Duncan Harrison
Duncan Harrison (b. 1986) is a British experimental musician. While born in London, Harrison moved to Brighton during his university years because of his fondness for the city’s experimental scene, typified by labels like Chocolate Monk. Harrison began making drone music as a teenager, but his work soon shifted towards sound collage and sound poetry, constructing narratives out of abstract sonics and voice. He’s released numerous albums throughout his career, including Young Arms (2012), Ogre Neon (2013), Nothing’s Good (2019), and There is No Fire in the Lake (2025). His latest release is Vegan Horse Meat (2026), a collaborative album with Barn Sour. Harrison also runs the adhuman record label where he’s released beguiling experimental music from overlooked artists. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Harrison on August 26th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss his first forays into noise music, the evolution of his artistic practice, and the many collaborations he’s done over the years.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Were you born in Brighton?
Duncan Harrison: I wasn’t. I was born in London, and then my family moved somewhere not far from London when I was 11. I came down here for university and a lot of that was because I always wanted to be in Brighton.
What do you remember about growing up in London?
My parents split and remarried to other people before I can even remember, so I was used to going between two homes. My dad’s house had reproductions of famous abstract pieces on the wall. He studied art and tried to get me to talk about this stuff, so if I liked an image, he’d ask me why. Also, a lot of British TV up to the 2000s was quite surreal. Anyone who was making filmed media, even if it was just ads, was probably coming from a theatrical and studied background in film. I can show you adverts from the 1990s for instant coffee that are like dada pieces, and that always appealed to me a lot. None of this is specific to London, to be honest—I left before I was old enough to get the most out of that. But even by that age, it was common for me to go to Central London and shop for CDs.
Was your dad also an artist or did he just study it?
He just studied it out of interest. He did a few degrees as an adult through the open university. He was a musician, though, and there’s a lot of music in the family. He sang in choirs and played in guitar bands when he was younger, and my stepfather was also big into music, so there was a lot to be listened to in both my households. It’s not like I was being played John Cage when I was 8 years old, but there was interesting stuff that were early influences.
Given that you had all this music, television, and art around you as a kid, was there a point at which you realized that you needed to venture out on your own and learn about this stuff? You mentioned going to the shops, but I’m wondering if there was a film or album that really changed things for you.
I suppose just getting into punk and heavy metal as a teen. I tried to engage with a lot of things to have an easier social life, like popular music and culture, but it never worked for me at all. With punk and metal, even though I’m embarrassed by a lot of the stuff now, the immediate aggression of it, and the idea that this was a music culture you could immerse yourself in and be a freak—you were rewarded for being unpopular—it made me feel that I really needed to adopt it. But even before that, a lot of my friends in London were from Jamaican families and they had older brothers who were immersed in ’90s Black youth culture, and I would take a lot of it in through osmosis. I was really into hip-hop when I was young. I was getting into Wu-Tang when I was 8 or 9 and I remember thinking that stuff felt really alien and that I needed to decode it. I’d go buy a CD based on their recommendation without knowing anything about it, and I felt really hungry to learn.
You mentioned this notion of being rewarded. When did you first feel the reward for yourself, whether as a musician or as someone participating in this alternative culture?
That would be around the time my interest in increasingly strange music led to noise. I must have been 18 or 19 when I really found the networks that I’m still in now. I felt that I had arrived at “the thing” that was working for me, because everything up until that point—stuff like hardcore—was something I went to because it was happening in my town, not because I was in love with it. I found something to be interested in, and I had contributions that were being recognized, even if that was just getting to trade with a few people and chatting at shows. It felt like being part of something.
Trading tapes?
CD-Rs and tapes. The first time I ever got to do that was really exciting because I knew it was something people did. The first time I got to stand in a room at a noise show and bring 10 of these little CDs and swap them with people… it still gives me quite a warm memory.
Do you remember an early show that left a large impact?
There were only two editions of this, but there was a small festival called No Trend in London during the mid-2000s. It was all mostly British and European noise acts, and the very first one I went to was pretty much the first exposure I had to very underground live noise. Being quite young, I went alone and felt a little nervous. I got to the venue and the power had been cut out in the street, and I stood in this room with all these people playing, waiting for hours for it to come back on. By the time it did, everyone had to truncate their sets into thirty seconds or two minutes. It was really exciting. The first stuff I ever saw was people doing a really quick, energetic set. And throughout the night, the floor began to leak water and people were having to play on ladders (laughter). It was like the night was doomed to failure. But this was it. I knew I wanted to be around this.
You said that you wanted to go to Brighton. I’m assuming this is because of stuff like Spirit of Gravity and Chocolate Monk. What’s your first exposure to Brighton as a cultural hub, that made you wanna move there?
I was at an age where a bunch of my friends had gone to do school and I was still living in my hometown. I had a weekend in Brighton, followed by Portsmouth. I was just doing stuff with friends and we went to this night called Wrong Music. Are you familiar with people like DJ Shitmat? This was more of a dance-oriented thing and it was very chaotic and rough around the edges. It was a lot of noise being put on at these shows and, when I went, I stayed up until the early hours of the morning and hung out with people. I got home and immediately started looking for things that I could study in Brighton. Coincidentally, I would’ve started getting in touch with Chocolate Monk at this time. I found out about Spirit of Gravity later. But again, that was all part of the attraction, of finding out that there were these people putting on these shows and doing different expressions of the same thing. That’s what I was coming down here for, to be around that.
Were you already making music before you were in Brighton?
When my family moved away from London we moved to High Wycombe, which is near Oxford, Reading, and London. I was making stuff around then. I was always messing around with guitars and I was in some embarrassing teenage bands, but I first started to mess around with my own music when I was 17 and living with my parents. By the time I got to Brighton, I was already a few years into it and had already put out stuff and ran a tiny CD-R label.
I wanted to ask about the early music you made. You had some early tapes and CDs during the late 2000s, and you were also on some compilations making drone—songs like “Honeying” and “Lerring” and one on a fundraiser comp called “Cagean Haino.” Were they two really important figures for you?
I was actually lamenting “Cagean Haino” this morning in a sleep-deprived, hungover state of fear (laughter). There’s a well-established workers co-operative here in Brighton called Infinity Foods. I used to work for it, and there was a guy who somehow convinced the co-op to let him have a little bit of money to make this fundraising compilation. His name was Nick Langley, and he has a tape label called Third Kind that puts out all sorts of weird stuff. The people who did tracks for this were all staff working at this co-op, and he assured me that it’d have some of the weirder, experimental things that people did on it. I knocked out this really, really stupid track with two tape players and vocals and yelling, and then I finally heard the compilation and it was all singer-songwriter stuff (laughter). To the best of my knowledge, nobody in that business knew I did that music, and that was their introduction to it. It was this really alienating thing.
I had been doing noise music more broadly before that. I couldn’t come up with a moniker that would make sense, so I used my own name. But you’re right, a lot of that early stuff is this creepy drone stuff, and then it moves into happy drone stuff (laughs). The first tape I put out under my own name was called Affirmations (2008) and I lived in this tiny room while in my first place living away at university. It was like a box room. I brought a tape deck with me, and I think I ran some sources live into a looping pedal directly into the tape. I don’t really remember much else about how it was made. It was a miserable time—I just have these memories of this bleak, tiny room and making this dark, miserable music. A lot of the early music is like that. It took a long time to make music I was proud of.
In the early 2010s you released Shit Barrel Scraping (2010), and that’s when you get into the collagic music, moving away from drone.
That was actually just a one-off birthday cassette I made for Dylan [Nyoukis] of Chocolate Monk. I ripped the audio before giving it to him and put it on a blog. That one I quite like (laughs). But the nature of that being something private and me just messing around on two sides of a tape to give to someone as a gift… there was a lack of pressure about what the music was meant to be. That’s why it’s more freeform. It also coincided with what my listening was like at the time. I was into this lo-fi, mid-2000s, Midwestern basement jam stuff. I listen to that stuff now and I do think there’s quite confusing and unusual variation in it.
Who were you listening to specifically?
Well, I’m talking about a lot of Canadian music here actually, but I use “Midwestern” to reference American Tapes-style stuff. Fossils and Middle James Co. and labels like that. Skaters tapes on blogs. I was really into that stuff, and I still have a lot of time for that, actually.
To me, Young Arms (2012) seems like a more mature iteration of what you were exploring on that birthday tape. I love the second track, “17/18,” because it just sounds really hilarious for whatever reason.
That material was some of the very first recordings I ever did that were consciously expressing this interest. It’s called “17/18” because I was 17 or 18 when I made them. It was just me rockin’ up in my parents’ garage with two mics and my stepfather’s old cassette deck that he didn’t use anymore, looping things around on this crappy sampling keyboard. There’s a theme of youth on that album, and this feeling that you’re progressing from younger things.
That’s the first album of yours I’ve heard, chronologically speaking, where it sounds like you’re tapped into this notion that any sound has the capacity to elicit a wide variety of emotions. On the track after that, “Olympiad,” the extended technique with the strings there sounds funny because the puttering on “17/18” right before it primes you for that. You also bring in Dale Cornish and other vocalists on the album. I’m wondering about the collaborative aspect here and what’s going on through your mind while making this album.
Back then, I worked a little more intuitively than I would now. And maybe I would like to return to that more intuitive way of doing things, but for the last few releases I’ve done, I’ve challenged myself to more explicitly introduce themes and ideas and have that be coherent. For me, it’s quite important that these things are built out more purposefully. With something like Young Arms, I was just putting stuff together. It represents the best bits of material I was experimenting with at home, with no idea that it would become an album, and then filling in some gaps afterwards.
With Dale being involved, there was a nice period of time when there was this creative pipeline between London and Brighton. A lot of us would see each other and we’d become friends. I just really love Dale’s voice and his approach—he was in this fantastic trio called Baraclough where he was the vocalist. I don’t know how much this album adheres to this idea of youth, but maybe there’s a little bit about me having the confidence to ask people I admire to work together. I would’ve been held back by fear around doing that when I was younger.
The way I read it is that you have these vocalists on Young Arms, and then you eventually do your own vocals on Ogre Neon (2013). “Rattles in the North” has that ending with the phasing “let’s try again” speech, and then “Dust From the Artist’s Corner” has a lot of muttering that feels at one with the textural sonics, and then “The Shadows Cast By The Bottoms of Photoframes Hung on Gallery Walls” has this clipping recitation that merges with this collage that feels like you’re turning a radio dial. It already feels like you’re trying so many things with your voice. Can you talk to me about that CD-R? It feels pretty crucial given that you’ve used your voice consistently since then, though I don’t really know if you were doing much vocalizing beforehand.
I wasn’t, no. And you’d be totally right to say that Young Arms is the beginning of that and it gets explored more in the Ogre Neon stuff. A very simple answer is that I started to appreciate free vocal improv and sound poetry at the time. It was a style that I really struggled with and didn’t like very much until I saw a performance at the Colour Out of Space festival. It was with Phil Minton and somebody else whose name I can’t remember. It just clicked with me that day and it felt natural to attempt it. There were definitely people down here in Brighton who were active and doing that stuff too. It felt like there was this culture where you could show up to a gig and just come with your voice and see what happened. It’s lovely from a logistical point of view as well (laughter).
It’s become a really persistent fascination for me, and I don’t exactly know why. I just think there’s something about trying to get as close as you can to only using a really, really minimal sound that’s still full of all this signifying meaning that you can play with and explode. Combine that with this very classical idea of sound poetry where you can use technology to disrupt those meanings… I just feel like that project is something worth revisiting and that it produces interesting results. I’ve only realized this quite recently, but I think I’ve always had this unconscious urge to introduce narrative to anything I make. Some of the first stuff I remember being good at in school was writing and English literature. I was in bands where there were lyrics and songs, and I feel like something I’m still really attracted to is the idea of introducing a narrative, and using words and voice is a good way of doing that even if you’ve subverted them of their original meanings.
You mentioned the logistical convenience of arriving to a show with only your voice. Was there a show you did around this time where you did just that? How’d that go?
I had a good couple of years where I did these performance-heavy live gigs, where there were these repeatable theatrical things with texts I’d follow. Some of them were purely voice, and maybe I’d have a tape recorder with me, or maybe I’d have something on an iPod to play as a backing piece. It was a mixed bag. With things like that, sometimes you feel like things aren’t working, and if you come with nothing besides this pre-planned thing and your voice, you have to commit to it. On days when you’re not feeling very confident, it can be miserable to do a gig like that. I’m quite comfortable with doing a lot of shows and putting out a lot of music where I feel like they’ve failed.
There was one I did at a festival that was in an old military fort. It was in a town that’s not too far away from here. They put me in this really dark basement at sea level, and that was nearly all voice and text. It was very emotional and difficult to do because I ended up theming the whole thing around memories of conversations I had with my grandfather. He had a military history whereas nobody else in my family does. It was supposed to be this funny and tongue-in-cheek performance, but it just hit me somehow and it was very hard to get through. It felt like I actually made a piece happen that day using these really strict components of voice and text. That might be one of the first times I felt like it was working, and that was 2012 or 2013.
How do you gauge if your sound poetry or text-based pieces are working, whether in a performance or on record?
It’s mostly intuitive, and the only barometer for me is if I like it and am interested by it. At this point, I’ve been doing this long enough that the reward of making things and feeling like it’s interesting is more than enough. I suppose there’s something to how you can gauge the atmosphere in a live performance, where the people seem locked in to what you’re doing, and that can feed back into one’s own experience of it. But if you’re talking about something that’s more sound poetic and there’s an idea, a text, and some diffusion or deconstruction of it, then you do have an objective thing you can follow. If I’m executing this idea as I’ve written it down, then it’s working, and any aesthetic outcome of that is secondary.
I recently listened back to something I did a while ago. I got asked to do a piece that was all about the body. It was a series of local people just making recordings for radio. I don’t even know if it’s out there anywhere, but I read an essay on sound poetry that I wrote whilst allowing myself to completely run out of breath. I’d get to a point where I couldn’t say words anymore, and then I’d breathe in and repeat until the text was done. There’s bits of it you can’t hear, and eventually it becomes a lot of gurgling and hiccups. I listen to that and think it sounds ridiculous, and I don’t know why anyone would want to hear it, but I executed an idea in that recording that kind of worked.
You said you weren’t interested in this type of music. What got you into sound poetry? There are a lot of different folks in this zone. There’s Henri Chopin who is French, there’s Charles Amirkhanian and the other American sound poets on 12 American Text Sound Pieces (1975), there are the Canadians like bpNichol and the Owen Sound folks. And when I think of the UK, it’s also hard not to think about the fact that radio plays had a longer history and place in culture than it did in the US.
I agree with that completely and it’s also why listening to a lot of British stuff of a certain era is quite hard for me. I don’t enjoy it as much as something in a language I can’t speak. But yeah, of course Henri Chopin. There’s such a focus on what the tape recorder and microphone can do whilst the use of voice is so essential to what he does… there’s something unique to his work that shares a lot of territory with pure experimental music on tape, like concrète sound. I really like Bernard Heidsieck. With him, I understood where he was coming from. A lot of the ideas in a lot of this work are simple ideas explored over and over again. The idea of the tape recorder being a tool for him, to produce another instance of his voice so he could realize this text he’d written down, was fascinating to me.
There’s a German artist, Franz Mon. It’s fair to say he was more into criticism and concrete poetry, but he has some recordings that are excellent. And some of his theories about this stuff are the most interesting and well articulated versions on what this type of work is doing. It also really applies to disciplines other than poetry. A lesser known artist is Greta Monach, who was Dutch. That’s just as simple as the fact that her voice sounds really amazing. They’re gentle pieces, and the way she uses her voice is brilliant.
That’s the thing I really like about sound poetry in general. These artists often have an overlap with non-musical fields.
Nearly always (laughter).
And there’s always this performance aspect when the voice is presented in this fashion. I like that performers will lean into specific facets of their own voice, whether their accent or prosody. I’m curious if there’s anything you’ve thought about with the way you speak or vocalize and how you lean into or push back against those qualities.
I think most people don’t like the sound of their voice when it’s recorded and played back to them, and I think it’s true for me (laughter). I just had to get used to it and not hate it so much. There’s some boring but significant details in there, like learning how to use a mic in different ways, learning how to record things in certain ways, knowing when you need to have a very clean digital recording or a terrible tape recording. I had a funny conversation with Louis [Golding] from Regional Bears a little while ago. I sent him a version of something for a tape we did. Myself, Graham Lambkin, and Russell Walker did a gig in Stockport. We produced a tape for it, and Louis recommended that I don’t use a slowed-down version of my voice because there’s an undeniable debt to Lambkin. And even though we both agree that he doesn’t own the idea of pitching your voice down slowly, it’s quite hard to do that on a tape with him and not feel like it’s derivative of what he does.
There’s definitely some tonal and accent things I lean into. I’ve done things in other countries that are vocal pieces. They dealt with being monolingual and feeling ignorant when you’re in Europe and everyone speaks multiple languages. They’re about cultural differences, of feeling like you’re a bummy, ignorant English guy going to a really nice place to get paid lots of money for people to speak in your language, and then going home to a culture where none of that would be available to them. I’m fairly critical of the United Kingdom, so bringing that around in my voice and dealing with my issues with what it’s like here, while being audibly British, is something I’ve tried to work with for quite a while.
You mentioned the importance of knowing when to use a microphone and how to process your voice and if you want to leave it clean. These are decisions that go into how the voice will be understood and what it’ll signify. I’m curious if you could speak to the musical side of things in terms of signifying. On Others Delete God (2015), you have the song “It’s a Dark Spot” where it sounds like both a performance and a field recording. I’m curious how you navigate that aspect in the context of sound collage and field recording.
There’s a very specific reason for having done that track that way. I’m embarrassed to say this now because obviously life is different, but Others Delete God is a big ‘ol self-pitying break-up record (laughter). The person who I’d broken up with had made a piece of music that kind of did the exact same thing: she was playing her own music over a field recording, which had a street performer playing violin. For reasons that are maybe obvious, I thought I’d replicate it. But more broadly, there’s always a lot of intuition going on with this stuff, though I think I’ve forced myself to have more of a conceptual rigor to this.
For as much as possible, I like for the sound sources in my work to have a significance to the wider narrative. For the most recent album I did, There is No Fire in the Lake (2025), there isn’t a single sound that isn’t directly explicable as being part of the main ideas, and as a result it took years to finish. I’m probably not going to do anything that rigidly again (laughter). But I have to begin with something meaningful because otherwise I don’t really know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. If I’m just doing something for the sake of it, I feel like I’m gonna end up with something I won’t be proud of later.
You were talking about narrative, and I think that gets really clear to me in the late 2010s with Preamble to Nihil (2017) and Nothing’s Good (2019). Both those albums feel like they’re intentionally structured, and it’s funny how a specific sound will appear and make me feel that way. There’s the breaking glass on “A Good Night” from Nothing’s Good, and for whatever reason, the way it’s recorded makes it seem more like a sound effect, which in turn makes me associate it with the world of radio plays. But then there’s also just discrete sections in general, like how the organ comes in after. With Preamble to Nihil, I think the saxophone on there is very funny. I’m going to use “field recording” very broadly, as I sometimes use it to refer to the way a certain recording sounds, where you can tell there’s a distance between the recordist and the sounds that are recorded and produced. The repercussion is that the piece can then sound like a staged performance, which then has the semblance of narrative in this way. How do you approach the structure of your pieces?
That’s really interesting feedback about the breaking glass and so on. I can’t really put myself back into when I made it because I don’t remember much about it, but I think that regardless of whatever the reasons for it would have been, a slightly more looped and morassed-sounding recording suddenly cutting out into a single, identifiable sound does push a kind of tension and narrative, purely from a compositional point of view. It creates movement and change, and sometimes that’s enough of a narrative. I think I totally identify with what you’re saying regarding the slight confusion around why a sound placed in a certain way can do that, but these things can be oddly emotional or funny or moving.
With Nothing’s Good, it was made at an earlier point in my relationship with my partner. She deals with disability and there’s a lot of stuff on that record that’s about learning how to properly be a companion to someone who has those struggles. There’s an image of an airport mobility aid [on the packaging] and the sound of it on the album—stuff like that. Also, I was living separately from her at this time, so there was this odd feeling of regular displacement. I feel like that record is very much about having an unfavorable living situation, dealing with that, and also dealing with these tensions and failures around supporting somebody who needs that support. A lot of that album is quite bleak-sounding, and I know that the feeling of smashing glass in my front room was meant to be an unpleasant moment. I wanted it to sound like breaking glass; I didn’t want to cloak it in anything. Maybe it was a spiteful moment or something.
Sorry to disappoint about Preamble because that was completely contrary to any of what I’ve said so far (laughter). All of that stuff was vignettes and sketches and things that I had no home for, that I decided to compile into a tape because they stopped me from getting work done. I kept returning to these pieces that I really liked, but I didn’t know where to put them. I felt like I needed to do an act of house clearing. The sequencing of that record is because I put them all into a playlist on my computer, and then I put them on shuffle until two sides of the tape were full. It was completely random, but there was an accompanying booklet that came out around the same time with some writing I’d done. It was a lot of themes about nihilism and it was fitting with some of the things that was going on with that tape. It was kind of cool to use a fairly randomly sequenced tape of leftovers to create other ideas. I thought that was fun. I’m thinking of doing another volume, of getting through stuff that’s been sitting around, because one thing I’m crazy on as a listener and music collector is collections of demos and outtakes and leftovers. I love that stuff.
Do you have any favorite compilations of demos and such that, for you, exceed the regular studio albums from that artist?
Wow, that’s such a great question and one I know I won’t give a satisfactory answer to. It’s hard to say. (looks over at shelf). Some years ago, Pica Disk put out this Reynols box set [Minecxio Emanations 1993-2018 (2019)]. There’s a lot of official stuff that’s reissued on there, but there’s a bunch of bits and pieces on there that are fascinating. Right next to it is a similar collection of Witcyst lathe-cut records [Real Folk - Lathe Cut Singles 1993-1997 (2017)]. While those aren’t demos or outtakes, I like that it’s a collection of really low-run things that only would’ve been available in New Zealand that’s now been given a new life and identity through the reissue. I’ll send more answers later.
I’m wondering if you’re thinking deeply about the format you’re releasing music on. The album that makes me think about this most is fires.serif (2021) given the album name, track titles, track lengths, and the music itself.
Yeah, I do think about it. The shape of the recordings might even be informed by who’s putting it out. I’ve always thought that the people you’re working with, the format it will come out on, the thing a label might have already produced before… I’m very happy for all of that to inform what I would do. For fires.serif, I thought about the tape aspect of it because it allows you to be palindromic. It’s nerdy, but there are two spoken-word pieces on that, and if someone were interested in doing this, they could play both tracks at the same time and they will occur at the same point. There’s a part of each one that will match up in a palindrome if you layer the two recordings. You can only really do that on a two-sided format. That’s a sculptural way of thinking about the format.
I’m also thinking about the flow of tracks. It’s different when there’s a stop in the middle, and I want the feeling of stopping the tape or record and flipping it to be part of the experience. The pause should do something. And then the CD is perfect when you have this beginning-to-end narrative. And sometimes it’s just fun things—there are certain recordings I’ve got that I just give to people. I don’t even think they’re on Discogs. There are semi-regular CD-Rs I make at home of live stuff or whatever that’s quite goofy, and I want to hand-deliver it to people I think will like it. There’s something about the immediacy of doing that at home with photocopied stuff. That’s all part of the aesthetic I want the thing to have.
Speaking of CDs, I wanted to ask about There is No Fire in the Lake because that’s something that shouldn’t be interrupted at any point. It really feels like a culmination of your narrative-driven works. How long were you working on that album?
It’s hard to answer something like that because if I tell you I was working on it for nine years, it’s not like I was working on it every day. I consider that my first proper album since Nothing’s Good. I picked it up and put it down a lot, but by the time I was really in the weeds of that thing, I did really overengineer it, spending a very long time working on different variations and mixes and edits. It’s the first or second time I’d ever sent versions of tracks to friends to get feedback—that’s not something I’d normally do. It took a long time, and there were also contributions from others I had to wait to come in.
What do you think you were able to accomplish on that album that you don’t think you were able to do on previous efforts?
Making every sound count (laughter). I made it so everything was there for a reason and that it’d relate to the main ideas behind the record. It’s another one that’s all about my partner, who I’m now married to. If I’m effectively making this record that’s meant to be a secret expression of that relationship, then I want to make sure that it lands emotionally and discard the things that aren’t working. Someone said a really nice thing to me earlier this week: “There’s a lot going on, but it never forces itself upon you. You can choose how much you want to go in.” I think that’s something I wanted to do, and I’m glad at least one person felt that way about it. I think I managed to make something minimal—and there’s some maximal stuff on there—but I’m quite happy with it. I’m a big fan of the busy, cut-up music I’ve done, but I did want to rein that in with this CD and have things that were sparse. I wanted it to feel like these were things occurring in a room, that things were spatial.
How are you capturing your relationship with your wife in this way? Are you translating a feeling?
She’s on nearly every track, whether she’s doing vocal recordings or readings, or it’s an animal voice from some Instagram video she sent me. She was present at moments when I was recording stuff. You know, some of this stuff is ridiculously hermetic and non-obvious, which is why I’d never expect anybody to pick up on any of it, but things were recorded at really significant times. These could’ve been life events we went through together or decisions we made as a partnership.
There’s a certain point at which the pure building and making takes over. You get all these materials together, and once you’ve got them it’s a very brick-and-mortar mentality. It’s a really positive album. The message behind it is realizing that you’ve come to a point in your life where you can relax a bit and that things might actually be good. Nothing’s Good was about despairing and failure, and this is a response to that. Nine years later, a lot of things are better. And this comes down to people I asked to contribute to it—these were people I had conversations with that stuck with me, and it almost didn’t matter what their contributions were, even though they were amazing.
I wanted to ask about Dylan Nyoukis. What does he mean to you? What’s it like to record with him, perform with him, be friends with him? You partially moved to Brighton for this experimental music scene, and you’ve released albums with him. I like the screaming on The Great Many Necked / Jeer Sabbath (2016) tape.
That’s quite a fun one. He’s a dear friend of many years now. It was a nice moment when I realized that a lot of my “noise friends” became my real friends. I think that happens when you know people for a long time and experience highs and lows together. At one point there was a real point of collaboration down here. I feel it a bit less now, but it’s only because people have moved on out of the city or they’re focusing on other things. There’s not a negative reason why that doesn’t exist anymore, but it did feel to me that most of the shows happening were people doing ad hoc duos and trios, and it’s really interesting. On a lot of levels, I love collaborating with people live, so much more than solo—it’s just so much more enjoyable and fun. And it’s not just Dylan, it’s his partner Karen Constance, too. She and I have probably played more than I have with Dylan. We have a CD coming out soon and she’s excited.
Another person I collaborated with a lot is Ian Murphy, who I did the Slow Lightning (2020) album with. When we first got into rooms together to play, he was the person responsible for teaching me how to listen and respond. He was always willing to give feedback, good or bad, about what was happening. And I appreciated that this was part of the process. We’ll say what we do and don’t like, refine it, and try to accomplish something; it wasn’t like we just showed up, did whatever we wanted, and nobody cared about whether it was good or bad. That’s still so foundational to how I want to do things. These people are just really, really good friends and we see each other all the time. We’ve shared meaningful things in life, like I’ve watched their daughter grow up into an adult. All of these are lucky things because I know that not all local scenes result in people having friendships like that. Like, there are things we do outside of just meeting up at shows.
I wanted to ask about the new Barn Sour collaborative album, Vegan Horse Meat (2026), which I know has its roots in the live performances you had together. What were those shows like and how did you approach the album? When I talked with Pat he was like, “this was all Duncan.”
Pat’s a really self-effacing guy. I suppose I did “everything” but none of that was very much work, you know? The point is that we had these recordings sitting around from these shows, and I wouldn’t have done anything with them but Louis from Regional Bears kept asking. He’s someone whose taste I really trust. All of those shows we did together—there was a collaborative set we did, and then we did a solo show one night each that KRAAK put on. They were fun trips, but I associate them with high-energy, drunken foolishness. It can be quite difficult to listen to evidence of that on recordings, and I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of going through that and making something out of it. Most of the work was cutting things out and getting the pacing right. I was removing enough parts of it that it didn’t just feel like a live album with people clapping at the end, and I was sequencing stuff in different orders from how it happened.
I didn’t want to listen to it very much; I just wanted to see if it was functional, and then I just gave it to Louis and part of the process was him listening to it. I just knew it wasn’t worth me laboring over in that way because I connected them so much with the nights. But fortunately, Louis thought it was cool and he thought it worked as its own entity. But there’s no way it would’ve worked without some gentle persuasion. After a period of not enjoying playing live for a few years, I’m enjoying it again. But I’m quite pragmatic about these things. They’re nice social opportunities. It’s great to meet Pat—I’d met him before, but it’s nice to be around people you don’t get to see often. And if the way to do it is to throw some performances in, then so be it. Even if I hadn’t been involved, I may have gone to see him play anyway.
I wanted to ask about the adhuman record label and what the experience has been with that. You mentioned that you had a CD-R label back in the day, too. You’re talking about the social aspect of music and I’m curious about your role as the label owner and if you have a specific vision for it. I especially love the Thomas DeAngelo album, Voiceprints & Aircuts: Sound Poetry By Other Means (2023). And I do like that the logo of the label has the “dh” italicized because it’s your initials.
Yeah, that was a coincidence (laughs). It’s nice to do the label. When I used to just put out low-run CD-Rs back in the day, it felt like a way to participate in what the dominant culture was: you make noise, you make CD-Rs, you trade ‘em, you sell them for £2. But there came a point where I wasn’t following through. I was really bad at saying no to people so I was putting out things that I wasn’t really interested in, and it got to a point where I was broke and uninfluential—I couldn’t do anything for these artists. They could’ve printed 30 CD-Rs themselves. And not to say that I’m influential now, but I work a job and can afford to make these nice albums.
I don’t think there’s an overall vision. There are preferences I’ve got and influences I take from other approaches. I just put out things I think are great by people who I think are great, and if I can give some time to artists who I think are underrecognized, it’s nice. I certainly like when things are difficult to listen to. There’s this feeling I have when people submit masters to me where I might not immediately love the sound of the stuff, but it’ll leave me with so many questions. I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach that someone’s gonna have to put this out in the world, no one’s gonna like it, and this deserves to be given a platform. When I feel like that, I get excited.
It’s a pretty collaborative process. I weigh in quite a lot on what the content of the stuff is and what the presentation ought to be. The Thomas DeAngelo one is quite interesting because when he sent me the first version of all that music, we had a video chat. There were some pieces that I didn’t think were working, but the answer wasn’t to change anything, it was to print a booklet that would explain his thinking behind each track. It’s an artist’s record in some ways. This isn’t necessarily meant to be an enjoyable piece of music to listen to—this is an idea that’s being explored and people should know what the idea is.
There are logistical things that are annoying about having a label, and when it’s my own work it’s easy to not care about the outcomes, but when other people trust you with their music, I want to try and get it out there in the world and for people to hear it. That part can be stressful. None of this is meant to sound like a complaint, but it’s really difficult to get people to pay attention to these things. If you want to publicize it and promote it or get it into particular places, you often have to have the right relationships with people, and I don’t think I’ve got a lot of that. It’s fine, but it’s a shame that I can’t get people more exposure. Still, I don’t think anybody’s that unhappy. And I love this stuff so much as a fan and as a listener that it feels so normal to put this stuff out.
I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
I feel pretty confident every day that I do right by my wife. I’m very proud of it. I’m good at cooking as well (laughs). I make a nice Indonesian-style tempeh curry. I’ve also been making fermented hot sauces with mango and habanero, and I’m going to make some more to give to people.
Duncan Harrison’s new collaborative tape with Barn Sour, Vegan Horse Meat, is out now via Regional Bears. More of Duncan Harrison’s music can be found at Bandcamp. His record label, adhuman, can also be found there.
Duncan’s Picks
I asked Duncan to select his favorite compilations that feature b-sides, bootlegs, outtakes, and the like, but specifically those that he prefers to a band’s proper albums. The following are his choices.
Reynols - Minecxio Emanations 1993-2018 (Pica Disk, 2019)
Witcyst - Real Folk - Lathe Cut Singles 1993-1997 (Pica Disk / End of the Alphabet, 2017)
Angus MacLise - Tapes (Pleasure Editions, 2015; Art into Life, 2023 reissue)
R.H.Y. Yau - Coagulation: Selected Works 1996-2000 (Auscultare Research, 2003)
Masonna - Exploring Self-Corrosive Noise With Coquette (Urashima, 2018)
Henry Cow - A Cow Cabinet Of Curiosities (ReR Megacorp, 2009)
Throw a rock at any Les Rallizes Dénudés boots
Thank you for reading the 237th issue of Tone Glow. Down with “enjoyable music.”
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hell yeah for the Angus MacLise