Series: Moving Furniture Records
Format: Cd

With the CD John Duncan & T. R. Kirstein we present the first collaboration works by Danish composer/artist Tobias R. Kirstein and American composer/artist John Duncan.

John Duncan & T. R. Kirstein is released on CD mastered by Jos Smolders in artwork designed by Kasper Vang with illustrations by Vernon Lee and photography by T.R. Kirstein.

About John Duncan & T.R. Kirstein

On May 31st, 2019, the day Roky Erickson from 13th Elevators died (I later found out), I woke up from a dream of sound and text. I dreamt that John Duncan kept repeating the words YOU ARE SAFE entangled with sine waves.
So I instantly shot him a message asking if it was too weird to do exactly that. He replied: “not too weird”.

— Tobias R. Kirstein —

YOU ARE SAFE and COME TO ME are the first two collaborative tracks by Danish composer/artist Tobias R. Kirstein and American composer/artist John Duncan.

Reviews

Vital Weekly, Frans de Waard

I heard the name John Duncan for the first time in the mid-’80s, and ever since I heard his music off and on. In the last decade, mostly off. I am not sure if there are many new releases from him, or maybe they simply don’t reach me. Duncan was once part of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, starting a trajectory that brought him to Tokyo, Amsterdam, and then Italy, where he performed radical music. The shortwave radio is one of his main sound sources (well, perhaps ‘is’ should be ‘was’). Kirstein, on the other hand, is someone of whom I heard not too much music, save his work with Pär Thörn (Vital Weekly 1261) and that he is a member of Lights People (Vital Weekly 884) and Topos, a trio with Jacob Kirkegaard and Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard. I believe you could call him a computer musician, but that is also what you could call Duncan.
This collaborative work started with a dream Kirstein had in which Duncan repeated the phrase ‘You Are Safe’ (the dream was on the day that Roky Erickson from the 13th Elevators died, March 31, 2019, if that has any relevance). Kirstein asked Duncan to record that phrase, as well as ‘Come To Me’, which is the second piece here, and around that, they spin an intricate web of sine waves or drones; or both. You never know how these are generated nowadays. Likewise, I am not entirely sure what was done here, beyond the voice of Duncan. ‘Come To Me’ is repeated more times than ‘You Are Safe’ and has more words. It is a song if you want. I don’t know how the drones/sine waves were made, but my best guess is that these are computer-generated. In ‘Come To Me’, the drones at the beginning sound like a buzzing insect, which is slightly annoying, but over twenty or so minutes, it morphs into a gentler variation. By then, the repetitions of the voice are also less. ‘You Are Safe’ starts with a similar drone as ‘Come With Me’ ends, maybe tying both pieces together, but the drones remain sober and atmospheric throughout this piece. The repeated text is almost like a warning signal. I enjoyed this piece a lot for its minimal character and, honestly, the lesser amount of text. The other one is not bad at all, certainly in the second half of the piece. It is altogether a most interesting collaboration. (FdW)