24.1.11

John Duncan - Tap Internal (2000)



John Duncan is one of the most extreme people in modern music, and yet he doesn't play in Dark Funeral. What he does do is create unsettling sound art and performances that often deal with the limits of human endurance, with sensory deprivation as well as violence. This is the same guy who shot a blank at a friend's face ('Scare', 1976), showed porno movies to an audience of women and then invited them to enter a back room and abuse him sexually ('For Women Only', 1979), locked himself and 7 other people (one of them an infant) into a dark room, naked and blind, without knowing for how long ('Maze', 1995), and, if rumours are true, had to flee to Japan after having sex with a corpse in Tijuana - and of course making a sound recording of the proceedings ('Blind Date', 1980), all in the name of art. Suddenly Dimmu Borgir don't look so frightening anymore. In recent years he seems to have calmed down a bit, which is probably a good thing.
'Tap Internal', released on Touch but now out of print, is one of his sound-only works, one 46 minute track of cracklings, buzz and rumblings, and somewhere in there, the beating of the human heart (the transparent front cover looks like an X-ray of the chest). More uncomfortable than most, this will probably go down well with people who enjoyed the Courtis & Marhaug album I posted recently.
Listen.
320kbps.

1 comment:

  1. how could anyone resist with an intro like that! thanks for this...

    ReplyDelete