Lucy Duncombe Sunset, She Exclaims

Highly regarded for a pair of innovative releases with 12th Isle, Lucy Duncombe is an experimental singer and
artist who uses technology to deftly abstract songcraft in ways that uniquely pique the imagination. With
’Sunset, She Exclaims’ Lucy diversifies Modern Love’s 7” series via a trio of works that embody influences
ranging from doo wop to avant garde and pure pop forms, in a style of melismatic sound poetry weft with
Jacquardian intricacy. It’s a truly precious, beguiling and evocative record that will reward repeat plays for
eons to come, much in the manner of contemporary classics such as Kara-Lis Coverdale’s ‘Grafts’, or Laurie
Anderson’s ‘O Superman’.
The star of this short story is no doubt ‘Sunset, She Exclaims’, where Lucy reframes Jeff Alexander and
Anthony Wilson’s haunting ballad, ‘Come Wander With Me’, used as a titular device in The Twilight Zone’s
swansong episode, 1964, and which has since notably featured on Vincent Gallo’s ‘Brown Bunny’(2003). In
Duncombe’s larynx and motherboard, the song is dissected and reworked as a glossolalic froth of hiccuped
melody blooming into crepuscular harmony. Its effect is practically hormonal; affective as indole in, as
she puts it, “reducing the stench of the real”, whilst distilling the saccharine sadness of the original to a
synaesthetic, dream-nudging whiff of nostalgia.
Once you prize yourself away from that A-side, Lucy’s B-side only lures deeper into blurred hyper-pop
fantasy. The precedents of Maria Chavez’s experimental sound poetry and Niecy Blues’ raw soul hover around
‘Ghosting’ and ‘Ghosted’, teasing the parameters of avant-pop into plasmic refrains, foregrounding the usually
unwanted parts of vocal performance - glitching digital artefacts and errant detritus - in a way that makes
the mind’s eye saccade, tracing the half-heard glowworms nestled in its bush of ghosts. Fine-tuned ears will
surely recognise the sort of brilliance on show here, and will no doubt revel in its gauzy glaze, which prizes
oneiric ambiguity, ephemerality, the supernatural, over anything more corporeal.