DUNCAN, JOHN & GIULIANA STEFANI - Palace of Mind

Format: CD

Label & Cat.Number: Allquestions 01

Release Year: 2000

Note: lim. 1000 special cover

Price (incl. 19% VAT): €15.50

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"... a really mind-blowing journey into pure sounds - same concert as he played during his small tour in Germany December 2000. Needs to be played loud. Our favourite DUNCAN-album so far. Mysterious, powerful, organic. A real experience." [Drone Rec. 2001]

label: www.allquestions.net

"Palace Of Mind is the 2000 recording collaboration between John
Duncan and Giuliana Stefani. Mr. Duncan has long been one of AQ's
favorite experimentalists, having started things out back in the '70s
LA performance art community only to quit the US to pursue his own
intense psychological research into sound, projection, installation,
photography, and the like. Stefani is a mathematician by training and
became acquainted with Duncan through a collaborative project they
began in Amsterdam in 1996. For this album, the two sifted through
digital treatments of shortwave transmissions, wire-tapped data
streams, and voice. In turn, they work the album into labyrinthine
composition that can hold any number of potent metaphors: the neural
synapses of the human brain, the schematics of a computer, or simply
an architectural set of overlapping resonant spaces. Rareified tones
set with motoric vibrations transition through the fluttering of (or
rather the lack there of, as this sounds like the empty spaces between
the bands marked by a mechanoid oily hiss) and onto slashing digital
drone. Here, one can think to Duncan's exceptional field recordings
made at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in the early '90s. Within the
movement from an irritable data-stream purity to the gossamer haze of
shortwave distortion to gaping drones of treated vocal vibrato, Duncan
and Stefani have set a trajectory deep into the heart of their sonic
architecture, with each 'room' saturated with an anxiousness for what
may be on the other side of the door. You won't find Duncan firing a
gun at your head (seriously, he did that as performance piece called
Scare back in the late '70s, using blanks mind you), but Palace Of
Mind revels in an interlocking network of chambers that resonate and
breathe with a profound beauty. Highly recommended!" [Aquarius Records]