John Duncan / Scheintot Split

A clash of the titans: squaring up the venerable John Duncan and collaborators against adventurous new trio Scheintot, aka Joachim Nordwall, Mats Gustafsson, and Henrik Rylander, putting sax and electronics thru the ringer in bullish but surprisingly sensitive avant jazz-noise gauntlets.

The Duncan / Scheintot split reprises a relationship ongoing between the cutting edge sound artist and iDEAL horde since 2014, and which has produced some properly rough hewn gems such as the disarming suite of covers ‘Bitter Earth’ and related Duncan / Nordwall suite of dark ambient noise ballads ‘Conventional Wisdom’. Here, however, they ditch any niceties for a proper, spittle-inflected delve into the sort of sheer, atonal abstraction that has underlined and bound their respective catalogues over the decades, with Duncan throwing down an absolute howler ‘SaxMix’, whilst his iDEAL counterparts keep up their side with a feral expressions on Korg Ms20, flute/sax, and mixing desk tekkerz. Definitely one for those who like when it stings.

Notorious, uncompromising pioneer of noise, sound and performance art, Duncan mangles sax recordings made by Mats Gustafsson, Antoine Chessex, Martin Escalante, Dror Feiler and Ulrich Krieger in a 12 minute maelstrom that strips them down for parts and panel beats into a banking tidal wave of noise that comes crashing down to near silence in spectacular fashion. With an experienced hand on the tiller he grows the piece from drooling extended tekkerz into alright swarms of precisely layered viciousness, bulbous with bass and collapsing into more fragrant jazz convention, culminating a final push for the border.

Scheintot’s part is more restrained but also powerful in its stare-down intensity. Spunk-in-the-reed gargle gives way to heavy breathing with an eroticism tied to Duncan’s own work, buckling into electronic scree and tones resembling his shortwave sounds on ‘Zugrundeliegend’, whilst they foreground a squirming flute quite unlike we’re used to hearing it on ‘Erweiterung’, and the elements come together with a strangely meditative appeal common to some of the best noise music in a final 10 minute part ‘Extreme Hess’ that hovers on the edge of threat that never breaks fully loose, but hangs in the air like a decomposing stink or last weekend’s Mkat seeping from pores.