built to act on the listener's nervous system.
The other half of the early work was performance, and it was deliberately confrontational. Pieces such as Scare and Bus Ride tested fear and consent in ways that would be impossible to stage today, and the notorious Blind Date (1980) went further still. Duncan framed these not as provocations for an audience but as acts of self-directed psychic torture, a way of turning shame and conditioning back on himself. I record this as part of the historical account, addresses it directly in the content advisory above, and documents the work for its sound and its influence rather than its capacity to shock. The performances are part of why Duncan is remembered; they are not why he is here.
In 1982 he left the United States for Tokyo, and this is the move that matters most for this archive. In Japan he continued his performance and pirate-radio work and fell into direct contact with the noise scene, leading to collaborations with Masami Akita, Keiji Haino and Hijokaidan. The Tokyo-period records, the solo Riot, Dark Market Broadcast, and Kokka (National Anthem) made with Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter, sit at a genuine crossing point between the American performance tradition, the British industrial axis and Japanese noise.
He has since lived and worked in Amsterdam and Italy, where he remains based, his later installations and recordings continuing the same pursuit of sound as a psychophysical event. The Close Radio archive went to the Getty in 2007, and his work is now shown in galleries as readily as it is heard on record.
My reading. John Duncan is at Tier II as the figure who linked the Los Angeles performance underground to the Tokyo noise scene, and as an early master of the shortwave-and-voice method. The transgressive early work is recorded as history and kept without emphasis; the sound is the reason for the entry.
VAGO · c. the postwar