Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:34:24 — 216.1MB)
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Duncan Park is a rather eclectic musician based in Durban, South Africa. Chief among his instrumental palette is guitar. Through the process of honing his craft with this instrument, he has simultaneously fostered skills with synth, bass, percussion, and a sundry of other odd instruments, which he injects throughout his body of work. He began producing folk tunes under his own name and he cast his first cluster of songs off into the Bandcamp ether in early 2017. And as he forged ahead with this solo endeavor, he sought avenues to broach the traditional verse-chorus confines. Though tendrils of psychedelic timbres and a particular spacious aura permeated several of his earliest EPs, it was not until December of 2017 that Duncan fully embraced the liberating architecture of drone on his album After the Earth Has Burned—a breathtaking stream of serenity to wander about endlessly.
After a spell of being sick and sapped of energy in the months following After the Earth Has Burned‘s release, Duncan tapped a raw nerve pulsating in his chest. From this spilled a new project, Listeriosis. Malefic he blends lo-fi black metal with passages of skin-tingling blues and grisly undercurrents of sludge. Each track he writes is impromptu, taking only a couple hours apiece. And though the production quality is intentionally bereft of polish, Listeriosis channels pure, undiluted anguish.
In addition to the two aforementioned projects, Duncan contributes guitar snippets and arrangement ideas to a zany experimental electronic project titled Dr. Haphazard’s Magic Factory. And more recently he formed a synth-laden krautrock duo with drummer Cam Lofstrand titled Return to Worm Mountain. Duncan’s love toward genres serene and extreme observes no boundaries as is evident by the seemingly disparate styles he embraces and conjures in each of his endeavors. And what’s most surprising is that so much of his work has been trickling out in such a brief time frame and the noticeable evolutionary strides in each of his releases are remarkable and captivating.
In this conversation, Duncan delves into each of his projects and discusses what he has learned from them. He speaks about how he came into contact with extreme metal, his love for drone, how his compositional approach has evolved as he works with more musicians, and a good deal more. Thank you so much for listening.
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In addition to the various links provided above, you can follow Return to Worm Mountain on Facebook to stay up-to-date on new developments. Though Duncan’s other projects do not have direct social media pages, you can follow each of them Bandcamp to be notified of new releases.
Thank you Kyle at Ash & Dust Studio for mastering this conversation’s audio.
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