"John Duncan is a multi-media artist currently living in Bologna (Italy). His body of work includes performance art, installations, contemporary music, video art and experimental film, often involving the extensive use of sound. His music is composed mainly from shortwave radio, field recordings, and voice. He was born in Wichita, Kansas to parents of English and Scottish ancestry. He was raised with a strict Calvinist upbringing where self-reliance, hard work and the suppression of emotional suffering were considered virtues. Questioning authority was severely punished. In his teens he studied figure drawing and painting together with psychology and the physics of light. His first contact with experimental music was the Jacques Lasry LP 'Chronophagie', discovered in the record bins of the Wichita Public Library. At 19 he left for Los Angeles to attend CalArts, where he studied under Allan Kaprow.
Duncan left the United States for Tokyo in 1982, where he continued his performance work, and expanded his experiments with shortwave broadcasts and film. The music he produced in this period led to collaborations with Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter, and a number of Japanese noise music artists, including Masami Akita, Keiji Haino and Hijokaidan. His solo recordings and live concerts from this period establish him as one of the early pioneers of Japanese noise, the first non-Japanese to work in the genre. It was also here that he began to deliberately limit the exhibition of his visual art to public arenas, such as men and women's public toilets, combining graphic war images with commercial pornography to emphasize links between them (some of these stalls were frequented by men from government offices, the banking sector, and the fashion industry).
In the mid-1980s he began pirate radio and television broadcasts with portable custom-made transmitters he built himself, operating illegally from apartment block roofs in central Tokyo and an abandoned US Army hospital near Sagamihara, as well as periodic broadcasts made from his own home. Radio Code broadcasts featured the early live work of musician Keiji Haino and Butoh soloist Hisako Horikawa, which were also relayed throughout Tokyo via other pirate radio stations, particularly Radio Homerun in Shimokitazawa. Television broadcasts were transmitted from central Tokyo rooftops over the frequency assigned to NHK 1 after the station had concluded its broadcast day, limited to 12 minutes in order to avoid contact with Tokyo police."
